rom the moment Paul Monette moved with Roger Horwitz to Los Angeles and Monette published his first novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978), he "went Hollywood." He later wrote that he was a "child of Hollywood," raised on movies. His next two novels dissect the world that is a beacon to so many, including, of course, gay males.

Mrs. Carroll had an actress as one main character, and his second and third novels, The Gold Diggers (1979) and The Long Shot (1981), are set in Hollywood and Los Angeles. Up until the 1970s, with publishing and reviewing centered in the east, few novels were set on the west coast. Los Angeles critic, writer, and UCLA professor Carolyn See was among the first to study the Hollywood novel, the subject of her 1963 UCLA dissertation in English. She was among the first in her generation actually to set books in Los Angeles. In the late 1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald had written his unfinished Hollywood studio novel, The Last Tycoon, and Nathanael West published The Day of the Locust. Gay writers set novels or parts of novels in Los Angeles and Hollywood: Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948) and Myra Breckinridge (1968), Gavin Lambert's The Slide Area (1958), John Rechy's City of Night (1963), and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964). Isherwood was the most prominent gay resident writer of Los Angeles until his death in 1986. Monette's Hollywood books follow in this tradition.

Throughout the rest of his writing career, Monette used the varying moods of the city of Los Angeles as a subtext of his works, as a symbolic background, and even an actor in the works themselves. He has noted that summer—what most think is the one season of Los Angeles—is important in his work since he was raised in the cold on the east coast.

Monette's work as a free-lance screenwriter and in making novelizations of others' screenplays gave him insider locations and information for his own fiction. He made novels from the movies Nosferatu (1979), Scarface (1983), Predator (1987), Midnight Run (1990), and Havana (1991). A photograph shows an advertisement for Monette's adaptation of Scarface on a billboard on the north side of Sunset Boulevard, just one block east of King's Road, leading up to his house. UCLA has long collected movie tie-in literature, but Monette seems to have left no manuscripts for these works, and thus there is no way to study how he composed them.

Constructions of motion picture plots also supported Monette's larger writing purposes. Since he wanted to write about love and relationships, he mixed the Hollywood genres of romance and screwball comedy. Critic David Román has noted Monette's use of comedy in an almost Shakespearean way. The novels proceed with dizzying plot complications, genders are confused, but loose ends are resolved and characters come together as they do in the world of comedy. This suited Monette's ideas of presenting in a positive light gay men's relationships as they were being developed and defined through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Notes for The Gold Diggers show Monette's interests both in Los Angeles history and setting with notes for a "Spanish house" that is "in the cleft between two shadowed hills" and that "was bought from the estate of an old-time silent screen actor who built it in the teens or 20's and lived in it for 50 or 55 years." Notes about the protagonist show his continuing to work against the stereotypes of gay men: "From L.A., coolly muscular body, has always been on top of things, didn't have a stressful growing-up as a gay man-hunky."

Prior to gay liberation, no one would think of describing a gay male as "hunky," not even gay men themselves. With Monette's work and the work of illustrators and artists, this was changing in the 1970s. Among those influential illustrators was Stavrinos. A representative sample of his gay male imagery can be seen in the work on display, editors Dennis Sanders's and Michael Emory's Gay Source: A Catalog for Men (1977). This book is a Whole Earth-style catalog for the gay male with Stavrinos's illustrations of "hunky" men.

The Gold Diggers was issued in paper wrappers by a mainstream publisher, Avon Books. Letters from Monette's editor show the thought behind the design, noting the typeface and cover would share an Art Deco influence, popular in revival at that time, and that "Stavrinos is starting from scratch on the cover." He depicted portraits of attractive young men, suitable to Monette's characters. The book remains a landmark design in presenting gay male literature.

While Monette's screenplays were never produced, he earned enough money along with Horwitz to live modestly but stylishly well. They bought a house at 1500 North Kings Road, now West Hollywood, and Monette set part of his third novel, also involving Hollywood history and gay men, there. Stars had lived on Kings Road. Sketches and notes for his third novel, The Long Shot, show the outlines of the Kings Road house. Monette's third novel, Lightfall (1982), was an anomaly, written because his publishers thought he had been writing too many gay novels. Monette couldn't have known that calamity would keep him from writing fiction for eight years.

Notes for The Gold Diggers

Letter to Monette from Avon editor

Avon publication of The Gold Diggers

Monette's Scarface novelization