Happy Pride Month!

As long-time readers know, LGBT characters have always been a major part of Donald Westlake’s work. From early lesbian pulp novels like Sally (1959) and Young and Innocent (1960) to the Parker series, to the Tobin books and beyond, Westlake wasn’t just shining a spotlight on LGBT stories every now and again – he was acknowledging gay characters as an unquestioned, prevalent part of life. In Westlake’s writing, the frequent inclusion of LGBT characters never feels like a matter of conscious diversity, it’s an expression of lived reality as much as anything else in a body of work tending towards absolute realism.

It’s certainly a tendency that his contemporaries lay no claim to, and Donald Westlake’s novels appear downright radical in the context of 1960s and ‘70s crime fiction. More so, the instances he’d spoken about LGBT themes outside of his novels have shown him to have been a staunch ally. Most telling is his analysis of homoerotic subtext in Raymond Chandler’s work – and “story forms on male preserves” in general – in a 1982 essay entitled The Hardboiled Dicks:

It is rare for a writer of Westlake’s calibre with a reputation built in a historically masculine genre to talk at length about “homosexual content”, let alone celebrate it and deem it necessary in order for art to withstand the test of time. His interest in gaycoding is also apparent in the Parker series, and the dynamic between its two protagonists.

Westlake’s comments regarding the 2001 Five Star reprint of A Jade in Aries are equally heartening:

The significance of gay-themed novels like The Sour Lemon Score (1969) and A Jade in Aries (1970) cannot be overstated, but Donald Westlake’s dedication to constant, varied, and layered representation in very nearly all his books is one of the most striking aspects of his work.