This is a pretty cover for 1959’s The Demands of the Flesh by March Hastings, one of the pseudonyms used by Sally Singer, who specialized in lesbian novels and was gay herself. The cover is signed—stylistically but illegibly. However, we can tell you it says “Stake.” Nothing is known about Stake except that he or she did several other covers for Newsstand Library. This one is a sort of copy of a Freeman Elliot cover that you can see here. It perhaps isn’t artistically ideal when the best cover you ever painted was a copy. Also, notice the weird neck? She looks like a human frigatebird. That’s in the original too, to a lesser degree. We still love the cover though. Stake chose a new color palette and it works well.
The book is about thirty-year-old widow Ellen Tendler, mother of a ten-year-old, who finds herself ready to rejoin the social world and conveniently finds herself with three options: Jay Masters, her son’s teacher; Raoul Verne, the man whose proposal she once refused; and worldly, cultured neighbor Nita Probish. As to the latter, Ellen doesn’t know she has feelings for Nita. She just knows the woman makes her feel… tingly. Regardless, it must be nice to have dating choices there for you the instant you desire them. See kids, you’re doing it all wrong with your dating apps. You just need to live in a lesbian novel.
Ellen’s son soon complicates love matters by bonding with one of the guys, his solicitous teacher Jay. So there’s now a multiplicity of potential problems. It especially won’t go over well community-wise if Ellen starts hooking up with Nita and anyone finds out. But as we said, she’s mostly clueless about sexual potential with another woman. We love the bit where Nita tells her, “But what you don’t seem to understand is that not everybody likes steak,” and it goes—whoosh—totally over Ellen’s head: Now Ellen felt lost in their conversation. By Nita’s tone of voice, she knew that there was great significance in her last statement. Yet Ellen could not fathom what she was supposed to glean from it. Heh. She’ll start gleaning soon enough.
The Demands of the Flesh isn’t of any great depth, but that’s a lot to ask of a paperback original in 1959. It’s engaging is the main thing. Most male authors flog the evil lesbian trope, but in Singer’s hands Nita is the one character every reader would want to know. She kind, smart, sophisticated, and empathetic. In short, Hastings wrote a near-perfect woman as a lesbian and, because of the times, had her fail at love anyway. That the deck was unfairly stacked against such a person was, we suspect, a commentary she slipped into the story for readers who were paying attention. It helps make the book a winning excursion.
