Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film

8. Queer Eye for the Private Eye: Homonationalism and the Regulation of Queer Difference in Anthony Bidulka’s Russell Quant Mystery Series

179 CHAPTER 8 QUEER EYE FOR THE PRIVATE EYE: HOMONATIONALISM AND THE REGULATION OF QUEER DIFFERENCE IN ANTHONY BIDULKA’S RUSSELL QUANT MYSTERY SERIES Péter Balogh Anthony Bidulka’s Russell Quant mystery series is one of a kind on the crime fiction scene in Canada today. Not only is it a successful Canadian detective mystery series with over 35,000 copies1 having been sold to date, it is the only Canadian detective series written by a gay male author that features a gay private eye. The series features Russell Quant, whom Bidulka describes as “the first, and perhaps only, half-Ukrainian, half-Irish, gay, exfarmboy , ex-cop, Canadian, Saskatchewan, prairie, world-travelling private detective being written about today anywhere” (Bidulka, website). Moreover , the Russell Quant mystery series also presents a host of secondary lesbian and gay characters2 and raises a number of important lesbian and gay issues, including same-sex marriage, homophobia, and the globalization of gay rights, while Quant tends to his caseload at home and abroad. As a consequence, and in contrast to many other genre fiction series with gay characters or gay themes, Bidulka’s work focuses on the day-to-day lives and intimate relationships of the characters who populate his imagined version of the Saskatoon lesbian and gay community. In this chapter, I explore how lesbians and gays are represented in Anthony Bidulka’s imagined community and interrogate the relationship between Bidulka’s fictional representations and a specific form of governmentality , the project of homonormalization, unfolding within the mainstream lesbian and gay community in Canada today. I argue that, through CHAPTER 8 180 its privileging of a particular version of gayness, Bidulka’s mystery series can be read as both representative and constitutive of discourses that are aimed at normalizing good gay citizens and casting out queer3 difference. I undertake a discourse analysis of Bidulka’s work overall to explore how the detective series presents a mainstream gay culture that is decidedly homonormative —a concept that I unpack further below. In particular, I consider the series’ construction of a normative, homogeneous, and depoliticized Canadian gay community through its rich embrace of gay male consumer capitalism, its sanitary proscription of queer sex, its repudiation of the feminine , and the ways the author literally and metaphorically makes a monster out of the primary racialized gay male villain in the series. I argue that although Bidulka’s writing helps to render certain gay identities more visible and legitimate in the Canadian context, the Russell Quant mystery series participates nonetheless in the homonormalization of the mainstream gay community, as well as in the Western political project that Jasbir Puar calls “homonationalism.” By legitimizing acceptable gay behaviour and setting proper gay citizens in opposition to perversely gendered, r deviantly sexualized, and racialized queers, the homonational project seeks to assimilate good lesbians and gays into the heteronormative nation while containing and, as necessary, (r)ejecting what might be called the monstrous queer terrorist. My readings of Bidulka’s work demonstrate that while it might not be obvious at first glance, popular lesbian and gay crime fiction can and does function as a cultural site that lends support to larger ideological and political projects. Not surprisingly, lesbian and gay crime fiction originated in step with the political project of gay liberation in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. It began to flourish there during the rise of the gay liberation movement, especially following the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Americans Joseph Hansen and Richard Lipez (whose pen name is Richard Stevenson) turned the crime fiction genre on its head with their gay detective series featuring Dave Brandstetter and Donald Strachey respectively. Since the early 1970s, dozens of authors, including Michael Nava and Michael Craft, have expanded on gay themes in their novels, at the same time chronicling the evolution of gay America. Today there are several well-known, successful American private eye series, ranging from John Morgan Wilson’s seriously dark and gritty Benjamin Justice series, which sees the hero battle alcoholism, HIV, and his inner demons, to V V the more playful Tom and Scott mystery series by Mark Richard Zubro. QUEER EYE FOR THE PRIVATE EYE | PÉTER BALOGH 181 Despite the growing popularity of gay and lesbian mystery writing in the United States, Canadian crime fiction authors did not introduce lesbian and gay detectives to the Canadian reading public until...