Della Martin

Lon dreams of an island where she can be who she truly is and surround herself with like-minded women. But Lon hasn't quite figured out who she is when she meets Violet, a gay girl with purple hair (which was probably all the more shocking in the 1950s or 1960s). Violet takes her to a club, The 28%, where Lon meets a lot of gay girls, and she discovers that she's one, too. She caries on an affair with Violet, although Violet has her eyes on Sassy Gregg, and Lon meets Mavis, Sassy's girlfriend.

So, I can imagine that this book was crossing pretty much all of the boundaries when it was first published. Not only does it have oodles of gay girls in it, but Mavis, Lon's love, is black. The book itself is still quite readable to this day, although there are some seriously dated phrases in it, as well as incredibly dated attitudes towards women of color. Still, it was published in 1961, so that's rather expected.

Lon is a strange character. She's likable, but she's also rather crazy. And the reader knows that she's going to end up locked in a psychiatry ward at some point in the future from how the book starts. Plus she thinks that a perfectly reasonable response to her teacher rebuffing her is to kill the dog with glass-studded meat. Umm. Violet is rather two-dimensional, but I did like the looks into Sassy's head (she's a gay girl trying desperately not to be) and Mavis (who has been hurt, and badly, in her life).

Altogether, this book stands up rather well in the test of time, although it's seriously depressing. As mentioned before, Lon ends up in an asylum. Sassy ends up dead. And Mavis ends up in prison. So...yeah. Don't read this for a happy ending, because there certainly isn't one.… (mais)