A meditation on queer historical invisibility, traced through Los Angeles past and the particulars of my family history. With forays into the fictional Los Angeles of Dave Brandstetter, everyone’s favorite* gay private eye.
My father’s cousin, George Bonnell, was gay. I never knew him—never even knew of him or the fact of his queerness until a few years ago—though he lived in L.A., where my father grew up and where we would visit my grandparents every Easter and Thanksgiving of my childhood. He died in 1996 of complications from AIDS, but he had disappeared from my family’s narrative long before his actual death. I’ve never even seen a photograph of him. He’s my queer ancestor, and I never knew him. This loss saddens me, both for George and for all our queer ancestors, but I choose also to frame it as a gift. His historical invisibility allows me the freedom to chart my own imaginary map of his life, with the fictional Dave Brandstetter as my guide.
Brandstetter is that classic hard-boiled investigator who makes a mean bacon-and-eggs breakfast and drinks a lot of whiskey, neat. Over the course of 12 novels written by gay author Joseph Hansen from 1970 through 1991, he also gives us a sidelong pop-culture glimpse into everyday life as an out gay man in L.A. in the 70s and 80s, a time when George Bonnell was going about his own life in West Hollywood.
Thanks to Dave Brandstetter and a helping of creative license, George Bonnell is no longer invisible to me. An imaginary map of 1970s gay L.A. is the memory I’ve constructed of my first cousin, once removed.
*Not really. He isn’t nearly as well known as he deserves to be. I have total serendipity (and Justin Carder) to thank for introducing me to the Brandstetter series last winter.
In Search of George Bonnell was first presented in 2018 as a performative talk in the context of the PLACE TALKS series at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. PLACE TALKS is a project of artist and designer Nicole Lavelle and librarian Charlie Macquarie. The series carves out a space for projects that span visual and conceptual art, performance, culture, history, geography, sociology… you name it! It’s awesome.
LISA MARTIN 