Alternative Closets

This and the successor volumes in this series provides a historical view of how and what several important novelists were writing about these subjects in the past by making a number of these novels available inexpensively in a single place.  A modern reader may consider them rather tame if they are to be judged by modern standards.  Nonetheless, the novels are illuminating, especially when subjected to a careful reading. 

This volume contains the following works:

• The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire
• The Girl With the Golden Eyes, by Honore De Balzac
• The Pretty Lady, by Arnold E. Bennett
• The Farringdons, by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
• Poor White, by Sherwood Anderson
• The Bondsman, by Hall Caine

The collection and its successors is a combination of two factors: the rapidly changing social climate for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals in the United States, and the availability of a book published by Marion Zimmer Bradley entitled Checklist that was written in 1960.  The existence of the changing social climate needs no further discussion to inform the conscious reader.  She is the author of a number of books in considerably different genres: gay and lesbian fiction that were published in the early and middle 1960’s when  these works were generally considered pornographic.

In 1960, she wrote Checklist.  She states in her introductory remarks:

“Here, in a single volume, it has been our intention to list, document and review every novel dealing, however slightly, with female variance, lesbianism or intense emotional relationships between women. We have also included a majority of the better known novels which, dealing primarily with male homosexuality, are of interest to the collector of variant fiction in general.”