As The Price of Salt author Patricia Highsmith recounted in an afterword to Bloomsbury’s 1990 reissue, gay and lesbian characters usually “had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing-alone and miserable and shunned-into a depression equal to hell.” There had been gay and lesbian novels before, but there were usually only three options available to the main character by the end of the book: death, madness, or a life of repression and denial. The book was released in 1952-the same year the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness in its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. When The Price of Salt was first published, it gave LGBTQ+ readers something they had never encountered before: a novel that didn’t punish its main characters for being gay and allowed them at least the possibility of a Happily Ever After.
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