PROFILES IN GAY COURAGE
Leatherfolk, Arts, and Ideas
by Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
Palm Drive Publishing
244 pages, $24.95
ANY NEW BOOK by Jack Fritscher is cause for celebration. In his stellar six-decade career, he has produced four novels, six shorter works of fiction, nine works of scholarly nonfiction, and innumerable pieces of erotic leathersex fiction. He was founding editor-in-chief of the legendary Drummer magazine. (Full disclosure: Fritscher published my first piece of fiction in Drummer in 1979, and we have corresponded since then.) To this reader, his Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 is without peer, the definitive novel of gay life in 1970s San Francisco. His Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera is an insightful, passionate examination of Robert Mapplethorpe’s œuvre. As a novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, pornographer, interviewer, filmmaker, and pop culture archeologist and archivist, Fritscher, along with his husband and artistic collaborator Mark Hemry, has not only reported on gay culture but has shaped it as well.
His latest work, Profiles in Gay Courage: Leatherfolk, Arts, and Ideas is a collection of essays celebrating “authentic leatherfolk founders, icons, and superstars too often under-reported by gatekeepers of gay-history timelines.”
Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most recently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.
