WINNER! Independent Press Award: LGBT Nonfiction
DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE! NYC Big Book Award: LGBT Nonfiction
Jack Fritscher, the founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of
Drummer
magazine and curator of the
Archives since 1977, is the award-winning author of twenty books popular with readers and researchers including memoirs of his bicoastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe, his friend Larry (
Leatherman's Handbook
) Townsend, and his "gentleman caller" Tennessee Williams. His new Profiles is holistic gay history written by a New Journalist who lived the life.
In essays, interviews, and photos, Fritscher's masterful writing sheds new Gay Pride light on authentic leatherfolk founders, icons, and superstars too often under-reported by gatekeepers of gay-history timelines: AIDS poet,
Thom Gunn;
race-sex-and-gender photographer,
Robert Mapplethorpe
;
Society of Janus
founder,
Cynthia Slater
Mineshaft
manager,
Wally Wallace
; godfather of gay writing,
Samuel Steward
; young Provincetown playwright,
Tennessee Williams
; filmmaker Wakefield Poole's art-director,
Ed Parente
Old Reliable Video
hustler-art photographer,
David Hurles
; leather fashion designer,
Rob of Amsterdam
; and the filmmakers of the 1975 classic
Born to Raise Hell
,
Terry LeGrand
and
Roger Earl
.
With his first gay writing (on James Dean) published in 1962, Fritscher at 83 reaches across 60 years of gay life into his journals and heart to examine our lost midcentury world as he did in
Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982
which
The Advocate
called the "Gay
Gone With the Wind
."
GMSMA president-historian David Stein confirmed to the Leather Leadership Conference that "Fritscher, one of the great
editors, seems to have been everywhere and done everyone during the 'good old days' of leather culture."