CONTENT WARNING
This post contains mentions of sexual abuse.
Valerie Taylor’s THE GIRLS IN 3-B can be summed up as ‘a 50s Chicago lesbian pulp novel’ but it’s more than that. Its focus is on three young women — Annice, Annice’s best friend Pat, and Barby — who are leaving high school and their small Iowa town to venture to Chicago seeking employment and romance; to make their own way in the urban world.
What they want is different for each, and what they do find is not exactly what they want.
Annice is a restless college poet with a part-time job looking for interesting, off-beat intellectuals, while Barby and Pat are seeking gainful employment while enjoying life in the big city.
The three of them settle together in an apartment, a place in the slums one that Barby discovered, one that she ineffectively tried to talk the others out of renting.
As the pages progress, we read about how the women are changed by their independence, altered by the urban environment, thrust into financial worry and navigating rocky interpersonal waters.
With these new responsibilities and encounters, the girls in 3-B quickly become estranged, rarely knowing where the others are, or why they’re doing whatever they’re doing. It’s a familiar story, although somewhat rare that the detachment occurs when all are under the same roof.
Part of the issue is that all three have secrets: Annice rarely attends classes or work so she can fuck around with her pretentious dirtbag asshole of a don’t-call-me-a-boyfriend-boyfriend. Pat has a severe crush on her engaged boss and has given up her brusque tomboy style and demeanor in favor of severe diets and costly fashions. And Barby?
After having been molested as a youth by the town bank’s vice-president, Barby’s now being sexually abused by the building’s caretaker. When she finally extricates herself from that, one of her older, refined coworkers — Ilene Gordon, whom other shopgirls whisper about — takes Barby to a lavish lunch, away from prying eyes. Barby is enamored and, later in the day, finds that Ilene has tucked a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel THE WELL OF LONELINESS away for her.
Matters escalate in well-worn ways. Annice gets in trouble. Pat struggles with desire and choices. And Barby? Barby finds a new world with Ilene.
“Yes,” Ilene Gordon said, “that’s the hardest part of growing up, waiting for someone else to show you your own possibilities. So often the right person doesn’t come along.”
If you’ve read the above and thought, ‘Oh, great, Barby has to deal with yet another predator’. Or you read Barby’s history of sexual abuse — which are even worse than I’ve detailed — then you as THE GIRLS IN 3-B leaning on the ‘sexual abuse made her gay’ trope. That wouldn’t be unusual. A lot of lesbian pulp works of the time routinely adhered to a Hayes Code-ish sort of unspoken regulations which punished ‘aberrant’ behavior, which meant turning an instigating person into a villain or monster and by the end of the work, the protagonist would be back in a heteronormative relationship.
That’s not the case with THE GIRLS IN 3-B. What you fear for Barby, how her queerness might be treated, how she might be taken advantage, how things might fall apart, how we as readers may have to endure a disingenuous ending to her tale, does not occur. Barby finds safety, even though their relationship means hiding their true nature.
THE GIRLS IN 3-B, while its main appeal is with the urban lesbian courtship, doesn’t skimp on Annice or Pat’s story. Annice is arguably the leading character — the novel opens with Annice, and Annice’s interests as a writer and intellectual and unconventional endeavors and experiences round her character out more than Pat. However, all three have engrossing arcs, ones that see them begin to find their footing in the world as young adults, no longer girls.
It’s an evergreen tale. The three of them naively navigate the world and encounter many of the same trials, tribulations, and pitfalls anyone would today. Apart from a handful of terms here and there, some of which have not aged well at all, it’s a story that could have been penned and embraced by youths today.
If, like myself, you pick up the The Feminist Press’ Femmes Fatale edition of THE GIRLS IN 3-B, make sure to read Lisa Walker’s afterword. Walker details the fascinating life of Valerie Taylor, as well as provides a crash course in the history lesbian pulp fiction, and the unfortunate state of its preservation. It’s vastly informative and instructive on what to seek out next, and what to hope might be resurrected in the reverent way The Feminist Press have with THE GIRLS IN 3-B.