The Gay Detective. Lou Rand
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designed to gradually reveal some version of truth. And as is often the case in sleuthing of either sort, some of the most revealing evidence is found not through conscious acts of seeking, but rather in stumbling upon something unexpected.
This is precisely how The Gay Detective came to our attention. While working on their 1996 book Gay by the Bay, a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, Susan Stryker and her co-author Jim Van Buskirk skimmed through the San Francisco Public Library’s vast, recently-acquired collection of lesbian and gay paperbacks, assembled by lesbian publisher Barbara Grier of Naiad Press, looking for San Francisco–related materials. The Gay Detective was one such find. Neither Stryker nor Van Buskirk spent much time at that point digging into the novel’s historical background, and contented themselves with reproducing the cover art for a pictorial spread in Gay by the Bay.
A few years later Stryker shared the book with the San Francisco Queer History Working Group, whose other members included Martin Meeker, Willie Walker, Gayle Rubin, and Paul Gabriel. That’s when the historically grounded nature of the novel’s back story became visible, as nearly half a dozen historians pieced together what they knew about various aspects of San Francisco’s mid-century history based on their own original research. The group members quickly realized that while Hogan’s detective tale offered an enjoyable evening’s read, it also supplied something far more substantial: a veritable road-map to the inner dynamics of “pre-liberation” gay culture. That realization is what prompted us to seek republication of this neglected and forgotten work, with a new historical introduction.
Even in its most superficial details, The Gay Detective is so chock full of references to the contemporary culture of San Francisco that the book practically begs for historical analysis. The Backroom Crowd at Flanagan’s Bar, to whom we are introduced in the second chapter and whose centrality to the plot is revealed only towards the end of the book, are all modeled on prominent San Francisco figures. Jake Eberhart is based on headline-conscious society lawyer Jake Ehrlich, who had gained a name for himself defending the likes of Billie Holiday and notorious madam Sally Stanford—and for having his victories published in the book Never Plead Guilty. Senator Martin resembles real-life Senator (and former San Francisco Mayor) James K. Phelan who, like his fictional counterpart, was a “confirmed bachelor” hailing from the highest rungs of the social ladder. Joe Cannelli, a night club operator with a “live and let live” attitude towards the city’s burgeoning homosexual population, has more in common with Joe Finocchio—proprietor of the famous female impersonator venue Finocchio’s—than an Italian surname. Then there’s gossip-columnist Bert Kane, a fine caricature of three-dot journalist Herb Caen. In spite of his apparently vigorous heterosexuality, Caen’s generally good-natured columns displayed on occasion such intimate knowledge of his beloved city’s gay life that rumors persisted about his own sexual practices. As Hogan says of Caen’s fictional alter ego in The Gay Detective, “anyone knowing that much of the words and music is bound to have done the dance routines too.”
Like the supporting cast of characters, many of the story’s locales are drawn from the material world. Canneli’s Bait Room is not quite Finocchio’s, but it’s a reasonable facsimile of “Fin’s” chief competitor, the slightly more downmarket and risqué Beige Room, which was located on Broadway at the crossroads of North Beach, Chinatown, and Nob Hill. Likewise, the generically named Baths bathhouse, where the novel’s climactic action takes place, also had a brick and mortar prototype, Dave’s Baths, situated near the waterfront on the edge of North Beach. Hogan goes so far as to mention the controversial new Embarcadero Freeway (whose construction would soon be halted by the grass-roots “freeway revolt”) then being built adjacent to Dave’s. One of the book’s cleverest settings—a gym by day, an illicit after-hours club by night—actually existed in San Francisco’s then mostly black Fillmore neighborhood, but Hogan, the cheeky chef, fictionalized the Gourmet Club as the Gourmand Club.
More significant than the myriad parallels between characters and places are the situations that motivate the plot. Blackmail is at the heart of the story, and in this respect, too, Hogan draws on lived experience. The fear of exposure as a homosexual that led Hogan to mask his identity in much of his explicitly gay writing has been a persistent feature of gay life, one that was even more prevalent in earlier decades of the 20th century than it has been recently. In his autobiographical “The Golden Age of the Queens,” Hogan makes the shocking admission that he himself had stooped to blackmail in the dark days of the Great Depression—befriending straight military officers at tony Nob Hill hotel bars, stealing their wallets to learn their identities and addresses, and later demanding money in exchange for not spilling the beans to the men’s wives and commanders. Usually, however, the exploitation worked in the other direction, with countless gay and bisexual men ruining themselves financially to avoid the social stigma of public accusations of homosexuality.
Interestingly, given the historical veracity of much else in Hogan’s novel, there are tantalizing clues in another mid-century gay paperback about a blackmail ring in San Francisco. Bud Clifton’s otherwise forgettable Muscle Boy (Ace, 1958), also set in the Bay Area, details a scam quite similar in its particulars to the one uncovered by Hogan’s gay detective. In describing Muscle Boy in his 1964-65 Guild Book Service mail order catalog of gay-interest titles, pioneering anti-censorship activist H. Lynn Womack notes that “this thinly disguised fiction” allows readers familiar with the San Francisco scene to “enjoy identifying” the characters, “because they are from real life, as real as life around … California can be.”
Less apparent to the casual reader is the way in which the spatial organization of semi-public and commercial sexual activity in Hogan’s Bay City mimics what local historians have uncovered about the interrelationships between mid-century San Francisco’s gay neighborhoods and commercial sex and “vice” districts. Without giving away too many details of the plot, gay detective Francis Morley and his sidekick Tiger Olsen follow a trail of crime that begins in a high-profile night-spot patronized by “slumming” socialites, tourists, and open-minded “bohemians” as well as by gay men and lesbians. The action then moves to a more marginal after-hours joint before finally arriving at the steamy, seamy Baths.
In the process, the protagonists move from a tourist-oriented entertainment district, to an inner-city slum, to a derelict waterfront, all the while moving deeper and deeper into a criminalized underworld of illegal drugs and sexual variance. In doing so they map a circuit through which the city’s sexual appetites once circulated. What seems most fascinating here is the way in which Hogan’s story depends on the consequences of criminalizing all sorts of non-reproductive erotic activity and pleasure-seeking stimulation, as well as on the unexpected couplings of high society with low life that transpire in the shadowy back-ways of the city. Buried beneath all the fluff, Hogan’s book offers a serious political critique: he shows how social privilege is preserved by casting non-normative sexuality out into the margins of society, but also how the sexual margins are preserved precisely because they offer a space for the socially privileged to enact desires and practices condemned by an oppressive and hypocritical society. It was in this space, structured by the needs of elites, that pre-liberation gay life was allowed to flourish, and to be exploited.
Exploitation is the hinge upon which the sexual double standard turned. In true noir style, Hogan depicts a world whose very order depends upon outlaw spaces over which cops and criminals—two rival gangs—vie for the ability to profit from the people and activities relegated to the sexual margins. Even more impressively, however, the back story Hogan offers as motivating force for his foregrounded tale of blackmail and murder involves a sense of sweeping historical change. He shows how broad social developments that had nothing directly to do with homosexuality nevertheless worked to disrupt and reconfigure the underworld of vice and crime in ways that led to the emergence of new—and newly politicized—gay identities and communities.
In a pivotal scene in which gay private detective Francis Morley is called in to help the Bay City Police Department solve a string of murders involving gay men, we learn that the law has taken an interest in the murders primarily because there seems to be some connection between the murders and a new movement of narcotics into the city. An FBI agent assigned to the case, clearly uncomfortable with the gay angle that