Blackmail, My Love

A Murder, a Mystery and a Secret History San Francisco, 1951. Josie O Conner s gay brother is nowhere to be found. His friends claim that just before he disappeared he became a rat, informing the cops on the bar community s nascent resistance to raids, graft and brutality. What s a loving sister to do? Josie sets off to clear his name, halt the blackmailers, and exact justice for the mounting number of corpses. Along the way she rubs shoulders with a sultry chanteuse running a dyke tavern called Pandora s Box, gets intimate with a red-headed madam, and conspires with the star of Finocchio s, a dive so disreputable it s off-limits to servicemen... An illustrated murder mystery deeply steeped in San Francisco s past, "Blackmail, My Love" distills history and fiction into a brilliant and visually stunning read. "

Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a miserable graduate student, buoyant union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She attended Oberlin College and Yale Graduate School, then for over a decade, taught cultural studies with an emphasis on the histories of gender and sexuality. For her PhD research, Gilmartin interviewed lesbians about their lives in the 1940s and 1950s. Gilmartin studied printmaking at San Francisco’s South of Market Cultural Center, and became utterly smitten with the medium as art and as craft. Gilmartin has called San Francisco home for over twenty years. She founded City Art Cooperative Gallery and the Queer Ancestors Project, which is devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young LGBTQ people and their ancestors.