Copyright © 2015 by Ann Bannon.
Foreword © 2015 by Lily Tomlin.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press,
An Imprint of Start Midnight, LLC.
101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Text design: Karen Quigg
ISBN: 978-1-62778-132-9
A Love That Dares To Speak
At the same time that the Beat Generation went on the road with Kerouac, a young woman went on a search for self-discovery in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. Inside, she knew she was searching for something different. Her name was Beebo Brinker, and she became the heroine of a series of classic lesbian novels in the 1950s and 60s. With the publication of the first book in the series, Odd Girl Out, in 1957, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles was launched. Ann Bannon created Beebo and a cast of characters who made an indelible impression on a whole generation of young women who were longing to see their own lives reflected in print.
I recently had the opportunity to co-produce, with Harriet Leve, a Beebo Brinker play based on these books and was delighted to provide audiences with a chance to see Bannon’s characters brought to life. Despite the repressive culture of the 1950s, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles gave many young queer people a glimpse of others like themselves, living contemporary lives and hoping to find a place for themselves in a world that seemed hostile and disapproving.
You are holding history in your hand. Courage, too, and the subtlest kind of activism: changing minds by opening minds. Within these pages you will find the entirety of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, all together in book form for the first time ever. Enjoy!
Lily Tomlin
Odd Girl Out
Odd Girl Out
by Ann Bannon
Copyright © 1957, 2001 by Ann Bannon
Introduction © 2001 by Ann Bannon
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,
P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Text design: Karen Quigg
Cleis Press logo art: Juana Alicia
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Introduction: The Beebo Brinker Chronicles
I must have been the most naïve kid who ever sat down at the age of twenty-two to write a novel. It was the mid-1950s. Not only was I fresh from a sheltered upbringing in a small town, I had chosen a topic of which I had literally no practical experience. I was a young housewife living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, college graduation just months behind me, and utterly unschooled in the ways of the world. There were millions living the same life; I was to be indistinguishable from them for many years, except for the fact, known to very few outside my immediate family, that I was the one who wrote a series of lesbian pulp paperback novels under the pen name of Ann Bannon. The stories came to be known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.
To my continuing astonishment, the books have developed a life of their own. They were born in the hostile era of McCarthyism and rigid male/female sex roles, yet still speak to readers in the twenty-first century, giving them an historical snapshot of the times. They have been revived in editions by five different publishers, once even coming out in a hard cover library edition. They have given comfort and courage to young gay people exploring their often difficult identities. They have even dismayed some in that community in our own time for their depiction of the stereotypes of the 1950s.
I sometimes shake my head and wonder, Who was that ingenuous twenty-two-year-old to be making these bold observations? Was she really me? Do I even know her anymore? Yes. She was me and I still recognize her. And I recall the characters I created, too. There they are in the pages written all those years ago: the girls I found so beguiling in college, the young women I met coming to the big city for the first adult adventures of their lives. In them, I still see the perplexities of identity, so pressing in youth, buried just beneath the sexual urgencies that drove us all. I see the older women, too, a little weary, a lot wary, many of them not that far in time from the utmost upheaval in their lives: World War II.
The world in the 1950s was changing in ways that were to lead inexorably to the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and yes, the Gay Rights Movement.
But those great social temblors were still in the future when I got my first look at a tranquil, almost rustic, Greenwich Village, with its parks, its crooked streets, its crafts shops, and its beckoning gay and lesbian bars. It was love at first sight. Every pair of women sauntering along with arms around waists or holding hands was an inspiration. As I’ve often remarked, I felt like Dorothy throwing open the door of the old gray farm house and viewing the Land of Oz for the first time.
At that time, I was bubbling with stories of young arousal, but woefully lacking in what might be called “fieldwork experience.” I started to tell
