new feminisms is a digital thought companion run by critic and editor Sarah Fonseca.
At present, we once more find ourselves living against the backdrop of a gritty metropolis: only this time, the war isn’t quite over. The political divide that has defined the American Left and Right for the past five years has manifested within the LGBTQIA community to varying degrees, nowhere as intensely as it has for queer women; the politics of gender, sex, and, soon, religion, have never been this aggressively debated since the 1980s; parallel to that, broader cultural oration — so often delivered callously — on pornography, sex, and social media have put targets on the backs of these very same citizens (an act similarly unseen since the 1980s).
Proposal for The New Lesbian Pulp, 2019
The New Lesbian Pulp turns six months old this month. Edited with Octavia C. Saenz, she is now a full, and very material book, 245 pages in length; and featuring work by Trish Bendix, Ella Boreau, Grace Byron, August Clarke, M.J. Corey, Anna Dorn, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lorraine Hansberry, Trae Higgs, Lillian James, Rose Jeanou, Eva Kotchever, Astrid Anne Rose, Octavia C. Saenz, Nadine Santoro, Shamim Sarif, Sarah Schulman, Dora Rosetti, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and myself.
She is just far enough from our editorial rear-view mirror for me to have an opinion of her. How daunting. How delicious. How Mommy Dearest. What I will say: I craved a different cover treatment… but if budget permitted me to have it my way, she’d be a gilded linen hardcover. This was never not a bit Talmudic for me. The impossible challenge of it.
Alongside lesbian pulp, I have always been a sucker for the grab bag that is 1990s LGBTQ Anthology Culture. TNLP studies at those texts’ feet. Though that needn’t be evident, I want to nail it down here. The contributors will go on to have their own careers, if not already, independent of this project. And it’s touching to know they are game to live in perpetuity with one another, on the page. Collective immortality is an amazing thing to experience.
If TNLP has a true blue forebear, it’s almost certainly The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading. Now that TNLP exists, I can rest easy. I loved last year’s Be Gay, Do Crime, but the moment necessitates a rightful heir and non-import. We’re fighting for our own for a hot second, domestically. That includes my own publisher, from whom Trump rescinded NEA funding upon re-entering public office. Dear reader, please do not mistake my emotional and learned certainty for hubris. I am tired, too.
Five years ago, we wrote a book proposal centering the necessity of lesbian pulp fiction revival, especially given that America was already walking a fine line towards literary censorship, if not neofascism overall. The idea was: there was a finite amount of time for lesbian writers to exercise their imaginations and be remunerated for it before the window began to close, again, we needed to make that happen. Magnus Hirschfield shit. Before they start burning the archives again. IYKYK. This was the quiet part I never said loudly over five years, in the name of preserving the genre tradition and morale. There is a lot I will refrain from writing here because it is petty, I am vaguely exhausted, under-attended-to, and parties in the wrong with me generally already know that they are in the wrong. No need to beat the most beaten horses of publishing, specifically on the rather incestuous small press level.
Maybe the one thing I will say is that the publishing world needs more people who yell for what their people deserve, as I am fatigued from being the singular moaner and groaner in every room and inbox.
A Controversial Choice; or No, I Regret Nothing
When we first put our heads together, I knew I wanted to publish a story that was once censored in-community, and I knew I would have to put my neck out to make this happen: “Cottonmouth” by Ella Boreau. Our second (of three) commissioning editors on the project was Not a Fan of including the story, even though Sarah Schulman had previously vetted it for an edition of Cleis Press’ Best Lesbian Erotica that she was tasked with editing over a decade ago. The publisher subsequently refused, Sarah quit, and “Cottonmouth” was lost to Waybackmachine. Our editor eventually resigned. We proceeded.
“Cottonmouth” is fiction. There is no defense to be mounted because the argument will always falter. This goes for every contribution within. And elsewhere. Lesbians will continue to quietly hold the line.
The One That Got Away
I selfishly wanted to include something unpublished and weird by Susan Sontag in TNLP, as I knew she tooled around with her own male pseudonym (Calvin Koff) at a time that coincided with pulp and the grey area of lesbian pulp-as-autobiographical-drama (see: Hansberry). I dumbly reached out to her estate rather than realizing I already had a page of Sontag’s fiction that I could have easily republished, hiding in plain sight. Her son did not reply and I felt cagey, so I dropped the enterprise entirely. Nevertheless, the story is a fictionalization of Susan returning home from Paris, affirmed in her queerness, and demanding a divorce. UGH, dreamy, soapy, I know. I will publish it somewhere in full yet… maybe here.
Praise, Reviews
People seem to really, really be picking book baby up.
Rebellious, subversive, and sexy.
Ms. magazine
This entire volume of multi-faceted erotic pulp fiction sizzles hotter than this summer’s climate-change sun. This collection will make your brain break in a good way, and many of these short stories are so vivid and engaging that you’ll be angry they aren’t longer.
On their face, this is the version of lesbian pulp fiction that The New Lesbian Pulp and its film corollaries are meant to evoke: that rare space for queer women’s self-expression and self-definition, where lesbians could defy a repressive world to create a literature that spoke to both the intensity of their desires and the complexity of their moral lives.
Tying together uncovered and rediscovered works by older writers with more recent short fiction, this collection is a great gateway into a genre rife with history.
Have I Gotten Paid?
Yes, kind of, not really. Octavia and I were advanced $2,500 in 2021, which we split between ourselves. We have not seen royalty pay, which we intend to use for contributor remuneration, but I will – famously - follow up on that soon.
How Much Did You Pay Your Contributors?
We have a commitment to pay living contributors $1,000 per story, which we continue to fundraise and pay out-of-pocket because – again – someone has to remind writers what they’re worth.
Are Your Contributors on Substack?
Yes, actually! In decent numbers. Trish Bendix is here, Grace Byron is here, Anna Dorn is here, Rose Jeanou is here, Nadine Santoro is here, and m.j. corey is here.
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