Ann Bannon - Legacy

Legacy

Critics have since remarked that Bannon's books are remarkable for portraying homosexual relationships relatively accurately. The continuity of characters in the series also gave her books a unique quality, especially when most lesbian characters during this time were one-dimensional stereotypes who met punishment for their desires. Bannon's characters have been called "accessibly human", and still engrossing by contemporary standards compared to being "revolutionary" when first released. LGBT historian Susan Stryker describes the relationships between Bannon's characters as mostly positive, satisfactory, and at times complex depictions of lesbian and gay relationships, which Bannon attributed to not letting go of the hope that she could "salvage (her) own life." One retrospective of lesbian pulp fiction remarked on the reasons why Bannon's books in particular were popular is because they were so different from anything else being published at the time: "Bannon was implicitly challenging the prevailing belief that homosexual life was brief, episodic, and more often than not resulted in death ... Bannon insisted on the continuity of lesbian love, while everything in her culture was speaking of its quick and ugly demise."

Bannon set her stories in and among gay bars in the 1950s and 1960s that were secret. As described in Beebo Brinker, one had to knock on the door and be recognized before being let in. In reality, women were not allowed to wear pants in some bars in New York City. Police raided bars and arrested everyone within regularly; a raid on a gay bar prompted the seminal Stonewall riots in 1969 that started the gay rights movement. Because of the atmosphere of secrecy and shame, little was recorded at the time about what it was like to be gay then, and Bannon unwittingly recorded history from her own visits to Greenwich Village. In 2007, one of the writers who adapted three of the books into a play said of Bannon's work, "I think she rises above the pulp. She wasn't trying to write trash. There wasn't any place for a woman to be writing this kind of material ... But I just think the writing's transcended its time and its era and its market."

Author Katherine V. Forrest claimed Bannon and her books "are in a class by themselves" and credits Bannon with saving her life, writing in 2005, "Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air ... I found it when I was eighteen years old. It opened the door to my soul and told me who I was."