MIRAGE CITY

Queer San Francisco PI Evander “Andy” Mills returns to his hometown of Los Angeles in 1953 to solve a mystery that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone.

Myrtle Bolton is concerned that three fellow members of her local chapter of the real-life Mattachine Society have vanished. The Society, dedicated to normalizing homosexuality by persuading its members to act as straight as possible apart from their sex lives, is so fanatical about preserving its members’ privacy that Myrtle knows the missing only as boyfriends Edward and Hank and singleton Daphne, who disappeared a few weeks later. Nor does she have any photographs of them or background information about them. It seems an impossible job, but it’s right up Andy’s alley. Maybe even a little bit too much up his alley, for the few leads he unearths take him past the Fifth Order, an altogether more radical group Edward violently opposed, to the Bacchanal, the gay LA motorcycle club Hank’s rumored to have joined, and the North Private Clinic, where one of the nurses is Mary Mills, the mother Andy hasn’t seen in seven years. Mary’s delighted to see her son again, however unexpectedly, but Andy’s awkward squirming becomes ever more frantic, first because he’s never come out to his mother, and then when he finds out exactly what kind of work the North Private Clinic is doing with its all-male clientele. Although the mystery isn’t as strong as the one in Rough Pages (2024), the unsparing descriptions of aversive conversion therapy and Andy’s agonized attempts to come to terms with the many warring sexual communities around him more than compensate.

Required reading for anyone who wonders what it was like to be queer before Stonewall.