'These Were Gay Men Together':
Setting as Representation in Richard Stevenson’s Death Trick
“As backrooms get shut down to make room for wedding-vows, and gay culture morphs into ‘straight acting dudes hangin’ out,’ we wonder if we can still envision possibilities for a flaming faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle….”
— Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in “Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots: An Introduction” (2009)“When Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’ came on, we switched [partners] again and I ended up with Timmy, and by the end of it, some of the younger gay dancers were yelping and shouting and shaking their fists. These were gay men together, and it was a Wednesday night.”
— Richard Stevenson, Death Trick (1981)
In 2025, we are well into the “same love” era of homonormativity, Lisa Duggan’s term for the cultural pressure, often embraced and enforced by LGBTQs, to de-queer our cultures and lives. Homonormativity works not to make homosexuality normative, but rather to (re)make homosexuals in the image of heterosexuality. Any queer can at least understand the pull of “the normal,” the wish that you could live without the constant nagging pressure of being different—and millions of American queers (particularly middle class white queers, it must be admitted) want to just be accepted and “normal.” I do understand the desire for relief that assimilation into the cis-het world promises. And yet, assimilation is also disappointing and isolating, a promise never fulfilled, which drains queerness of all its potential meaning. If I am exactly like a straight man, except this one teeny-tiny thing, if my love and lust for men is really the same as hetero love, then being gay, all of our social spaces and cultures and experiences, has virtually no meaning other than the meaning assigned to it by heteronormativity.
Reading Richard Stevenson’s Death Trick, a murder mystery with a gay private detective written in 1979 and published in 1981, I found myself far less interested in the murder mystery and drawn instead to Stevenson’s descriptions of gay life. Sometimes it was a small throw-away line as set dressing for a scene in the book, other times he took longer to describe a police raid in a gay bar or the set up of a gay bathhouse or a gay couple’s arrangements for their sexual activities outside their relationship. I found myself both cooing and guffawing at detective Donald Strachey’s wry yet loving observations about gay life, sex, Disco, and the tediousness of straight people. Reading a mystery novel written on the brink of the HIV-AIDS catastrophe evoked in me a kind of nostalgic longing for a gay world I’d never known or experienced.
Stevenson never seeks to explain gayness or gay culture. There is no ‘coming out’ secret to disclose, no self-discovery of a “true” identity, and more importantly, no effort to justify the existence, lives, relationships, or cultures of gay and bisexual men and “drag queens” (we would now likely see these femme-presenting gays as somewhere in the trans spectrum). At the same time, Stevenson doesn’t pretend that 1970s America was safe and nurturing for queer men, that the straights outside of gay social spaces, bars, clubs, and baths, were not motivated by fear, anger, and hatred. This is not a fantasy world of safety and acceptance; rather, it’s a fantasy of queer perspectives and experiences as the center and foundation for understanding and interacting within the world.
This fictional slice of gay life before AIDS challenges many of the typical arguments queers today have with each other about representation. Samuel A. Chambers, a scholar of queer representation on television, has argued that representation is never in and of itself “progressive” nor does it afford liberation or the easing or ending of oppressive power. I would add that, as participators in popular culture, we queers tend to engage with representation in terms of whether or not it feels “authentic” to us; we tend to judge the authenticity of a representation based on whether or not the representation fits the alchemy of our individual lived experiences and what we wish our experiences had been. While I do think that the experience of queer representation is a valid and interesting problem that queers as a minority should continue exploring together, Chambers argues that the ways a pop culture narrative engages with social norms is a more fruitful and important focus for our critical attention. “Representation can have an important political impact … but it has no determinate effect on the norms that both structure the political world and saturate society” (87).
By setting the novel outside of a gay metropolis like New York City, Stevenson renders gay life in 1979 Albany, New York, as a kind of banality that defies and resists today’s homonormative forces. Queer men in the mystery novel simply are, and they are queer, not merely because of whom they love or fuck, but because they love and fuck, form friendships and relationships, celebrations, meaningful lives, as queer men separate and different from the larger, often threatening straight world around them. The queers of Death Trick live in community with each other in a secondary (tertiary?) city in upstate New York, fucking, dancing, drinking, helping, and hurting each other — as humans do. Stevenson writes Donald Strachey as a combination of an American private detective in the mystery genre, and a gay observer of the humanness of gay and bisexual men. Strachey is not a Sam Spade who just happens to be gay. He comments and reflects in a confident, open, and loving, but also sometimes teasing and exasperated, voice about gayness and gay men that, 25 years into the 21st century, felt refreshing and somehow hopeful to me. In Chambers’ terms, Stevenson’s queering of mystery novel tropes creates a short, simple refusal of the social norms that would have constrained and contained gay life in the 1970s.
Strachey’s smirking, gentle critiques of gay liberation activists walk astride his appreciation for their activist work. Stevenson imagines a fictional organization for the story called The Forces of Free Faggotry, or the FFF, who in the fictional early 70s had fought for rights of gays to be who they are, as they are, through direct confrontation with medical and legal authorities. The FFF’s embrace of faggotry as something worth fighting for and protecting is not didactically imposed on the reader. Rather faggotry is simply the unspoken driving ethos behind the story, pushing it forward.
In a very different world of the twenty-aughts, historian David M. Halperin suggests a way to understand the politics of the fictional FFF. He observed how HIV-positive men had embraced their abjection, seeing it not as a symptom of psychosis as the medical establishment does, but rather using it as a tactic, not merely for survival, but for freedom and ultimately meaning and intimacy. In his explanation of what makes camp camp, scholar José Muñoz observes that drag performance not only accepts and embraces the parts of queer culture that the dominant culture hates and despises, but that we elevate it through exaggeration and then treat it as the height of aesthetic experience. This, for Muñoz, is not only a form of resistance but also healing and social bonding.
I would argue—and I think Halperin and Muñoz would agree—that the embrace of abjection as a tactic for survival and thriving, well predates HIV/AIDS. I found it in gay men of the 1950s and 60s in my own research. Halperin notes how HIV-positive men had employed their status as pariahs in a fruitful way, to lay foundations for new identities separate from the heteronormative. This is an intensification of the sense that, at least in my research, gay men have had for many decades that their very existence is an act of social defiance (89). Halperin concludes, “Abjection … might express itself in love and camaraderie with other abject individuals” (91).
This love and camaraderie are the air the characters of Death Trick breathe. But importantly, Stevenson’s gay Albany is not an idealized gay community. It is a community of men with conflicts and jealousies, men who bear the scars of the distorting forces of being gay in a violently heteronormative world. It’s a world where some gay men betray, exploit, and use each other; and even where the murderer is in the end a gay man, one who had been tortured and twisted by parents and psychiatrists, institutionalized and “cured.” But this fictional gay Albany is also a world of mutual care, reciprocal toleration (but not without arch and often barbed judgements), relationship, intimacy, friendship, fun, celebration, and beauty. In other words, it’s an actual community. This tension between camaraderie and inevitable conflicts is embodied in the character of Mike Truckman, the owner of Truckey’s, the novel’s central gay social space, a bar and disco. Truckman both creates and maintains a key social space for communal bonding, the “church” of disco and dancing; but he is also a traitor who uses the police to try to shut down a competitor. In the end, he tells Strachey unironically, “We need one another. All of us. Gay people can have their differences, sure, but when push comes to shove, we gotta stick together, right?” (247).
So when at the end of Death Trick Stevenson describes a gay dance club and all its excesses, he is depicting a complex blend of abjection, camp, layers of conflict, friendship, community, eroticism, music and dance, emotional healing, and love. “…[E]ach of us gave into the New Year’s Eve atmosphere that gay life can, with luck, produce two or three times a week. … the DJ played ‘Put Your Body In It’ and everybody did” (248).
Notes & Bibliographic Do-dads
Samuel A. Chambers. The Queer Politics of Television (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).
Lisa Duggan. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).
David M. Halperin. What Do Gay Men Want: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
J. Todd Ormsbee. The Meaning of Gay: Interaction, Publicity, and Community among Homosexual Men in 1960s San Francisco (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011).
Richard Stevenson. Death Trick [1981] (Los Angeles: ReQueered Tales, 2023).
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. “Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots: An Introduction” in Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (Oakland, Calif.: A.K. Press, 2012).
— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry
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