In the estimation of later lesbian feminist critics, a few lesbian genre writers stand out from the mass. Illinois natives Ann Bannon of Joliet and Valerie Taylor of Oswego garnered loyal followings.

Bannon, nom de plume of Ann Weldy, a married academic at the time, published five lesbian novels in the 1950s--the first, after only one visit to a Greenwich Village gay bar. Bannon created the quintessential "butch" character, Beebo Brinker. Bonnie Zimmerman in The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989 (1989) and others suggest that Brinker's swaggering attitude not only became the stereotypical perception of "butches" but also determined the behavior of a generation of gay women. Valerie Taylor used the proceeds of her first novel to obtain a divorce from an abusive husband and moved with her three boys to Chicago, the setting for several of her lesbian novels. Taylor, nom de plume of Velma Tate, sold more than 2 million copies of her first lesbian title, Whisper Their Love (1957). Five of her novels featured some of the same characters. Taylor wrote for The Ladder (1958-1972), the magazine of the first U.S. lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis.

Another notable "trash" writer of the period was Chicagoan Paul Little, who wrote genre fiction (including lesbian fiction) under at least a dozen names, according to his obituary.

European bestsellers such as the questionable Radclyffe Hall classic, The Well of Loneliness (1928), which postulated homosexuals as a "third sex," and Elisabeth Craigin's Either Is Love (1937), with its total acceptance of bisexuality, were reprinted as paperbacks.

In 1972 Anyda Marchant and her partner Muriel Crawford incorporated as Naiad Press, self-publishing two novels written under Marchant's nom de plume Sarah Aldridge.

The women soon pooled resources with Barbara Grier (who under the pseudonym Gene Damon had retained The Ladder's mailing list as its last publisher) and with Grier's partner, Donna McBride, and the most successful lesbian press to date began. The new joint venture was coordinated out of the Missouri home of the latter couple. The initial Naiad brochures were printed by Chicago's Womanpress, and early titles including Jeannette Howard Foster's translation of Renee Vivien's Une femme m'apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me) were printed at Salsedo Press, a Chicago printer for progressive causes. Books by Bannon, Taylor, Mary Renault, Patricia Highsmith and others would be reprinted in the 1980s by the Naiad Press. Taylor would continue to write novels until her death in 1997.

Copyright 2008 by Marie J. Kuda
From Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community, edited by Tracy Baim, Surrey Books, 2008.