LEGENDS Column: Joseph Hansen

When it came time to choose the first subject for this column, Joseph Hansen came naturally to my mind. From 1970 through the 1990s, Hansen was among the best known of the west-coast gay activists.

Hansen met Martin Block at his twenty-second birthday party, in 1945, and the two formed an enduring friendship. Block would help create ONE Magazine, the nation’s first magazine for homosexuals, in 1952. In 1958, a friend introduced Hansen to ONE’s senior editor Don Slater, and he soon began writing for the magazine. His first story was “The Corrupter,” published in 1963 under the pseudonym James Colton, used due to Slater’s insistence. In 1964, National Library Books published his first novel, Lost on Twilight Road, also under the name of Colton.

In 1970, Harper & Rowe published Fadeout, the first novel in Hansen’s own name. Fadeout is a mystery novel that features detective David Brandstetter, a character proven to have appeal with a vast and diverse audience. “My joke,” Hansen once said, “was to take the true hard-boiled character in American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well.” Indeed Brandstetter has done his job well, and Fadeout has thrilled audiences around the world for nearly thirty-five years, with a new edition currently in press. Hansen has currently published over forty books.

Joseph and Jane Hansen were active supporters of ONE, Incorporated in the early ’60s, and they sided with Don Slater when the organization divided in 1965. Calling themselves the Tangent Group, their version of ONE Magazine soon became Tangents, which continued publication until 1970. The Tangent Group became incorporated as the Homosexual Information Center [HIC], a California non-profit corporation, in the fall of 1968.

When asked to describe one event during his years of activism that stood out as having been a truly exceptional experience, he first declined, stating: “There have been many, many, many events that have taken us to where we are today. I think pebbles more than boulders have built this mountain, on top of which we stand.”

But then he decided to discuss the first gay pride parade, organized by Morris Kight and Christopher Street West in June of 1970 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. Hansen was HIC’s representative to the Planning Committee. The first gay pride parade was nothing like today’s gala celebration. As Hansen described it, “The parade was super silly, and very ragtag, and nobody had any money for the floats or anything. But they threw on a few sequins, a bit of tulle, and some paint, and they got out there and did the best they could.”

The effect, he added, was “electrifying.” He recalled standing across the street from the Pickwick Bookshop, where he had worked years before, and seeing his past co-worker Lloyd standing in front of the store watching on. Lloyd saw Hansen and yelled, “JOE! Isn’t this wonderful! Isn’t this a marvelous day! Can you imagine this ever happening?”

It seemed to Hansen that “the fact of the parade, the fact that nobody threw eggs or rotten tomatoes at it, and nobody jeered—people stood and smiled as it went by—was a huge shock, and a very pleasant one, to people like Lloyd. There were thousands of them in Los Angeles at that time. I think it showed homosexuals that being bold, being brave, and coming out was not going to have the awful results that everybody always feared. That those days were passed, they were behind us. And that was a thrilling day.”

For Hansen, the most important role of the early movement was that it let people know that they were not alone, that there were others out there who “shared their predicament.” Its greatest accomplishment has been the recent repeal of the sodomy laws by the Supreme Court. “Once the Federal Government said NO to such laws, that was the coup de grâce, that was the principle thing…. That’s what we were asking for, to be decriminalized.”

It seems that few people today realize that the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality took over fifty years to fight and that it began in Los Angeles. It is hard for us to comprehend the amazing changes in social attitudes since Hansen wrote his first short story for ONE. Fortunately, the books, stories, poems, and art contributed by Joseph and Jane Hansen remain, and these will help us to remember how difficult it was for homosexuals then, and how wildly different things were.