Futures sweeping in their murmurations
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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.
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Do these sorts of stories mention women much? I realize women are absolutely not their focus but as background or ancillary characters? And if so, what are the attitudes toward them?
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I am happy to pass the word on! Fay's one unrealized ambition is to find a cure for gonorrhea—"that so-called 'social disease,' which has been fastened on mankind as a penalty for enjoying love"—and I can't see it as a failure on her part when penicillin would not be discovered until a decade after her death. Otherwise, once she disencumbers herself of her internalized homophobia, she does pretty much entirely as she pleases and good for her.
Do these sorts of stories mention women much? I realize women are absolutely not their focus but as background or ancillary characters? And if so, what are the attitudes toward them?
There are two main female characters in The Gay Detective. One is Hattie Campbell, the sixtyish secretary whom Francis inherits along with the rest of the Morley Agency: she has seen it almost all, comes up to speed beautifully on the rest, and she's wonderful. The other is Vivien Holden, a sort of Chandler-style nympho heiress who is introduced as a client and turns out be mixed up in the kinkier fringes of the case and is one of the reasons I do not consider the novel as sexist as some of its coreligionists since she does not get killed or even sent to jail at the conclusion; she writes the agency a four-figure check and skips town.
The only female characters of consequence in A Scarlet Pansy are lesbians. By far the most prominent is Marjorie Bull Dike, known to her intimates as Bobby, a devil-may-care "collar-and-tie woman" who becomes one of Fay's closest friends and eventually lavender-marries the other; she is wealthy, clever, chaotic, and when last seen by the novel has picked up a dashing scar driving ambulances in the Argonne. Fay preparing to follow her beloved lieutenant to the front leaves a tender final letter for her and for Mason Linberg as her effective next of kin. Secondary representatives include the merrily sensible Billee Dike who presides over a popular gay bar and the imperiously statuesque La Bull-Mawgan whose memorable feud with the quick-tempered Marjorie is patched up only by the war effort. All three are considered by the narrative to be exceptions to "the typical attitude of most of the members of the Dike family [. . .] that they are nature's tragedy," whereas we are told that the attitude "of Fay and her friends [is] that they are nature's joke and that it is their duty to turn life into a roaring farce. Now, who is right?" I remain unconvinced of the innate tragedizing of queer women, but assume from its inclusion in the text that it was a popular attitude among queer men of the time and appreciate that the author at least did not stick any of his major dykes with it. Alternately it's just a dig at Radclyffe Hall.
tl;dr women exist in both novels and though not given any kind of detaliled attention, are not totally dismissed by them either. I don't know that the lesbian representation in A Scarlet Pansy would win any prizes, but Marjorie is obviously dear to Fay and disaster lesbians are a known phenomenon.
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I don't know if I would go as far as superior just because I have read novels from the '30's and '60's whose female characters are vividly explored and key to their narratives, but it mattered to me that neither novel seemed to feel the need to prove its queer bona fides by showing off its lack of interest in women. Neither Francis nor Fay is sexually interested in women, which is taken as read and does not prevent Francis from bantering with Hattie or Fay from palling around with Marjorie. There's a moment in A Scarlet Pansy where Fay performs a pantomime of disgust with the overtures of an exotic dancer and there's another where she and Mason befriend the pair of kept women who live in the apartment beneath theirs; when she moves to Baltimore in the first step of her journey toward self-discovery, the landlady of the boarding house where it takes her three weeks to find a job is horrifically untidy and sincerely kind and Fay remembers her with gratitude and affection to the end of her life. It doesn't have to be glowing representation across the board, but it defuses a lot of the worry that a book means its woman-hating literally. (The phrase is not actually used in either novel. There's no reason for it to be. Fay doesn't seem to be of sexual interest to women of any orientation and Francis is regarded by Hattie as a nice young man but just a little too pretty, besides which if anything she views him familially, having been his uncle's secretary for the last thirty years. From her perspective, she inherited him.)
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Everything you write (and every elaboration!) makes me love these characters more. Thank you so much.
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I don't know, the inescapable volume of casual misogyny baked into every layer of our culture and stuck into some of the frosting, too?
Everything you write (and every elaboration!) makes me love these characters more. Thank you so much.
You're welcome! I got really fond of many of them while reading.
(Not yet described: Tiger Olsen, the one-time local football hero, decorated former Marine, currently down-on-his-luck used car salesman who hires on with Francis as an assistant early in The Gay Detective. He is the definition of butch and very straight to boot, but once he gets his head out of the misconception that he was hired as a personal assistant—Francis knocks it out of him, actually, in a couple of two-minute rounds at Sandy's Gym—he makes a game and loyal aide and does not jib even when developments in the case require him to pose as his employer's pickup for an investigatory night on the town. He gets his heart a little dinged up by Vivien Holden, but will obviously be fine. I assume that in the future fictional installments which I long for he would continue to handle the romancing of ladies and Francis would continue to come in occasionally late and rumpled from his own nights on the tiles and the rest of Bay City would continue to take them for a couple, which I find possibly more charming than if they really were.)
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[in which I attempt to reconstruct a comment I thought I had left days ago, which it seems my browser ate instead]
I was saying to