Picked this up second hand ages ago, not knowing this was Ed Wood Jr., famous ‚world‘s worst director‘. I wasn‘t expecting it to be trans lesbian pulp from the 60s, but it is! Mentioned briefly in Susan Stryker‘s Queer Pulp, this is a story about Glen/Glenda (yes from the movie, inspiration for Chucky‘s kid, etc), a semi-autobiographical ‚drag‘, or ‚transvestite‘ assassin who‘s saving up to leave the mob and get surgery so she can be Glenda full time. She buys a circus, nearly has sex with various men for money or safety, has sex with several women (including another full time ‚drag’ who recognises her by her voice) out of love for clothing, passion and love, is lusted after by almost every man she meets, and decides while bidding her new lover goodbye that she doesn‘t want surgery: „I like things right where they are.“ It‘s as readable as a good-transvestite-versus-bad-transsexual turn as it is a more radical acceptance, but there‘s so many sincere pleas in this book from characters we’d now probably call trans women for the ability to live life as they please (including from the ‚half-man half-woman’ carnival worker Shirlee; Wood’s ‚female name’ was Shirley) that I‘m more inclined just now toward the latter, despite e.g. the disparaging references to less successful or elegant ‚transvestites‘. This is also in a pulp context I don‘t know at all so !!

It‘s so interesting, it makes me want to read a lot more around Ed/Shirley Wood and their (plural) other works (tens of pulp novels??), and more on lesbian and trans pulp more broadly I guess to get an idea of context. But god knows if I‘ll ever have the juice for that.