odd to out-and-proud gay readers today, but he acted as did most gay men of his generation, prizing privacy and anonymity over the double-edged sword of notoriety. Those reminiscences offer intriguing insights into the real-life underpinnings of The Gay Detective, written against a backdrop of sweeping historical change in the city of San Francisco, in the organization of “old gay life,” and in the relationships between sexuality, vice, and crime at a time when homosexuality was itself illegal. In them, we see much of Hogan’s character and personal style, and are treated to a few juicy anecdotes that paint a telling picture of the society in which he moved. Hogan made it clear that during the Roaring Twenties the most raucous gay life appeared on the street. “Looking back,” he wrote, “it must be repeated that Market Street was the focal point of all the action; remember, up until 1932, there were no bars open as such, you ‘met’ on the street. Every foot of it, from the Anchor Bar at the Embarcadero corner to the Crystal Palace Market, could tell a story, all interesting.” Along with engaging in the “promenade” up and down the street “to show off new ‘outfits’, hair-do’s, jewels, and the like,” Hogan wrote about one of the “interesting” stories that unfolded in the Unique Theater, formerly located on Market Street between Third and Fourth. Originally opened as a grand movie palace during the Silent Era, by the late 1920s “this old grind house,” according to Hogan, had fallen into disrepair and it was a place one might find a “middle-of-the-night trick.” Hogan added that because “the house was kept so dark (to hide its grime) one could DO the trick right in his seat, if one were agile enough. This was quite often managed!”
The celebratory, sex-affirming tone so evident in “The Golden Age of the Queens” did not secure a lasting literary reputation for Lou Rand Hogan. He has gone entirely unmentioned in queer-focused encyclopedias, “who’s who” lists, and other reference works. The Gay Detective similarly has been overlooked in the numerous anthologies of gay literature and historical overviews of gay fiction that have now been produced. The Gay Detective was initially published in 1961 by Saber Press of Fresno, California, and the history of that publishing house helps explain some of the obscurity that has surrounded The Gay Detective since its initial appearance. Saber Press was owned and operated by Sanford Aday, allegedly a former pimp, and his partner Wallace de Ortega Maxey, an ordained minister and early member of the pioneering gay rights group the Mattachine Society. Most Saber Press books—with titles like I Peddle Jazz, Camera Bait, and Our Flesh Was Cheap—dealt with lurid, semi-sleazy topics. They had low production values and limited distribution, but they were quite tame compared to the graphic pornography that would begin to appear before the end of the 1960s. Saber’s proprietors repeatedly ran afoul of the law in that more censorious era; after selling a copy of Sex Life of a Cop through their mail order business to a customer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Aday and Maxey were convicted of shipping lewd materials through the mails. They were fined $10,000 and sentenced to several years in prison.
Although lesbian works of various quality and veracity abounded (and sold well) in the “golden age” of paperback publishing between World War II and the rise of the sexual liberation movement in the mid-1960s, print representations of gay male life were harder to come by and faced greater barriers to distribution. In a culture where straight men might take voyeuristic pleasure in fantasizing about lesbian sexual scenes (and thus provide a wide non-lesbian audience for lesbian-themed paperbacks), books with gay male themes were targeted primarily at a gay male audience, and were much more vulnerable to homophobic legal attacks. Consequently, even paperback works that had some substance, like The Gay Detective, were relegated to publishing houses that survived in the margins of respectability. To a certain extent, the taint of disreputability has always clung to Hogan’s novel, both in its initial release by Saber and its subsequent republication under the title Rough Trade (with a slightly revised text), by Argyle Books in 1964.
When post-gay-liberation literary scholars have taken note of The Gay Detective at all, one senses a trace of embarrassment in their dismissive tone. Roger Austen, in his seminal 1977 book, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America, says that Hogan’s novel was nothing more than “tepid.” James Levine’s 1991 survey, The Homosexual Novel in America, takes an even more critical tack. Levine writes, “Lou Rand’s Gay Detective is an inferior mystery novel with some feeble attempt at humor…. Throughout most of the novel, gays emerge as stereotypically effeminate queens. The story of a gay detective who solves the crimes committed by those preying on gay men sounds positive, but this is not the case. The few masculine gay men are the murder victims. The police chief, who is aware of the crime syndicate, and his friend who ran it both escape prosecution…. In short, the blackmailing of gay men is shown as only mildly reprehensible and popular stereotypes of gay men were not disputed.”
Levine’s concern with effeminate stereotypes lies at the heart of Hogan’s negligible critical reputation. Hogan himself identified as an effeminate “queen,” and he wrote his book in the then contemporary “queen’s vernacular” of a now-vanished gay male world. Hogan’s milieu was organized along butch/queen lines that resembled in some respects the better-known butch/femme gender system of the lesbian world. He was consequently neglected by a generation (or two) of gay editors whose political sensibilities were forged in reaction to that older gay way of life, and who were more comfortable with newer styles of gay masculinity that disparaged effeminacy.
In fairness to Hogan’s critics, charges of effeminacy have been historically important ways of oppressing gay men; it is equally true that some critiques of effeminacy harbor a masculinist bias against the feminine. We as contemporary readers have an opportunity to step outside the ideologically motivated frameworks of previous decades, however, to reappraise older literary works in their historical context—indeed, the glimpses we catch of social realities that no longer exist provide much of the pleasure of such texts. The Gay Detective is admittedly light fare, perhaps tepid in its lack of sexual explicitness and stereotypical in its representations of gay male gender conventions, but to dismiss the book’s worthiness on those grounds reveals more about the assumptions and agendas of contemporary critics than they do about the ultimate value of Hogan’s detective story.
And in the end—whatever one thinks about the dated language, corny humor, unfortunate anglocentric prejudices, or politically incorrect representations of gender and sexuality—Hogan’s novel is primarily a detective story. On this level the book succeeds wonderfully, and readers will just have to find out for themselves whodunit and why. Rather than spoiling the plot, however, we want to act as tour guides to the San Francisco on which Hogan patterned his fictional Bay City, alerting readers to the local color and sites of historical interest they’ll encounter when following the main characters on Hogan’s fabulously fruity tour of a seedy sexual underground.
Mystery writing and historical studies might seem at first glance to be worlds apart: mysteries are generally fiction and histories are ostensibly fact; mystery authors write to delight and confound the reader while historians write to educate and explain; mystery novels generally end with all loose threads being tied up, while histories generally wind up posing more questions than they can answer. There are similarities, too, of course. Investigation, hypothesis, and evidence are important features of both genres, as the writer constructs a narrative 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