There was something disturbing about the illustrations - and it wasn’t the leering men. The men loomed behind them or clutched them in muscular arms, bending the women’s bodies backward so that their breasts pointed up. The women on these book covers seemed to have a lot of trouble keeping their clothes on. The book rack alcove was normally deserted, but even so, Lily spun the rack self-consciously, retreating behind it so that she was hidden from view. Lily normally bypassed that rack but today she paused, drawn in by The Castle of Blood, on which the blonde’s red gown seemed about to slip off her substantial bosom, nipples straining against the thin fabric. One was full of thrillers with lurid covers depicting scantily clad women in the embrace of swarthy men. There were several rotating racks of them in a sheltered alcove beyond the sanitary napkin aisle. She had soon discovered that Thrifty had another advantage over the Chinatown pharmacy: it had a very good selection of paperback novels.

Thrifty was just outside the neighborhood, so her friends didn’t usually go there. She had ducked in to buy a box of Kotex, because she hadn’t wanted to get them at the pharmacy in Chinatown, where she’d risk running into people she knew. The first time Lily had gone to Thrifty Drug Store had been sometime last year. With deportation looming over her father-despite his hard-won citizenship-Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.Īn Excerpt from Last Night at the Telegraph Club Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.Īmerica in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Which is why we’re more excited than we can say to partner with PenguinTeen to debut the cover and a new excerpt from Malinda’s latest and most personal book, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Her work has remained incredibly relevant and sustaining to this site and this community, and her voice on current leaps forward in lesbian cultural production remains unparalleled.

Malinda Lo has been an inarguably essential creative force in bringing us all to this current moment in queer women’s pop culture – long before we had The Half of It or the current rainbow of queer YA, Malinda Lo brought us Ash, Huntress and a wealth of writing by and for queer girls online. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.

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