It was the 1950s when a desperate young woman, rejected by her family because of her sexuality, walked into a drugstore, intent on taking her own life that day.

Inside the shop, the woman spotted a book cover featuring two women — a novel by American author Ann Bannon, the so-called Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction whose salacious stories of forbidden love served as one of the few representations of homosexuality at the time.

The young woman purchased the book and read it in one sitting on a bench, …