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 MemoirNovel of San Francisco 1970-1982is 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.” He shares personal remembrances and astute observations on the lives and work of eleven iconic gay pioneers. These include: his beloved Robert Mapplethorpe; the British-American “Poet Laureate of Leather” Thom Gunn; Society of Janus founder Cynthia Slater; Wally Wallace, manager of the Mineshaft in New York City; Samuel Steward, the “godfather of gay writing”; Ed Parente, the art director on Wakefield Poole’s films; David Hurles, the “hustler-art” photographer and videographer of Old Reliable; leather clothier Rob of Amsterdam; the filmmakers behind the 1975 classic Born to Raise Hell; and Tennessee Williams. The book is Fritscher’s attempt to ensure these icons’ place in the pantheon of gay culture. “Robert Mapplethorpe: Fetishes, Faces, and Flowers of Evil,” the first essay in the book, begins with a paragraph that might serve as a raison d’être for much of Fritscher’s work: “The pre-AIDS past of the 1970s has become a strange country. We lived life differently those many years ago. The High Time was in full swing. Liberation was in the air, and so were we, performing nightly our high-wire sex acts in a circus without nets. If we fell, we fell with splendor in the grass. That carnival, ended now, has no more memory than the remembrance we give it, and we give remembrance here.” Mapplethorpe entered Fritscher’s life in 1977 when he showed up at the Drummer office with a portfolio of photos. For an idea of how transgressive some of his photography is, look at “a selfportrait of the photographer as a young man, his crotch shot in close-up, with his two hands holding a Polaroid camera just above his flaccid penis to make the radical equation that his cock was his camera and his camera was a cock.” Mapplethorpe had simultaneously mounted two landmark solo shows, his Flowers andPortraits at the Holly Solomon Gallery, and his Erotic Pictures (which Solomon refused to show) at the Kitchen Gallery. That dichotomy between his “fine art” photos and his “obscene” photos continued through Mapplethorpe’s career, spurred by philistines who refused to recognize that his erotic photographs arefine art, culminating in a trial for obscenity in Cincinnati for his showThe Perfect Moment at the Contemporary Arts Center. (The philistines lost.) On March 9, 1989, Robert Mapplethorpe—“innocent as any victim,” Fritscher writes—died from AIDS-related complications at the pinnacle of his career. Fritscher’s remembrances of his artist lover are intimate, passionate, and clear-eyed. Future writing about Mapplethorpe by anyone else will be useless unless it draws upon Fritscher’s unique remembrances. Writing about Samuel Steward, “the godfather of gay writing,” Fritscher tells us that Steward was born in 1909, into “the anti-gay century when owning one gay photograph meant jail.” Steward’s career included giving input to Dr. Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex; chumming with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their Paris salon; writing erotic S&M fiction under the pseudonym “Phil Andros” and nonfiction under his own name; becoming a popular university professor; tattooing some 150,000 men (primarily Hell’s Angels bikers and young sailors) as “Phil Sparrow”; and logging thousands of Nodes in the Leather Network HANKTROUT PROFILES IN GAY COURAGE Leatherfolk, Arts, and Ideas by Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. Palm Drive Publishing 244 pages, $24.95 Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most recently as senior editor forA&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. 40 Robert Mapplethorpe
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