Most of the books contained more than one of these tropes, just to be safe. In Spring Fire, Mitch decides she was never actually a lesbian, and Leda, her love interest, is institutionalized.
If some of these sounds familiar, it’s because the way authors of lesbian pulp threaded that loophole has had lasting consequences on the way queer women are represented in media decades later.
Institutionalization and traumatic sexual experiences are rarer tropes in modern media, but they still appear from time to time. From American Horror Story, to How to Get Away with Murder, characters go mad, get institutionalized, or have the “sexual dysfunction” of their queerness explained as a response to sexual trauma.
However, the tropes of murder/suicide and eventual heterosexuality are incredibly common in modern representations of queerness, especially in media portrayals of queer women.
“Bury your gays” became a common trope for exactly the reason that queer characters just cannot seem to make it to the epilogue alive. They represent far fewer characters in media than their heterosexual counterparts, but a far higher percentage of those characters end up dead. One 2016 Vox article, which assessed all TV deaths from 2015-2016, found that 10% of deaths were queer women. A staggering number considering how few queer women were portrayed in the first place.
Moreover, as bad as that number seems, the most common of these tropes is still the inevitability of heterosexuality for queer women. Whether it’s a character that briefly has a relationship with a woman before ending up with a male partner or the “lesbian kiss episode” that sweeps week popularized in the 1990s. Lesbianism as a sales gimmick, where women return to the heterosexual norm after a “walk on the wild” side, is another trope from the lesbian pulp era that has become embedded in modern media portrayals of queer women.
These tropes took hold in the 1950s to get around censorship, but once they were introduced, they became a self-perpetuating meme that has subconsciously become the standard for how queer women are viewed in media.
