In the 1950s-set novel Mirage City, queer San Francisco PI Evander Mills returns home to L.A. for a hardboiled adventure involving motorcycle gangs and the Mattachine Society.
Which elements of the noir genre have you needed to transform to tell the kinds of stories you want to tell?
A lot of old noir novels actually had quite a few queer plotlines that got removed in the movies because of the Hayes Code. But even when the stories were mildly sympathetic toward queer people, the characters were pornographers or that poor fellow who got taken in by the bad, older gay. But what is it to put the queer perspective in these noirs? Getting to take the tropes of noir and then put this twist on them is a delight. Being queer in the ’50s itself was a very noir experience: the world closing in, having to hide from the authorities, always feeling like you’re being persecuted—because you are.
Evander’s investigative success is tied to his ability to build trust with his informants through his identity as a gay man. Why did you choose to highlight that?
His being able to give a piece of himself to get a piece of someone else makes his role as an investigator special. My agent for the first book asked me, “What’s his special power?” Originally, I thought, well, he’s hid his secret for so long that he can read it when other people are hiding theirs. But I do think that on some level, his power is being able to say, Hey, we are all in this together. He has to be a lot more vulnerable than you’d think a noir investigator would be, which allows us a little more access to him, and allows him a little more access to everyone else around him. But he has to see people as allies before he can really view them as suspects, which on some level, makes him worse at his job.
Mirage City is grounded in real LGBTQ+ social and political history. Did you talk to gay elders from the period as part of your research?
I couldn’t talk to any original members of the Satyrs motorcycle club, whom Evander mixes with in L.A., because they have all since passed. But I did talk to several queer bikers who are members of clubs that came up in the ’60s and ’70s who knew those guys. I was getting secondhand stories and learning about biker culture from them. The issue with going too hardcore into some of the true stuff the book covers is that I don’t like writing real people in history. I don’t necessarily want someone’s first introduction to an important queer historical figure to be a fictional version of them in a murder mystery. It feels irresponsible in some way.
