Be Gay, Do Crime (In Books)

June was pride month, which had me thinking about the inseparable link between noir and queerness. Noir is a “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled cynical characters and bleak sleazy settings.” The entire structure of noir, its building paranoia and unspoken feelings, creates an atmosphere of grit and shadows and the cornered feeling of being in the closet.

The founding father of the hard-boiled detective, Dashiell Hammett, was a bisexual man but due to the social mores of his time, that aspect of his identity couldn’t be expressed openly. Instead, it bled into every page of his stories, breathing life into the decadence of a villain and the lingering gazes between a detective and his partner.

Due to the Hays Code, homosexuality could not be represented unless it was in a negative light as criminals or crime victims. With these trappings, Hammett included a variety of queer characters, often slipping commonly known slang past editors. Sam Spade, the hero of The Maltese Falcon, employs the slang with such ease that although Hammett struggled with his bisexuality, he connected to queer culture.

To give you an idea of how common the noir tropes became, the villain Joel Cairo is fashionable, neat, and delicate. The character and the actor who portrayed him, Peter Lorre, are so iconic, they ended up parodied in Looney Tunes cartoons. Indeed the influence of the effeminate and physically weak villain trope can be seen in Aladdin’s Jafar and Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Morarity in 2010’s Sherlock series. Critics have accused Hammett’s depiction as being homophobic. However after Spade knocks out a gunmen who happens to be Cairo’s lover, the villain strokes the man’s hair in effort to revive him. The greatest love story with genuine affection is between the queer villain and his sidekick.

Sam Spade and the other iconic detective, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, were written to be ladies’ men. Despite the characterization, literary critics have observed the hyper-masculinity of these lonely detectives to be a mask. Their cynical, anti-woman views and disdain for the more out villains were hiding queerness. These critics often cite Marlowe’s descriptions of a mobster’s jawline or a sailor’s eyes as evidence of a queer undercurrent. To me, the best queer subtext is in one of my favorite Neo-noir films, LA Confidential. In it, Detective Ed Exley, portrayed by Guy Pearce becomes obsessed with the brute officer Bud White played by Russel Crowe. He traces White to a prostitute, Lynn Bracken, who is played with ethereal old Hollywood beauty by Kim Basinger. He watches them be intimate through a window. Finally when later questioning Lynn, Exley feels seduced by her every answer. Lynn says, “Fucking me and fucking Bud aren’t the same thing, you know” before Exley succumbs to her seduction. It’s obvious that Exley’s obsession with White triangulates through Lynn. It is only after both men have an affair with the same woman, they bond to take on the corruption in the LAPD. As they load shotguns, their met gazes promise a closer connection that 1950s society wasn’t ready for.

My novella Devils in the Details has some of these tropes. Tobias Quinlan is a womanizer and embraces hyper-masculinity. Not-so deep down, he is a man who wants to believe and do what’s right. And unlike the publishing and film days of yore, his queerness is not subtext. It has inherited the hidden feelings of Spade and Marlowe, but I can now explore it more explicitly as Tobias falls for a masked superhero. The noir yearning is there but so is the detective uncovering the wonders of a P spot orgasm in the locker room shower.

Works Cited

Berlatsky, Noah. “The Detective and the Closet.” The Hooded Utilitarian, July 30, 2012.

‍ ‍https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/07/the-detective-and-the-closet/

Dyer, Richard. “Homosexuality and Film Noir.” Jump Cut, no. 16 (1977): 18–21. https:/

     www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC16folder/HomosexFilmNoir.html

Hanson, Curtis, dir. L.A. Confidential. Warner Bros., 1997.

Linder, Daniel. “Getting Away with Murder: The Maltese Falcon's Specialized  Homosexual Slang Gunned Down in Translation.”

Target 26, no. 3 (2014): 337-360. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.26.3.01lin