ABSTRACT
You had to make a choice: you could be gay or a Los Angeles police officer. You could not be both. If you walked into a room full of police officers and they knew you were gay, they'd clear out. If you walked into a gay party and people knew you were a cop, they'd clear out. You were a part of both worlds and a member of neither. You were alone; you were isolated. (Mitch Grobeson, quoted in Buhrke, 1996: 32)
To be against (opposed to) is also to be against (close up, in proximity to) or, in other words, up against. (Dollimore, 1991: 229)
When it comes to lesbians ... many people have trouble seeing what's in front of them,' claims Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian (Castle, 1993: 2). Castle's book comprises an erudite and witty search for the traces of female homosexuality in modem culture, and her ghostly metaphor seems highly appropriate to describe the paradoxical position of Katherine V. Forrest's lesbian policewoman, Detective Kate Delafield. In her 'polemical introduction' to The Apparitional Lesbian, Castle claims that she wants to bring the lesbian out of the margins and admire her substantial centrality within twentieth-century culture, and it is with considerable pleasure that she records the uncovering not of scarcity, but plenitude - a veritable surfeit of lesbian signifiers waiting to be read. Much the
167 same could be said of Forrest's novels. Not only does the lesbian detect, but whenever and wherever she detects, she uncovers or encounters the lesbian, and yet these lesbian multitudes remain, in social terms, invisible. Tucked safely into the closet or coralled into the margins, the lesbian landscape remains unmapped: invisible not only to the law, but initially also to the detective herself.
