Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Odd Girl Out

by Ann Bannon

Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Disclaimer: Some of these reviews will contain spoilers. All were generated after discussing the books in a lesbian book group to which I belong. However, the opinions represented below are my own, and nobody else connected with the group should be held responsible for them.

It was a double-header, with Ann Bannon's classic of lesbian pulp fiction Odd Girl Out paired with Bonnie Zimmerman's classic (?) of lesbian criticism, The Safe Sea of Women. I didn't read the Zimmerman book, because Liza thought I would hate it. Anyway, Ann Bannon wrote during the 1950s and 1960s; she was married when she got started but eventually divorced her husband once she became financially independent and professionally successful. The best part about these pulp novels is the covers--we have a book that's just reproductions of the cover art, and it's hilarious. We also have two of them on refrigerator magnets: "Female Fiends" (Their Motive--GREED! Their method--MURDER!) and "Women In Prison." The books (after reading OGO I went on to the sequel, I Am A Woman In Love With A Woman: Must Society Reject Me? (I swear to God that's the real title) and have just finished Journey To A Woman, a much later sequel) are both oddly compelling and rage-honing. She has that thing where you just have to know what happens once you get started with the story, and that's good; and the writing in Odd Girl Out was much better than what I expected (it deteriorates in the later ones). And initially, we thought OGO would be a nice, affirming, positive portrayal, since the main character Laura seemed to be fairly well-developed and sympathetic. But no.

Laura spends most of the book completely obsessed with Beth, her roommate at the Alpha Beta sorority house (Beth is a senior, Laura is a freshman). For a fairly large chunk of the book, Laura and Beth are having an affair, although for Beth it's always presented as something she's doing for fun while Laura has given herself over heart and soul. Soon after they get involved Beth also starts sleeping with a guy named Charlie, who's just so damn handsome and charming she can't resist him, and it's all downhill from there.

We put up with Laura's total lack of dignity and self-respect, and the fact that she was willing to subsist on the scraps Beth tossed her once in a while and let her carry on with Charlie (we've all had relationships where we beg for the scraps, humiliating as it is to recall). What really steamed us was at the end of the book, when Laura has her big Moment Of Lesbian Dignity and is telling Beth all about how she can go off and marry Charlie if that's what she wants but she, Laura, now knows she's queer and so must therefore drop out of college and run away to Greenwich Village with the other lesbians, and she says to Beth, "Well, I've matured as much as I can emotionally, but you have the potential to evolve into something higher and better, so go on your way, I'm catching this express train to Perversitytown."

I don't know why it is that the whole "homosexuality as immature" thing bothered us as much as it did, but man, we were climbing all over Arizona ranting to each other about it. Most of the negative stuff in books of this period we can just laugh off, but that one was a real day-ruiner. I think it's probably because it's one of the stereotypes that has survived in its original robust form. The other thing is, I think, that in all cases being in love does sort of involve being a child again, in some ways. Finally you have someone who you can trust to take care of you, who loves you unconditionally, and with whom you can allow yourself to be vulnerable and scared. So secretly, you notice this, and you wonder if it's normal, because of course you're supposed to be an adult and able to take care of yourself. But whether it's normal or not, it is universal; and it pisses me off that Laura just assumes that she has to be more immature than Beth, especially during a time period when the most culturally visible embodiment of heterosexual femininity was Marilyn Monroe, who was always calling her on-screen lovers "Daddy."

Really, the problem with the Ann Bannon universe is not so much that homosexuality is immature, as that everyone is immature, in general. With the exception of Laura's bestest gay buddy Jack, almost everyone in these books is operating at the emotional level of a three-year-old. Being "in love" appears to consist entirely of becoming consumed by lust, jumping the object thereof, and then dumping him/her once you get bored. And they wonder why love never lasts in Greenwich Village.

I also feel much better about my continuity problems after going from Odd Girl Out to I Am A Woman... . In OGO, Laura's parents are divorced, something she is terribly traumatized by and feels very bad about. She visits them both separately over the holidays, although you never meet either except through her father's letters. At the beginning of I Am A Woman, it is revealed that Laura's mother and little brother were drowned in a tragic accident when she was five, and that she has been raised by her father, who never remarried. Say what?

Actually, I know why she was willing to make that big a continuity blunder (she can't not have known she was doing it). It was so that she could create a properly convincing psychological background for Laura that would explain her lesbianism. Butches could be explained by the invert theory (homosexuals are gender inverts, men trapped in women's bodies and vice versa), but if you use that model of homosexuality there's no way to explain the fems who love them. From I Am A Woman, I gather that the way you explain a fem is by giving her an abusive and incestuous father who treats her so badly that she's terrified of and repulsed by men for the rest of her life. Laura explicitly blames her lesbianism on her father, right before he starts telling her how much she looks like her mother and makes a pass at her.

The way Bannon used the incest/abuse history with Laura came across to me as so exploitative that I determined that I would take a vow never to do anything that exploitative with Istria's biography. So I call upon you to witness. If any of you ever see me using Istria's history to generate cheap melodramatic thrills, do please smack me upside the head, and if I do it again, just take me out back and shoot me. Bleagh.

Ah well. The books are fast reads, they provide many moments of uninentional humor, and they hold your interest like a good soap opera would. And, starting with I Am A Woman, there's loads of hot 2-girl action. But the portrayal of lesbian life and gay culture in general (the Village in particular) is extremely negative, and there's all this psychopathologizing crap. So, Bannon is a mixed bag.

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