“Our friendship began on a clear, crisp October afternoon one month after the start of senior year...”
- Crush, by Jane Futcher.
Crush by Jane Futcher, published in 1981, is a lesbian teen fiction story of romance and betrayal. The novel is set in the 1960s, specifically in 1964-1965. The setting is in an all-girls boarding school (Huntingdon Hill Boarding School), which, I’m sure, did not seem clichéd at the time.
It’s told in first person from the perspective Jinx, the main character (lesbians in lesbian teen fiction always seem to have bizarre names. It’s one of those unspoken rules of the genre). She develops a crush (big surprise) on a pretty rich girl in the boarding school: Lexie. Lexie is obviously the femme of this relationship.
Lexie turns out, however, to not be the ideal relationship partner. She is bossy, and always used to getting her way. She orders Jinx around until the protagonist is doing things she would never otherwise consider. The butch of this relationship is a pushover, a doormat. She’d rather cry herself to sleep than risk offending anyone.
(spoilers follow) But eventually Jinx can no longer put up with being Lexie’s slave or plaything. She attempts to stand up to her, and the effort is not met with any sort of compliance. In the traditional style of lesbian fiction, and lesbian teen fiction in particular, this story does not have a happy ending. Lexie betrays Jinx to the school authorities and the protagonist is thrown out of school.
Some readers, actually, celebrate this novel’s unhappy ending. They describe being sick of the “sappy” endings modern glbtq teen fiction usually get. This, however, is a very recent phenomenon. Unhappy endings for glbtq are far more the norm when examining earlier published works. (spoilers end here)
In Huntingdon Hill Boarding School, homosexuality is treated like a mental illness. This was a reflection of attitudes in the 1960s, but the same sort of arguments were still taking place at the time of Crush’s publication.
Crush is still in print today, and although it is not considered classic lesbian teen fiction, many lesbian teen readers still enjoy the novel and relate to the Lexie and especially Jinx characters.