Hap and Leonard: Gay, Black, and Angry in East Texas

I would never in a million years have believed  that Joe R. Lansdale, a writer and martial arts expert who grew up in Gladewater, East Texas and now lives in Nacogdoches, East Texas, would have written a series of novels about two buddies who solve mysteries.

In East Texas. While driving a pickup truck, drinking beer, voting Republican, and listening to Dwight Yoakum and Patsy Cline.

 And one of them is gay.  And not even a swish.

The duo consistso of:

Hap Collins, a working class  guff who served time in prison in the 1960s due to refusing to go to Vietnam.  He's been working at odd jobs, drinking heavily, and pursuing an off-and-on relationship with girlfriend Brett Sawyer ever since.

Leonard Pine, a Vietnam vet, lives with Hap or sometimes Hap-and-Brett, or when he comes into money, Hap lives with him. He's gay and black and very angry. His anger issues cause trouble with his relationships and jobs.

Recently Lansdale discussed why he decided to make Leonard gay: while he was fiddling with the characters, there was a series of murders of gay men across East Texas (wait -- there are gay men in East Texas?), and people generally dismissed them: "it's what they deserved for being gay."  Lansdale had a lot of gay friends, and he was furious.

He had already created the character of Leonard as a tough, angry black man, so why not add being gay to the mix?:  He met a lot of tough, aggressive gay men through his martial arts work, yet all you saw on movies and tv were swishy queens.  Leonard would be unique.

The two first appeared in Savage Season (1990), the cover of which shows a big-breasted woman pointing a gun at you, suggesting that the intended audience is definitely not gay men.   Hap is now 40 years old.  His ex-wife Trudy shows up and enlists the duo to retrive some bank-robbery money from a riverbed.  Her radical leftist group wants to use it to save the whales or something. 

Hap and Leonard are both Republicans, by the way, so they find liberal causes ridiculous.

A gay black Republican!  Leonard must cause quite a stir at GOP meetings.

In Mucho Mojo (1994), Leonard's homophobic uncle dies, and while cleaning out his house, the duo finds a dead child wrapped in child porn buried under the floorboards. They discover that at the time of a local fun festival every year, a child always vanishes.  The book won the British Fantasy Award.

In Two Bear Mambo (1995), Leonard sets fire to a crack house, again, and the duo ends up sparring with the Ku Klux Klan in Florida.  And, finally, Leonard gets a boyfriend, Raul.

In Bad Chili (1997), Raul dumps Leonard for a biker named Horse Dick, who is murdered.  Leonard, of course, is the prime suspect.  Then Raul is murdered, too, and the Duo run afoul of a gangster who sells videotapes of gay-bashing to interested homophobes.

 There are eight more novels, three novellas, and three short story collections. The most recent, The Elephant of Surprise (2019), Leonard has a boyfriend, a cop named Pookie, but he's out of town during the adventure involving rescuing a girl.

Three seasons of a Hap and Leonard tv series, covering the first three novels, are now streaming on Netflix.  James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams star.

In the first episode, Leonard's gayness is referenced frequently.  Hap is asked if they are married, the homophobic uncle makes homophobic jibes, the duo locker-room flirts, and so on.  Leonard's boyfriend Raul (Enrique Murciano) is in the cast list for later.

It's still set in East Texas.