Jack Fritscher

Jack Fritscher, the founding editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine in San Francisco and curator of the Drummer Archives since 1977, is an award-winning author of 20 books. His work is popular with readers and researchers, including memoirs of his bicoastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe, his friend Larry Townsend, and his "gentleman caller" Tennessee Williams. His latest book, Profiles, is a holistic gay history written by a New Journalist who lived the life. In essays, interviews, and photos, Fritscher's masterful writing sheds new light on authentic leatherfolk founders, icons, and superstars who are often under-reported by gatekeepers of gay-history timelines. These include 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. Fritscher's first gay writing (on James Dean) was published in 1962. At 83, he 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 Drummer editors, seems to have been everywhere and done everyone during the 'good old days' of leather culture."