They knew, for instance, where they could eat where women in pants would be welcomed, and which lesbian bars had not been taken over by the mafia. Marijane Meaker had a two-year relationship with Patricia Highsmith, who she met at a New York lesbian bar.
Together with their gay and lesbian friends, Meaker and Highsmith negotiated the known safe spaces for queer people – some of them fully in the closet, others more or less out, though all suffered societal and familial constraints of some kind. Meaker’s memoir, published after Highsmith’s death, gives a glimpse into queer life in 1950s New York. The award-winning film version – Carol – was released in 2015, starring Cate Blanchett. Highsmith, best known for her Ripley novels, wrote one lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, under a pseudonym (Claire Morgan), also published in 1952. Under her own name, Meaker wrote a memoir of her two-year romantic relationship with the now more-famous Patricia Highsmith, who she met in a “word-of-mouth” only lesbian bar, L’s, in Greenwich Village. Queer New York life, with Patricia Highsmith In 1993, she won an award from the Young Adult Library Services Association for being “a pioneer in realistic fiction for teenagers”, with books like Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack (1972) and I Stay Near You (1985).įriday essay: the complex, contradictory pleasures of pulp fiction She wrote fiction for young children as Mary James, and she was an award-winning author of young adult novels under the name M.E. Meaker, who died late last year at the age of 95, would go on to write in a range of genres, under several pseudonyms – including 19 more books as Vin Packer, though only two of these would deal with homosexuality.Īs Ann Aldrich, Meaker wrote non-fiction accounts of lesbian life in Greenwich village. Ruled obscene and banned by a Canadian court, it went on to sell in the millions.
Publishers had first been alerted to the possibilities of books with lesbian-themed plots a couple of years earlier, with Women’s Barracks (1950), an autobiographical novel with lesbian content, set among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II.
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