Whisper Their Love (Little Sister's Classics) by Valerie Taylor

Whisper Their Love (Little Sister's Classics) Reviews

• 
  Steph

  another fascinating yet bleak foray into classic lesbian pulp. like my recent read from this genre,
  spring fire, this is the story of a naive girl with parent issues who enters a woman-filled school setting, and is quickly swept off her feet by a mysterious lady. but this story is much less straightforward than spring fire. there's a lot of shit going on here!!
  
  first off, the sapphic relationship in question is one with a SCANDALOUS age gap. young joyce falls for edith, an administrator at her college. while this fits in with the emotional issues joyce has with her mother, it's also extremely icky and predatory. edith has an unhealthy amount of power over joyce, and at first, joyce is content to be consumed by their secret romance.
  
  joyce goes as far as to compare edith to her mother, and becomes utterly obsessed. but edith is portrayed quite villainously. edith even reveals that an older lesbian seduced her when she was young, too, like a cycle of corruption! also of interest are edith's lengthy rants about the superiority of same sex relationships and the insensitivity of men.
  
  but the joyce/edith relationship is put on the back burner midway through the book. joyce instead focuses on her roommate, mary jane, who becomes pregnant and asks for joyce's help in making arrangements for an abortion. not an easy thing in the 1950s.
  
  the abortion subplot is really interesting. at first i wondered if it was just added for scandal and spice. but mary jane suffers a tragic fate (more tragic than even the sapphic characters, who somehow escape without having their sins punished). so i think this book is less about the dangers of female homosexuality, and more about the dangers of female sexuality in general. which is also a fucked up message, obviously, but it's interesting and unexpected from a sapphic book.
  
  like many lgbt+ coming-of-age stories, especially those from the 20th century, we have a sequence wherein our naive protagonist is introduced to an underground lgbt+ community. edith takes joyce to a glamourous gay party, and then to a gay bar, and joyce is amazed by the array of folks there. but unlike protagonists from other novels, joyce doesn't like what she sees. she feels detached and uncomfortable, rather than excited and represented.
  
  another odd thing that happens early in the book is joyce (who was raised by her aunt and uncle) briefly leaves town to visit her flighty mother. she meets her mother's fiancé, and joyce and the stepdad secretly have sex, just to add to joyce's parental confusion and sexual confusion. i suppose this happens to show that joyce is making all sorts of mixed-up sexual choices; she's not a "true" lesbian.
  
  and then there is the male love interest. yep, this sapphic book has a male love interest. he's coercive, pushy, and given to mansplaining, but i think he's meant to be written as a knowledgeable voice of reason for joyce. he's the force who eventually provides joyce's character with the opportunity to be saved and reformed, rather than punished; but it's disheartening that his arrogance is shown in a positive light. (he also loves to pontificate on freudian theories of gay people as repressed and underdeveloped)
  
  ultimately whisper their love is an interesting read, from a historical perspective. i enjoyed the fact that it defied my expectations, and defies the traditional tragic lesbian pulp formula. but such a bummer for the lesbian love interest to be a creepy and predatory older woman!
• 
  Stephy

  This Author, Valerie Taylor also wrote "Prism," a popular lesbian novel from the mid eighties, and several other books in the Lesbian Pulp Fiction genre. I read them before time began.
  
  She had been married with children until she came out, and had one son, possibly two. When I first knew her, she was a dear woman, just past sixty years of age. Her life partner of many years, lesbian Lawyer Pearl Heart, had died just before we met. I was proud to call her my dear friend for years. We visited, chatted and exchanged letters for many years.
  
  She published a book of Poetry with another lesbian poet, Jeannette Foster, author Of Sex Variant Women in Literature, a mighty overview of lesbians in literature.
  
  She was involved in, and Keynote Speaker at two Lesbian Writer's Conferences in Chicago, organized by Marie Kuda and other lesbian Writers in the Chicago Area.
  
  When she retired from her long time job at a clipping service and from her daytime editor job, she moved, First to Margaretville, New York, where she lived in the small town of her dreams. Making a fresh start in life in her early sixties. She had a brief but passionate affair with a widowed straight woman, who broke her heart. She spoke of this woman but once to me, when she later quipped, "These mixed marriages never work out."
  
  She had a very bad fall on the ice that winter, and broke some bones. When she recovered, her son helped her move across the country to relocate someplace with no ice. She always had pain where she had broken bones,
  
  Tucson, Arizona was the place she chose to rebuild her life from scratch yet another time; this time permanently. She became Mother Goddess to a whole new group of young lesbians, who loved her and lovingly cared for as she aged. A couple or three women moved in to care for her for several years, until she was unable to live at home.
  
  Then she moved into a nursing home, where her friends raised money to pay for the cost of her care, and checked on her daily until her quiet death. She died surrounded by her friends, and was mourned Nationally in Lesbian and Gay Media. I, too, mourned her, and took comfort in the fact that she had a productive, full life and was beloved by all who knew her.
• 
  CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian

  A fascinating, albeit far from uplifting read--which is pretty much what I expected from a lesbian pulp novel. There's also a very interesting subplot about the main character Joyce's friend getting an illegal abortion.
  
  The way Taylor writes is odd. Overall, there's a lack of complex, emotional interior. She tells readers what characters are feeling more often than showing and bringing you through the experiences. For a lot of the book, it's hard to discern why Joyce does what she does. But I was nevertheless compelled to keep reading.
  
  (I should note that Taylor does provide a textbook-like explanation pulled from Freudian psychology that Joyce's childhood growing up without a mother and with a sexually repressive aunt has fucked up her sexuality and relationships with women and men.)
  
  Considering this character motivation is taken seriously, it's hard to discern how much we are supposed to believe and take seriously John's later diatribes on homosexuality being an immature state of arrested development, pulled from the same Freudian theory. Taylor confirms her belief in this theory in the interview that follows the novel: "[Joyce] ends up with a nice young man and she really is not a lesbian. She's a young girl looking for a mother image."
  
  The essay introducing the novel, by groundbreaking lesbian publisher Barbara Grier, is fixated on reading the book in the specific lesbian lens of her generation that came of age in the 70s and 80s, despite the essay being written in 2006. For me this results in a reading that feels very forced and doesn't have textual evidence. (Although it did provide a lot of food for thought, mostly passionate disagreement, ha.)
  
  Grier reads Edith (the older woman and school dean who seduces Joyce) and her diatribes about the superiority of lesbian sex in a rosy light, as an example of a persecuted lesbian who offers a pure female sexuality and wisdom about the perils of heterosexuality. This is despite her being described often in a villianlike way--Taylor even says she's a villain in an interview included at the back of the book! There's also the fact that Edith's speeches come off as over the top, like she is trying to convince herself rather than that she truly believes the extreme heterophobic and misandrist things she's saying. (These rants were great, very amusing, if they weren't all together convincing).
  
  Grier also reads John (the dude Joyce ends up with, representing the happy heterosexual ending) as a caricature not fully realized in comparison to the other characters. I'd argue that most if not all the characters are somewhat caricatures, especially Edith as the repressed, predatory lesbian.
  
  And finally, Grier reads an irony in the enforced heterosexuality at the end that I really don't see at all. Grier is conscious of Taylor's historical context to a certain extent, but her own in the recent history of her lifetime and how she's imprinting it on this pulp novel from decades before not at all. I understand wanting to read this novel as affirming and pro-lesbian, particularly in the context of having come of age as a lesbian in the very difficult period of the 70s/80s. But to do so ignores the vast amount of internalized homophobia we see the characters struggling with and the negative, stereotypical, pitying way in which all the queer people in the book are portrayed! I see the book as a complicated, nuanced look at internalized homophobia, both in its queer characters, and in the narrative/authorial voice of Taylor's, who had not come out as lesbian yet when she wrote this book.
  
  There's a particular animosity in the book towards anyone who's queer and gender non-conforming (the gym teacher and some of the gay bar patrons stand out in that regard), both from the narrative / authorial voice and from Edith as a character. Joyce too, pities and looks down on the queers she meets at the party Edith takes her to, *as if she can't possibly be one of them* even though she's there with the dean of her school whom she's been sleeping with and obsessed with for weeks! This stuff is intellectually thrilling, I think, but a bit depressing as a 21st century queer person.
  
  Predictably, there's no acknowledgement that there is any identity available to Joyce other than straight or gay, from either the narrative or Grier's introduction. Bi erasure in the 1950s is one thing; it's a little harder to swallow from 2006.
  
  Is this worth reading? Absolutely! Will it make you feel warm and fuzzy and delightfully queer? Absolutely not!
• 
  Laura

  This was WAY more progressive than I was expecting- feminist! pro-choice! (relatively) sensitive about mental health issues and suicide! I’m really glad that this edition included an interview with Taylor at the end. I was (and still kind of am) disappointed with the fact that the protagonist ends up with a man at the end, and in the interview Taylor’s just kind of like “too bad, it’s my book, I wrote it the way I wanted to and this is the ending that seemed right.” Also, this interview reveals that she was a socialist. Rad!
• 
  Beau Brannick

  Spoiler *****
  
  NO no NO this book is trash. Not only do I just have to ignore the straight up gross age gap/power play in the main relationship there is ableist language the entire way through and the ENDING????? I did not just read this 'lesbian pulp fiction' novel for her to get with a man she doesn't even like??? Cba
• 
  Jackie

  Good for what it is, but bad ending.
• 
  Mel

  I throughly enjoy early lesbian pulps. In fact they may be my favourite genre. I think it was growing up in a small village in an evangelical Christian family makes the homophobia and the self doubt that fills these books something that I can easily identify with despite the difference in decades.
  
  Valerie Taylor's books are particularly good on social commentary. Here the lesbian affair is almost second place compared with the story of the girl's room-mate who suffers much worse with pregnancy and illegal abortion than the queer heroine. There are some truly wonderful bits such as when the college is described as educating women to be wives for husbands in the 10,000 a year bracket. When Joyce says that she knows relationships often end poorly because she's read Collette. There's a really sad butch dyke they find in one of the gay bars who tells them her life story and then goes off with their friends. Little moments like that had such truth to them. (In comparison with the ending). More than what it was like to be gay in the 50s this book really highlights the problems of what it's like to be a woman in the 50s. How restricted life was, how dangerous pregnancy was, how little access to birth control or abortion was availble. How there was so much pressure to have sex, but how little the woman was able to get from it.
  
  I'd highly recommend the little sister's edition of this book as it contained several wonderful interviews with the author which I found really touching. As well as extracts from her poetry. Normally I don't like poetry in English but I found her poems to be really touching and funny and wonderful. I am going to have to read everything she wrote. I've already got another book on the way from amazon!
• 
  Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser)

  Definitely a product of its time. Still, the book offers more depth for the characters than books typical of this era (Odd Girl Out, for example) and with less dramatics. It's also as much about gender as it is about being a lesbian, which is refreshing. The ending, though, undercuts what could have been a different, stronger potential message. The book leaves the reader understanding the unfortunate idea that a woman, even a clear lesbian, needs to marry a man to be happy.
• 
  Kay

  Valerie Taylor, once again on the theme: “if you thought it was bad to be a 1950s lesbian, consider: the plight of the wretched heterosexual!”
  
  This is not a lesbian novel with a hairpin turn to men at the end—that turn is actually developed through much of the book, and checks out for me. No complaints there. Not her best work, but an interesting contrast to Ann Bannon’s treatment of a similar setting.
• 
  Amris

  Fascinating lesbian pulp novel. I also really enjoyed the supplemental sections of the book, specifically the introduction by Naiad Press's Barbara Grier and an interview with Valerie Taylor.
  
  I thought the discussion of abortion was especially poignant and fascinating.
  
  When reading a book like this, you have to think of it as a historical artifact rather than something to hold up to modern scrutiny. Still, I found myself enjoying this more than other pulp novels I've read in the past.
• 
  Annika Kohrt

  Soap opera crazy but like sympathetically written
• 
  Rae

  This book is about Joyce and her older lover Edith.
  
  I'm not a fan of early lesbian pulp and this book has not changed my mind. To be honest I struggled to finish it.
• 
  Dide

  Can't believe books like this existed back in 1957! Nice read and very reminescent of the lesbian closeted life.