Katie Gilmartin

Artist Statement

Pulp art is lurid, smutty, and salacious. What’s not to like? My interest in the genre dates from my graduate school days, interviewing older lesbians about their lives in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. More than one life story told to me was anchored by an electrifying moment in a rural podunk’s Five and Dime. She was browsing the wire racks of trashy fiction when a racy cover caught her eye: a haughty brunette, a melting blonde, and a world of tension between them. She furtively bought the novel and cried over its tragic ending, but within its pages found a name for her desires.

For the most part, judging these books by their covers would be overly charitable. Nonetheless, the covers express eloquently the social tensions and cultural preoccupations of the era. Gender terrorizes, as men resolutely strive to prove their manhood and women exist to adorn. Women’s sexuality terrifies, threatening to tear the known world asunder. Race (if not white) lurks in the shadows, enticingly exotic or menacing. Gay sexuality mesmerizes, a hovering contagion.  Desire between women existed, in the astonishing number of lesbian pulps published in this era, primarily to titillate men.

To some extent, the very fact that these books read today as overblown camp or offensive dreck is an indication of how far we’ve come. And yet I find myself drawn to reclaiming pulp art’s busty babes; sex may have been their only source of power, but what delicious domination it was.

The titles, images, and blurbs in the prints I’ve created are a pastiche. I borrow from existing pulps, set the "book" in San Francisco, add an occasional autobiographical detail, and mix it all up with my own imagination. “Whisper His Sin,” for example, is the title of a Vin Packer pulp published in 1954; I love the slipperiness of that title in my mouth, its mixture of fear and fascination. The author’s name, “Benjamin Dover,” is appropriated from local gay culture, which has been hosting “Ben Dover” parties for as long as anyone can remember. The blurb is my own.