Rea Michaels. How Dark My Love. Domino, 1965.

SUMMARY: Elena sings great jazz and blues and is struggling to make it. Prim, a white woman from the south, hears her audition for a sleazeball and decides she wants to help her. She hires her to sing at a small Greenwich Village club, helps her get signed onto a record label, and falls in love with her. The two women start an affair and go through a number of challenges, the biggest of which is a show that Prim books for Elena, the management of which turns out to be racist. Elena wants to boycott the show, Prim doesn't want her to. Ultimately they work through this conflict but also realize that their love is not to be as Elena is at heart heterosexual, and Prim is a lesbian. The story includes a very ugly racially motivated rape (was there really this much rape in those days, and did it always go unreported?).

OPINION: Michaels' writing is better than the sleaze factor that she employs in her novels. It is a strange experience to read her good writing interjected with sexual cliches like 'high pointed breasts' and 'triange patches.' She is also one of the few lesbian pulp writers who dealt with racism (Meehan, Della Martin, Felice Swados, and to a lesser extent, Valerie Taylor do). In this particular novel of Michaels' racism plays a large and pivitol role (Prim's inability to understand why Elena wants to boycott a racist organization is one of the reasons that the two women start to grow apart). As far as I know this is the only non-pornographic LP where this is the case. Overall it is too bad that Michaels' was writing in this market, as I would have liked to have seen what she was really capable of. Still, this book is much better than average.

c2007 melodie morgan frances