Writer of lesbian fiction
Tereska Torres, a convent-educated French writer who quite by accident wrote America’s first lesbian pulp novel, died Thursday at her home in Paris. Her family announced the death. She was 92.
Although she wrote more than a dozen novels and several memoirs, Ms. Torres remained inadvertently best known for “Women’s Barracks,” published in the United States in 1950 as a paperback original.
The book is a fictionalized account of the author’s wartime service in London with the women’s division of the Free French forces. Although its sexual scenes appear tame to 21st-century eyes, the author’s forthright depiction of the liaisons of the women in her unit with male resistance members — and with one another — scandalized mid-century America.
Originally published by Gold Medal Books, “Women’s Barracks” has sold 4 million copies in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It was reprinted in 2005 by the Feminist Press in its Femmes Fatales series, which features pulp, noir and mystery novels by women of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
The book’s reception, and its subsequent enshrinement as a lesbian literary landmark, bewildered and irritated Ms. Torres, who was married for many years to the writer Meyer Levin. In interviews, she expressed dismay at what she saw as the public’s disproportionate fascination with the novel’s scenes of erotic love between women at the expense of all else.
“‘Women’s Barracks’ really launched the modern genre of the lesbian paperback,” said Susan Stryker, who discussed the novel in her 2001 book, “Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback.”. “It paved the way for the next entry into the genre, which was Vin Packer’s ‘Spring Fire.’ ”
Ms. Torres’ personal narrative was far more dramatic than anything in her fiction.
She was born Tereska Szwarc in Paris on Sept. 3, 1920. Before her birth, her parents, Jews from Poland, had settled in France, and, in secret, converted to Roman Catholicism and sent Tereska to a convent school.
When Tereska was 13, as she recounts in a memoir, “The Converts” (1970), news of her parents’ conversion was reported in the world Jewish press, alienating their relatives in Poland. But though the family practiced its Catholicism openly from then on, they knew it would not be enough to save them once the Nazis occupied France in 1940.
They fled to Portugal and on to London, where Tereska enlisted in Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces; assigned to secretarial duties, she rose to second lieutenant.
In London, she fell in love with Georges Torres, a French Jew also serving with the Free French. After a brief courtship, the couple were married in 1944; Georges Torres was killed in action in France several months later. By this time, Ms. Torres was pregnant.
At war’s end she returned to Paris, where, despondent over the loss of her husband, she attempted suicide.
In 1948, Ms. Torres married Levin, a friend of her parents 15 years her senior.
Riveted by her stories of life with the Free French, he encouraged her to turn her wartime diary into a novel. He translated the manuscript from French into English and arranged for it to be acquired by Gold Medal, the one U.S. publisher willing to touch it.
Her other novels in English include “Not yet …” (1957), “The Dangerous Games” (1957) and “The Golden Cage” (1959).
The Feminist Press has just reprinted her 1963 novel, “By Cecile,” about a woman who appropriates her husband’s mistress.
A memoir by Ms. Torres, “Mission Secrete,” about her work rescuing Ethiopian Jewish children in 1984, was published in France this year.
Levin, a writer whose novels include “Compulsion,” based on the Leopold and Loeb case, died in 1981.