GLR July-August 2023

ESSAY

Joseph Hansen’s Pre-Stonewall World N ILS C LAUSSON

I N THE SUMMER OF 1972, shortly after I joined the Gay Alliance for Equality in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I was a graduate student at Dalhousie University, a friend came back from a trip to New York with a copy of Joseph Hansen’s novel Fadeout and told me that I ab solutely had to read it, because its protagonist, Dave Brandstetter, a death claims investigator for a Los Angeles in surance company, was gay. There were few gay novels in those years—E. M. Forster’s long-suppressed Maurice had been pub lished the previous year—and even fewer gay detective stories. George Baxt’s A Queer Kind of Death , which featured the gay— and Black—New York police officer Pharaoh Love, who’s “60s hip and calls everybody ‘cat,’” had appeared in 1966. Remark able for the time, it was highly praised by the influential New York Times reviewer of mysteries, Anthony Boucher, who also wrote detective stories and science fiction: “This is a detective story, and unlike any other you have read.” That is exactly how I reacted to Fadeout , which, while fol lowing the well-established conventions of the genre, was un like any detective story I’d read—and not only because it had a dismissed as pulp fiction that was apolitical and irrelevant. Despite the enduring popularity of the Brandstetter myster ies—they are currently being reprinted by Syndicate Books— andalso because of that popularity, Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) has not received the literary recognition that I believe he de serves. He is conspicuously absent from Les Brookes’ GayMale Fiction Since Stonewall (2009). In part this may be because in many ways Hansen was a pre-Stonewall writer, even though most of his major novels came out after 1969. He was in his mid-forties when he wrote Fadeout , the first Brandstetter novel, in 1967, and it took him nearly three years to find a publisher who would accept it. He had already written a few novels under the pseudonym James Colton: Lost on Twilight Road (1964), Strange Marriage (1965), and Known Homosexual (1968)—the latter revised and republished as Pretty Boy Dead (1984), the title he originally wanted. When Hansen turned to the detective story, he was not aiming only for commercial success; he had artistic—and political—aims as well. As he later told an inter Nils Clausson is emeritus professor of English at the University of Regina in Manitoba, Canada. gay detective who acted as if being gay were perfectly normal. For the mystery of the dis appearance and later the murder of Fox Olsen was only a nominal mystery. The real mystery was that of Olsen’s life before he was murdered. There was in this novel a sub tly subversive political subtext that’s much easier to detect today than it would have been in 1970, when detective stories were

viewer for the St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996): “Homosexuals have commonly been treated shabbily in detective fiction—vilified, pitied, at best patronized. This was neither fair nor honest. When I sat down to write Fadeout in 1967, I wanted to write a good, compelling whodunit, but I also wanted to right some wrongs. Almost all that folk say about ho mosexuals is false. So I had some fun turning clichés and stereo types on their heads in that book. It was easy.” One of the reasons that Hansen “wanted to right some wrongs” was that, in 1967—two years before Stonewall—he had been active for several years in the gay rights movement. Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on July 19, 1923, Joseph Hansen moved with his family to Altadena, California. After World War II, he settled in Los Angeles, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the early 1960s, he became one of the editors of ONE magazine. He went on to co-found, with Don Slater, the gay magazine Tangents in 1965, produced a radio program for KPFK-FM called Homosexuality Today in 1969, and helped to organize the first gay pride parade in Hollywood in 1970, the year Fadeout was published. However, he did not fit comfort idea of gay this, gay that, and gay the other.” Nearly two decades after Stonewall, he said in an interview that his purpose in writing about gay men was “to deal with ho mosexuals and homosexuality [Hansen didn’t like the word ‘gay’ and rarely used it] as an integral part of contemporary life, rather than something bizarre and alien.” Although openly homosexual, Hansen was also married—to a lesbian, with whom he fathered a daughter—a fact that was not likely to endear him to the newly “liberated” gay people of the post-Stonewall generation. “Here was this remarkable woman who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. So something was right about it, however bizarre it may seem to the rest of the world.” The main reason Hansen’s novels have not received the recognition they deserve is that the author became typecast as a mystery writer. After the first novel in the Brandstetter series, his publisher, capitalizing on the popularity of the genre, began to market each new novel as “A Dave Brandstetter Mystery.” This automatically made it impossible to judge a “Brandstetter mys tery” as anything other than genre fiction, albeit with a gay twist. (When this magazine reviewed reprints of the first two Brand stetter novels in 2005, the reviewer showed little interest in their ably into the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation culture. Hansen was more of an assimila tionist than a liberationist. “Way back before Stonewall,” he recalled, “I was saying in the tiny gay magazines of those times [like Tan gents and ONE ] that what we should strive for was inclusion in a society that had long shut us out. ‘Us and them’ is a lousy way to build a world. And I’m still not big on the

There was in Fadeout a subtly subversive political subtext that’s easier to detect today than it was in 1970, when it was dismissed as pulp fiction.

TheG & LR

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