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The Gay Detective
Lou Rand
Table of Contents
Introduction: Mystery as History
Introduction: Mystery as History
Susan Stryker and Martin Meeker
Lou Rand’s The Gay Detective is a genre-busting gem of a story written in the waning days of the golden age of American “pulp” paperback publishing. Until now it has been largely forgotten by readers and disparaged by the few critics who ever took notice of it, but we think you’ll agree as you peruse the following pages that the book deserves a wider contemporary audience.
The Gay Detective can best be described as “hard-boiled camp.” The plot revolves around a grisly murder/blackmail/narcotics racket, but the cast of characters includes a gracefully aging chorus boy who packs a pistol and carries a private investigator’s license, a down-on-his luck football stud who might not be as shocked as one might expect upon learning that some boys do more than bathe in a bathhouse, and a vivacious vixen with a taste for rough trade and a roomful of kinky secrets. Along the way we meet handsome thugs, catty drag queens, sleazy businessmen, corrupt cops, tainted politicians, and a gossip columnist who bears more than a passing resemblance to the late, great San Francisco Chronicle newspaper columnist Herb Caen.
The Gay Detective is set in “Bay City,” a thinly disguised San Francisco. The action takes place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as that fabled city was earning its reputation as a world-renowned gay gathering-spot. While this tightly plotted little book offers a fun time for readers who don’t know a thing about San Francisco’s queer past, to those in the know, The Gay Detective also provides a fascinating guide to a place known since the mid-19th century as “Sodom By the Sea.” It’s a history, as well as a mystery—and it’s written by a man almost as mysterious, and just as historically noteworthy, as the characters he created.
San Francisco isn’t the only thing about The Gay Detective that’s thinly disguised. “Lou Rand” supplies only slight cover for chef and writer Lou Rand Hogan, who under the name Lou Hogan penned regular items for Sunset and Gourmet magazines. The historical record reveals little about the man, but the few anecdotes and pieces of evidence that have survived are all intriguing. He was born in Los Angeles at the turn of the last century and moved to San Francisco as a young man in the 1920s. Those two California cities would remain his principal ports-of-call over the next several decades, but his career as a chef took him to exotic locales around the globe. Hogan worked as a chef aboard the Matson luxury liner Lurline on its regular San Francisco to Honolulu to Sydney run, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and ruled the roost in such exclusive Bay Area dining rooms as those of the Bohemian Club, the Palace Hotel, and the Mark Hopkins. At other times he worked as a personal chef for billionaire industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and for the Sultan of Jahore in Singapore.
While dishing up Continental cuisine for the rich and famous, Hogan also took time to dish in print about two central features of his life: food and the gay world. He achieved his widest public with his Gourmet and Sunset gigs, but later in life he also contributed to The Advocate, San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter, and other gay publications. Hogan’s twin passions intertwined most famously—and notoriously—in The Gay Cookbook. This “compendium of campy cuisine,” published in 1965 by Sherbourne Press in Los Angeles, gained a cult following and went through numerous printings. The cookbook’s readers were treated to serious haute cuisine recipes as well as generous servings of vintage ’60s humor—an unrelenting cascade of double entendre that played on the apparently endless parallels between the kitchen and the bedroom. Hogan’s introduction for “Browned Beef Stew” clearly demands a parenthetical reference to “browning” and “frenching.” The book’s decidedly male (and often overtly misogynistic) bias is made clear by the disclaimer that it contains no recipes for fish.
Hogan’s adventurous life ended with little fanfare in Los Angeles in 1976. He left no known heirs, no will, no correspondence or personal papers. Apart from his essays and books, the man left few traces of his private life. Based on a brief, unpublished essay written by Hogan, we know that he considered the pseudonymous Robert Scully’s early gay novel The Scarlet Pansy (1932), which chronicled the party-filled life of a beautiful boy named Fay in the years around World War I, to be the most accurate representation of the kind of life Hogan himself had led. Moreover, Hogan wrote that The Scarlet Pansy was a “noteworthy book” because “it marked the beginning of a world-wide social trend”—gay literature. He admired the book so much that he hoped his short essay would be the introduction to a reissue of the work, but these plans never came to fruition.
Most of what we do know about Hogan is derived from a short series of reminiscences he published as “The Golden Age of Queens”