—and Les Maxime; The Golden Nymph, Brookwood 1958.
These are all hardcover risque novels retailing for about $3 in bookstores which deal in that sort of thing for the adult trade only; I don’t know, not being a postal inspector, whether they[19] can legally be sent through the U S Mails. On the whole I would think not. They are all fairly well written for books of their kind, amusing and entertaining, and bear about the same relationship to the paperback scv—evening wasters that ESQUIRE does to the average cheaper girly magazine. They are, however, strictly for a male audience; the “lesbian” content in all of them is presented from a strip-tease point of view and in every case the girl involved is “cured” of this perversion by male seduction—in some cases, by brutality. The plot of Non Stop Flight is typical; hero Eric Leighton discovers his wife dallying with a lesbian, so he beats up and rapes the lesbian (juicily described) whereupon his wife commits suicide. Then Eric gets involved with Celia, a stereotype “dish” with an ineffectual husband; when Celia tires of him he beats her up and rapes her (juicily described) then runs across the lesbian who has seduced his wife and Celia, so he beats her up and rapes her again (juicily described) after which Eric and the lesbian get married and live very happily forever after. I don’t know precisely what to call these books, but lesbiana is hardly descriptive. You have been warned.
DEISS, JAY. The Blue Chips. Simon & Schuster 1957, pbr Bantam 1958. fco. In an excellent novel of medical laboratory workers, a very very minor lesbian character.
DE FORREST, MICHAEL. The Gay Year. N. Y., Woodford Press, 1949, (m). Happily untypical of this publisher’s racy trash, this story of a young man searching for self-knowledge in New York’s Bohemias is very good of its’ kind.
DELL, FLOYD. Diana Stair. Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. Long novel of the early 19th century. Diana is a woman writer, but also explores life as mill-girl, school-teacher and abolitionist. Though attracted to, and attractive to men, she is never without “some older woman to adore and emulate, or some younger woman to teach and inspire.” Delightful, ironic novel of the trouble women can get into when they refuse to fall neatly into the ruts laid down by conventional society for women’s lives.
DE MEJO, OSCAR. Diary of a Nun. pbo Pyramid 1955. Just what it sounds like—fictional diary of a young girl in a convent warding off scandalous advances. Mediocre.
+ DENNIS, NIGEL FORBES. Cards of Identity. Vanguard, 1955. Hilarious novel of confused identity, dealing with both male and female homosexuality.
DES CARS, GUY. The Damned One. pbo Pyramid, 1956. A member of French aristocracy, ambiguously sexed enough to be classified as female at birth, grows up unequivocally male but retains the name, dress and character of a female to avoid scandal—which comes anyhow when she carries on with an eccentric Englishwoman.
DEUTSCH, DEBORAH. The Flaming Heart. Boston, Bruce Humphries, 1959, (m).