Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj is writer Marie David's pièce de résistance, despite how odd it feels at first to ascribe that title to a science-fiction lesbian pulp novel. Written under the slightly-more-flowery pseudonym "Margaret Darlington", it was published in 1964 by Prism Press, a small (and now defunct) independent publishing house based in Hamilton, Ontario.
David was born in Toronto in 1928 to well-heeled parents. Her grandfather was Senator Louis-Athanase David and her father, his son, was a barrister; her mother was Margaret Mackenzie, whose family was (and remains) blue-blooded Upper Canadian old money. She was their only child, and her father died of emphysema shortly after she was born, leaving her solely under the care of the rather overbearing Margaret. After her secondary schooling was completed she opted to take a year off and work abroad as an au pair in England; there she discovered a definite preference for women that would come to guide the rest of her life, confirmation coming in the form of a torrid love affair with the woman whose children she minded.
Returning to Canada in 1949, David studied classics at the University of Toronto. By the time she finished her undergraduate studies, a new trend of sensationalism in popular literature was beginning to take hold; David became more and more enamoured of pulp novels as more and more of them were published, and eventually turned away from classics to make the study of the pulp phenomenon her life's work.
David had reservations about her own skills as a writer, but in the late 1950s she decided to try her hand at a pulp novel of her own. This project was to become Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj, though it ran into a considerable snag along the path to fruition: once she had completed it, none of the publishers she approached expressed any enthusiasm about the prospect of publishing it, each citing the excuse that it was too risqué to be worth it.
After being turned down no fewer than sixteen times by various popular publishers in both Canada and the United States, David eventually found a publisher in Prism Press of Hamilton, which specialised in instructional manuals for birdwatchers and naturalists. Their acceptance of David's manuscript, then, is bizarrely incongruous -- rumour has it that palms were greased to the tune of ten thousand dollars, an offer which the struggling publisher couldn't afford to refuse. Panty Regents was published in March 1964, as the pulp craze was beginning to dwindle and the pulp-publishing industry was nearing collapse.
The plot revolves around a group of six women -- lesbians, naturally; these are the titular Panty Regents -- cruising around the galaxy in their starship, the FTL Olisbos, in search of a new ruler for the Planet Vajj, which has been taken over by an evil phallocratic despot bent on the destruction of womankind. The voyage and its various sundry digressions are all described in exquisitely minute detail, and it's got a happy ending too: a new, rightful ruler is found, the evil phallocratic despot is overthrown, and the galaxy is safe for woman- and lesbian-kind once more!
The Panty Regents are named after characters from Aristophanes' play Lysistrata, a nod to their author's classical leanings. They are Myrrhine, Calinice, Lysistrata, and Lampito. The evil phallocratic despot is a sort of Everyman of nastiness, and so is given only a title; to correspond, his opposite -- Planet Vajj's new ruler -- is referred to simply as "The Chosen One".
The "FTL" in the spaceship's name stands for "Faster Than Light", which is purportedly how it travels; but how this speed is achieved is something that David never explains, choosing instead to neglect the scientific aspects of the novel and devote more time to plot and character development. There is little exposition, and many things are ambiguously left to the reader's own imagination: what happened to the former ruler of Planet Vajj, for instance, or where the evil phallocratic despot came from and why he wanted to destroy all women, or what exactly a Panty Regent does apart from travelling around the galaxy having lots and lots of sex.
The picture on the novel's cover might help to clarify that last point. It depicts four tall, slender, scantily-clad, dark-haired, green-skinned women posed in front of a vaguely penis-shaped spacecraft, all in glorious Technicolor. One of them is carrying a leather jewel-studded thong that looks like it would be decidedly uncomfortable to wear. But the sex appeal of the cover illustration hardly does justice to the contents.
Simply enough, Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj is one of the best lesbian erotica novels ever written, let alone the best lesbian pulp. Not only is it sexy as hell, it's filled with humour; sex isn't any fun if you can't laugh about it, and Marie David realises that and exploits it to its full potential. And it isn't just a pulp novel, either -- David was a canny writer with a political agenda to fulfil, and she carries it off so slyly that you'd hardly realise it's there until it's already worked its way into your mind as common sense.
Her writing style is at once seductive and disarming in its honesty, regardless of what she's writing about. The following passage comes from the novel's climax (so to speak), just after the Panty Regents have found a promising prospective ruler for Planet Vajj. This space-woman fits into the uncomfortable-looking jewel-studded leather thong, which is the Cinderella-style acid test for prospective leaders, and all that is left is for the Panty Regents to test her mettle in bed:
"They fit! The royal panties fit her! We've found the Chosen One!" gasped Calinice in shock.
Lampito grinned a wicked grin as she scrutinized every inch of the One's nakedness, broken up only by the black and jewel-studded lines of the leather thong. The One was beautiful, tall and slender like Lampito herself, but with ice blue skin instead of green. Her nipples were indigo and were standing proud and erect in the cool breeze of the spaceship's interior. Lampito touched her neck and then put her finger on the One's pretty pink love button. She could feel herself getting hot and wet already and they hadn't even started.
"Myrrhine, pass me the quantum dildo!" said Lampito. "We aren't finished with this one yet." (p. 132)
All of this raises a couple of questions. Why on earth would Marie David bother writing such a novel after the popularity of pulp had passed its peak? And why did she devote so much effort and money to its publication?
The answer is that for Marie David, Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj was less an exercise in writing smutty science fiction about space lesbians than it was a roundabout explanation of her perspective on a troubling issue she had with the nature of lesbian pulp itself, and an attempt to solve it.
Though lesbian pulp novels in the 1950s and early 60s were often written by women and touted as being for women too, the people who read them the most were men. Writing to a primarily male audience, then, the writer of lesbian erotica was faced with the difficult situation of trying to maintain the integrity of her characters' sexualities while also trying to pander to the tastes of her audience -- whether it's true or not, the thinking ran that although men liked to read about lesbians doing lesbian things, they liked it even more when a lesbian was either punished for spurning men or converted to worshipping them by a good deep dicking.¹
During the heyday of pulp novels, when every hack writer and his dog was willing to turn out a (poorly-written but relatively-complete) novel each month, competition for publishers was fierce; to ignore one's audience was to lose one's place to another writer. So characters in lesbian pulps met all sorts of fates: sometimes they were seduced by men and suddenly revealed to have been bisexual or heterosexual all along, sometimes they went mad, and sometimes they committed suicide to avoid facing the terrible truth that they love the cock and had been living out a lie.
David's solution, played out in her novel, was simple but effective. The only man mentioned explicitly is the protagonists' arch-nemesis, the evil despotic phallocrat; in his loathsomeness he's nearly impossible for the reader to sympathise with, so he or she would perhaps feel better about his eventual demise sans great sex along the way. Things like the phallic shape of the FTL Olisbos, the presence of devices like Myrrhine's "quantum dildo", and the characters' names² imply that either there are men around somewhere, or that the inhabitants of Planet Vajj wouldn't be adverse to their presence and company in bed what with being surrounded by phallic symbols all the time anyway.
Nothing dire happens to David's protagonists to "punish" them for their lesbianism; they get to live happily ever after in perfect Sapphic bliss. But since there is never mention of a distaste for men, only of their distaste for a specific man, a male audience hungry for some heterosexual action gets to use its imagination, and perhaps hold out hope for a sequel.
Unfortunately, David's solution came at a time when the popularity of lesbian pulp novels was diminishing rapidly. The 1960s ushered in a period of free love and sexual exploration; people didn't have to read about things in pulp novels anymore because they could actually experience them for themselves. Prism Press went out of business in 1965, the year after Panty Regents was published. Marie David died of ovarian cancer in 1987. In a 1986 interview a couple of months before her death with the magazine Here and Queer, she remarked that she felt Panty Regents had served its purpose: a happy ending for a pulp novel where both the characters and the audience can be satisfied.
I always thought that lesbian characters in pulp novels deserved a fairy tale happily-ever-after ending, you know? I'm sad that I had to invent a whole new galaxy for that to happen. But it did, and maybe now it can happen in the real world, too.³
Even if its political agenda had never been made explicit, Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj would still be a truly stirring novel on any level you chose to examine it: as smut, of course, or as pulp, or simply as prose fiction. Sadly, it's fallen into near-complete obscurity, and has been out of print since Prism Press folded. Even more sadly, Marie David never got around to writing another novel.
¹ Christopher S. Nealon. "Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction", New Literary History 31.4 (2000), 746.
² Perhaps too subtle for most avid pulp-readers: the Lysistrata characters after whom the Panty Regents are named refuse sex with their husbands, but it takes an enormous amount of willpower and constant reflection on the necessity of this endeavour to do so.
³ From an interview with Marcia Zachary of Here and Queer magazine, Winter 1986.
Sources:
Darlington, Margaret. Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj. Hamilton: Prism Press, 1964.
Nealon, Christopher. "Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction". New Literary History 31.4 (2000) 745-764.
Server, Lee. Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback, 1945-1955. San Francisco, 1994.
Yusba, Roberta. "Twilight Tales: Lesbian Pulps 1950-1960". On Our Backs, vol. 2.1 (Summer 1985).
Zachary, Marcia. "Margaret Darlington Unmasked at Last". Here and Queer. (Winter 1986).
Panty Regents of the Planet Vajj is tough to track down because it's out of print, but there are copies out there if you look hard enough; I found one at the Mount Saint Vincent University library, which houses (among other, more scholarly things) the largest lesbian pulp collection in the world.