Over the next fifteen years, Nava published six more books in the series. In a genre that had used queer people primarily as figures of ridicule and contempt, the Rios books offer a vista on gay lives extending from the closet-lined corridors of power to cruising parks and leather bars. Gay and Latino, from an immigrant family in California’s Central Valley, Henry Rios is a defense attorney whose hardboiled bona fides-world-weariness, wit, a penchant for erotic entanglement-are accompanied by a hyper-attentiveness to class and a commitment to the poor. In 1986, Michael Nava published “The Little Death,” a mystery novel featuring a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir. Michael Nava’s novels evoke a period in which Los Angeles-“a brutal place,” “a flimflam town,” “a collection of hostile villages”-was transformed by the emergence of both the Latino and the L.G.B.T.
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