Born July 19: Joseph Hansen

One notable spot in the long shadow of Ramond Chandler’s acolytes and imitators is Joseph Hansen, who wrote twelve novels starring Dave Brandstetter, another hardluck, tough guy, L.A. private detective who, breaking new ground, happened to be gay. Hansen was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1923; when he was ten his family moved to Minneapolis and when he was thirteen they settled in to Southern California where he stayed the rest of his life. At twenty-nine he published a poem in the New Yorker, followed by other poems in the Atlantic, the Saturday Review, and Harper’s, and soon after began writing pulp novels under a pseudonym, allowing him to explore issues of gay life while adhering to the rampant homophobic code of the 1950s and early 60s. In 1970 he helped Harry Hay and others form the first gay pride parade in Hollywood, though for his entire life, to 2004, he preferred to call himself homosexual rather than gay. He was married for fifty-one years to Jane Bancroft, who died ten years before him. In all, Hansen wrote nearly forty books, including mainstream novels like A Smile in His Lifetime and Living Upstairs, a coming-of-age story in Hollywood during WWII that Publishers Weekly compared to Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West.