The Gay Detective

“A gracefully aging chorus boy who packs a pistol and carries a P.I. 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 roomful of kinky secrets. Along the way we meet handsome thugs, catty drag queens, sleazy businessmen, corrupt cops, tainted politicians” From the Introduction by Susan Stryker and Martin Meaker

Before there was Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, there was Lou Rand's The Gay Detective, a masterpiece of “hard-boiled camp” set in a thinly-disguised San Francisco in the early 1960s, just as that fabled city was earning its reputation as a world-renowned gay gathering-spot.

Lou Rand's The Gay Detective, originally published in 1961, is a genre-busting gem of a story written in the golden age of American “pulp” paperbacks. It is available for the first time to contemporary readers.

"It's so flaming you could roast marshmallows over it" -- Ann Bannon, Author of Beebo Brinker
"Sharp detective work and unabashedly limp wrists join forces to solve the puzzle of drugs, blackmail, and murder in this flamboyant whodunit" -- Ann Bannon