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Posted April 01, 2010 to photo album "L.A. from Every Angle"
As Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg shows, there are many different L.A.s inside the city limits. Joel Bleifuss takes us on the tour of how artists imagine Los Angeles.
Slide 24: L.A. of Gay Detectives
Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) Hansen, an L.A. writer, made history in 1970 by helping found Hollywood’s first gay pride parade. That was also the year he introduced the world of crime fiction to his creation, insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter. What set Brandstetter apart from fellow Los Angelenos like Philip Marlowe was that he was a gay dick—an out gay man at a time when gay characters scarcely existed, either as public figures or as characters of popular culture. “My joke,” Hansen once said, “was to take the true hard-boiled character in the American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well.” Through the 12 Brandstetter novels, the last one published in 1991, Hansen’s gay detective grew older and, eventually, wiser in matters of life and love.
The World's End
We Steal Secrets
Closed Circuit
The Deep
The Place Beyond The Pines
Greetings from Tim Buckley
Admission
Promised Land
Anna Karenina
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brokeback Mountain
Lost in Translation
Pride & Prejudice
The Pianist
Gosford Park