![]() ![]() In the real world I have my marching papers, but for this essay, I first have to introduce you to my main source on the period, the de facto historian Jim Kepner. ![]() The one where my major discovery turned out to be that a quarter of the gay bars and restaurants in Los Angeles were in the San Fernando Valley, where I live now, and that in the books people have written about gay life in Los Angeles during the 1950s there is NOTHING on the San Fernando Valley. I found Quatrefoil while I was researching the paper I presented at the Harry Hay Centennial in New York last September. I have to tell you a research story before I discuss the book, though. ![]() The war is winding down, and the Navy is at the point of cleaning up loose ends that men are being transferred to shore duty. It's a war novel, as you'd probably expect. This novel, Quatrefoil (1950), was unusual because the characters he created were men who liked men. He wrote about gay material in an era when many people who did so used a pseudonym (Gore Vidal had a sufficiently exalted social position and Truman Capote didn't really care). ![]()
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