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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | MARCH 2025 51 e location and time of our next potluck/social event are available via our Facebook page or email (rainbowgroup@myyahoo.com). is month our selection for the Famous LGBT Americans series is Joseph Hansen, a bisexual American writer, poet, and author of mystery and non-mystery books. Hansen was born in 1923 in South Dakota. He was raised in Minneapolis and Altadena and attended Pasadena Community College. Hansen's writing career started in 1952 when e New Yorker began publishing his poems. He also wrote nearly 40 books. Early in his career, he used the pseudonyms, James Calton and Rose Brock, but started to use his real name with his rst book of what became his best-known mystery series of Dave Brandstetter novels. e book, Fadeout, published in 1970, featured the homosexual insurance investigator and detective, Dave Brandstetter. "My joke," Hansen told e Orange County Register in 1998, "was to take the true hard-boiled character in American ction 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." e Brandstetter series chronicled gay lives in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Hansen fought for LGBT rights throughout his lifetime. He produced the radio show, "Homosexuality Today," for KPFK-FM in the late 1960s and helped found the rst Gay Pride Parade in Hollywood in 1970. He also taught writing at UCLA from 1977 to 1986. e Los Angeles Times called him "the most exciting and eective writer of the classic California private eye novel working today." He also won two Lambda Literary Awards, the rst for the category of Gay Mystery and the second for Gay Fiction. In 1992, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from e Private Eye Writers of America. Hansen was married and remained deeply in love for 51 years with his bisexual wife, Jane Bancro, a teacher and translator, with whom he had a child. "Here was this remarkable person who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with," he said of his wife. "So, something was right about it, however bizarre it may seem to the rest of the world." Bancro died in 1994. Hansen died in 2004 in Laguna Beach. For more information on Joseph Hansen and on the sources for this article, please go to the Rainbow Group's Facebook page or request a copy via our email. ~ Dan Hazeltine and Frank Galvan Rainbow Group

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