Girls in 3-B (The)

Girls in 3-B (The)

Three high school friends share an apartment in Chicago.

159 pages

18 cm

Barby and Ilene meet at their workplace, a department store

Damon, Gene. "Girls in 3B." Ladder, vol. 4, no. 7, April 1960, p. 17.

Barby, one of the three roommates in 3-B, is a lesbian. After a frightening rape experience and a couple of general disappointments, she meets Ilene, an older woman whose girl left the year before to get married. Ilene and Barby fall in love and Barby moves in with Ilene. They have a couple of family problems but work them out very well, and you are left with the feeling they definitely have a good life together. This author treated a lesbian affair between an older woman and a young girl in Whisper Their Love with much less understanding and sympathy just two years ago.

Rabinowitz, Paula. “Slips of the Tongue: Uncovering Lesbian Pulp .” American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, University Press, 2014, pp. 278–307.

Tooth Murphy, Amy. "The Kitchen: Lesbian Pulp Fiction's Radical Conventionalism." Queering the Interior, edited by M. Cook & A. Gorman-Murray, Home, Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 51-63

"Between descriptions of sex and marijuana affairs there is little story of their life in the city.
Story brings in homosexuality, rape and anything to keep attention. Trash!"

Contested in the U.S.A and Canada by the National Organization for Decent Literature.

Listed in the Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee Studying the Publication and Dissemination of Objectionable and Obscene Material.

"THEY CAME TO THE CITY fascinated, frightened - hungering after life with that desperate, head-long impatience of the very young...There was Annice...Bright, curious, full of untried passions, she let Alan drag her into his beat-generation world of parties, jazz, booze, marijuana and sex. And Pat...She was big blonde and built for love, but she was saving herself for marriage. Until she met her boss. Right from the beginning Pat knew she'd do anything for him - anything. And Barby...She was the most vulnerable. Men terrified her and for a good reason. When she finally fell in love it was with a woman. THE GIRLS IN 3-B - a vivid and searching novel of young girls on the brink of womanhood, caught up in the cruel and tantalizing currents of big-city life." -Back cover

Three women form a triangle inside what looks to be the bedroom of a city apartment. One, a blonde, stands in the background facing the reader, leaning against a wall beside a window. Her hair is shoulder-length and she is holding a cigarette in her right hand. Her right arm is fully extended downward and she grips it, with her right hand, at the elbow. She is wearing an orange jacket, unbuttoned, a brown skirt, and low heels stilettos. Her left leg is slightly bent, with the foot to her side, pointing out. She looks down to her left at another woman, a brunette with short hair, who sits on a bed with red and white undone sheets, putting on a stocking on her left leg. She sits in full profile, facing left of the image, and is wearing a black negligee and low heel stilettos on her right foot. The right leg shows a stocking at mid-thigh, and the left foot is bare. A third woman, also a brunette, stands with her back to the reader on the forefront left of the image. She wears a black slip and looks as if she is about to take off a blue blouse. Her hair is long and reaches the middle of her back, part of which is exposed. She too is looking at the brunette. There is a side table in the background, with a potted plant on top, and a pair of slippers on the ground. The scene is lit from the front right.