spatch took a picture of me in the strong bronze sunset this evening, which I like partly because I appear to be chameleoning into my background.



After which we got the day's political news about which I have nothing incisive or commentarial to say except that I don't like any of the directions it seems to afford and I am waiting on further reports rather than gluing myself to my other social media (FB, which is professionally useful to me but personally difficult to interact with). Have a couple of notes about books instead.

Since I have recommended Lou Rand's The Gay Detective (1961) to more than one person recently, I might as well recommend it generally for both its historical and entertainment values as a rarity of mid-century queer literature. Until Cleis Press brought it back into print in 2003, it seems to have flown well under the radar of the field, published originally by a particularly marginal pulp outfit, minimally reprinted under the sleazier and significantly less accurate title of Rough Trade, after which according to the introduction by Susan Stryker and Martin Meeker it dropped totally out of sight except for a few dismissive acknowledgements until it was rediscovered in the '90's by the San Francisco Queer History Working Group who recognized it as an invaluable map-on-the-slant to pre-liberation queer San Francisco as well as a wittily subversive mystery in its own right, hitting every beat of your standard-issue noir with a flamboyantly light-in-the-loafers P.I. who arrives at the job by inheritance from his previous career as a chorus boy and like so many queens is actually a pretty tough cookie. The novel isn't a parody, despite the introduction's spot-on identification of its aesthetic as "hard-boiled camp." Francis Morley with all his dish, swish, and tensile grace in a fight is a hero in the damned elusive tradition and the crimes he's determined to solve hit close to home when their narcotics racket mingles murderously with the blackmail of queer men. The prose is as chunkily colorful as any of its contemporaries in the straight pulp world and the ambient threat of misogyny actually lower despite the default gay male sensibility than in some heterosexual noirs I could mention. By the time of the wrap-up which sees the crowning catty touch put on the new team of the Morley Agency, the real crime is that The Gay Detective was not the first in a series set in and around the San Francisco its out-and-proud author barely fictionalized into Francis' Bay City. The only older queer detective novel I have read is Rodney Garland's The Heart in Exile (1953) and for all the very real virtues of that book, this one is frankly more fun. "My God, Bessie! It looks like the third act of Aïda out there."

I have not yet recommended Robert Scully's A Scarlet Pansy (1932) to anyone because I just finished reading it. It is an incredibly queer novel, but also an incredibly trans one in that its protagonist, the irresistibly beautiful and unapologetically un-monogamous Fay Etrange, is AMAB, always textually referred to with female pronouns, sexually oriented strictly toward butch men, and her self-identified sexual and gender identity is "fairy." When pressed to clarify the question of her masculinity or femininity, she demurs significantly, "Well, don't call me either; just call me it." Her pre-WWI New York City is polymorphously inclusive, her circle of friends filled with pansies and bull dykes and "oncers" like Fay herself, never cruising the same man twice in her preference for blond-haired, blue-eyed, well-muscled trade. She learns her own fetishes; she grows out of the painful confusion of shame over her desires; she clerks for a bank, puts herself through college for pre-med and medical school for obstetrics and venereology, as we know from the first lines of the novel will meet a heroically romantic end in the trenches in the arms of the soldier she loves which is hard to read as a moral desert or a queer tragedy when it caps a life of doing everything and everyone its heroine has ever wanted, all related by the novel not as if it is lecturing the reader on the habits and conformation of the sexual invert, but as if it's spilling the tea on a crowd the reader has been flung into as gossipily and intimately as Fay herself. In one of its rare moments of exposition as opposed to incluing, the narrative defines camp as an all-encompassing attitude of burlesque, but it demonstrates the mode just as well with its array of allegorical surnames including Bütsch, Bull, Dike, Voyeur, Chichi, Pickup, and Fish, and the parenthetical remarks it scatters through the text like hairpins. Its total disregard for psychological or sexological explanations for the various orientations and identities of its characters is refreshing even or especially in the twenty-first century. The physical description of the types of men who most attract Fay is sufficiently detailed as to suggest autofiction, although the introduction by Robert J. Corber points out that almost nothing is known about the author beyond conjecture. The intermittent period-typical racism is more unexpected than egregious, but perhaps serves as a reminder that falling down on intersectionality is not a uniquely modern problem.

What ties these two novels together, beyond the fact that A Scarlet Pansy is name-checked in the Cleis introduction to The Gay Detective because it was personally important to the author, is the way neither of them resembles any other of the queer fiction I have read from around their times. A Scarlet Pansy doesn't have a moment to waste on pleas for tolerance when it's diving into the sensual pleasures of drag balls and tricking. The Gay Detective brings on its hero with a mild hangover from a night spent cruising and sees him off joking with friends, well recompensed for his deft navigation of a dirty case, and just as defiantly swishy as when he claimed to be applying for a firearms license because he'd have "a helluva time beating off some attacker with a mascara brush." Neither novel is tragedy-free: even Fay's deliriously permissive subculture acknowledges the existence of blackmail. But the queerness of their protagonists is at once matter-of-fact and transgressive, totally uninterested in respectability politics, and thriving. Gay as in happy and queer as in fuck you. It's important to see, but it's also just kind of nice.