Bücher von Jack Fritscher

Desperate HusbandsA Gay Hero's Journey through CovidThis amuse-bouche gay pop-culture novel of arts, ideas, and history, packed with comic dish, is a meta-fiction memoir told by a marvelously unreliable third-person narrator. The "coming-out novel" meets the "elder-exit novel" in the circle of life when the closet of quarantine disrupts a happily married couple aging in place.The longtime husbands are representative men, survivors of gay history, from their coming out into the homophobia of the 1950s to their rowdy post-Stonewall life of fifty years in San Francisco before retiring to the Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate Bridge. Quarantined there, they watch online news of thousands of Covid refugees and renters fleeing the City, creating the most empty downtown in America, turning their once fabulous Castro gayborhood into a ghost town.Covid depression is the worst room in the best hotel of gay life. With the sinking feeling of drowning men, they see their pre-Covid queer life flashing before their eyes in slow-motion homosurreal memory scenes of magical realism, late-night noir films, and their own video diaries of friends lost to AIDS. Having survived isolation in the closet and the viral AIDS years, the veterans of the midcentury gay liberation wars, surveying their personal history, struggle forward on their gay heroic journey through the dark cave of Covid vowing never to surrender to the PTSD many gay men carry from years of homophobia.The author keeps this tale of Covid lockdown, the New Normal, and desperate husbands real and authentic with time-capsule headlines ripped from the news of the pandemic, the rise of MAGA fascism, the great gay migration to Palm Springs, rainbow pronouns, and a transgender person leading the revived Pride Parade.Director Oliver Stone said of his film Platoon, "This movie is not about me, but I had to be in Vietnam to write it." If this literary fiction, gayly packed with queer pop culture, seems as real as an autobiography, the author has done his job as an artist taking the reader on a fanciful ride as entertaining as his award-winning Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982.

WINNER! Independent Press Award: LGBT NonfictionDISTINGUISHED FAVORITE! NYC Big Book Award: LGBT NonfictionPINNACLE BOOK ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: LGBT NonfictionJack Fritscher, the founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine and curator of the Drummer 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 Drummer editors, seems to have been everywhere and done everyone during the 'good old days' of leather culture."

"What They Did to the Kid" is a memoir spinning as a comic novel for general-fiction readers intrigued by boys'' school tales, and baby boomers who "survived Catholic school." Ryan O''Hara, coming of age from 14 to 24, is the wise adolescent narrating readers'' entry into the secret culture of 1950''s altar boys who go to the seminary, meet priests, and must decide their own identities. The novel''s interior ticking covers the clock and calendar of boys'' emerging consciences and edgy consciousness. "The San Francisco Chronicle" says, "Jack Fritscher reads gloriously."Strong characters and snappy dialog propel the character-driven plot of male-dominant pecking order. At Misericordia Seminary (aptly nicknamed "Misery"), Ryan O''Hara exposes his own story. He''s trapped for oxygen-with 500 other boys-by the imperial Rector Karg, the disciplinarian Father Gunn "of the USMC," the tart Father Polistina, and the rebel-priest Chris Dryden "who knows Fellini and JFK." The storytelling Irish-American author gives each ensemble character-hero or villain, student or priest, man or woman-a rich back story. Black civil rights of the 60''s as well as three interesting women characters open this tale out of the suffocating seminary and on to the hot streets of Chicago''s South Side and Old Town.The compelling psychological drama hinges on the very source and aspirations of priestly vocation versus self-esteem. "Is God calling me-and what about chastity? Or is it just the ''Bali Hai'' of blind ambition and social climbing-and what about sex?" Fritscher makes deeper than usual sense of soulful coming-of-age material. The hearty supply of boarding school episodes cumulatively reveals the dueling dynamic between the boyish protagonist, Ryan O''Hara, and the callous ambition of the handsome bully, Tank Rimsky, as they fight toward the finish line of "manly men''s" ordination to the priesthood. "The hardest thing to be in America today is a man."The novel is based on an under-reported story: the Catholic Church recruited 200,000 boys into seminaries in the 1950''s. Only 20,000 were ordained. "Kid" details, in a nostalgic and not unkind take what happened to the missing 180,000 boys and the women and men in their families. Daring to step inside Catholic culture, without being parochial, this American story reveals the 1950''s roots of 21st-century "recovering Catholic" panic and angst. The millions of post-Catholic baby boomers who have exited the Church will compare notes and laugh knowingly at the dead-on characterizations. Fashionably anti-Catholic campers will say, "but, of course!"Readers might catalog "Kid" in the genre of "Young Torless, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and "Lord of the Flies." Before now, no one of the surviving 180,000 ex-seminarians has dared reveal this insider confession on the secret milieu of the Catholic education of priests. From interviews with more than a hundred former seminarians, Jack Fritscher uniquely stages their true story arcs with wit, verve, and comedy."What They Did to the Kid" is the fourth novel from Jack Fritscher whose twelve books have sold more than 100,000 copies. Jack Fritscher is a graduate of the prestigious Pontifical College Josephinum, a Roman Catholic seminary, located in Columbus, Ohio, and directly subject to the Vatican in Rome. He received his doctorate in American Literature from Loyola University, Chicago.

In his 16th book, eyewitness gay activist Jack Fritscher, the lover and biographer of Robert Mapplethorpe, breaks the trance of received gay history in this fact-rich memoir of how "The Boys in the Band Played On" from the Titanic 1970s to 1999. Built on all new information recently unearthed, this stylishly written and illustrated "timeline archive" of art, sex, obscenity, gender, culture wars, homophobia, pop culture, and the gay mafia, will get 21st-century readers and researchers up to speed fast on the serious fun of who did what to whom when and why. Fritscher was a founding member of the American Pop Culture Association in 1968, and in 1969, as academia met popular culture, he immediately knew what to do to preserve and chronicle Stonewall and the gay culture that ensued. Back in the heyday of the First Decade of Gay Liberation, university professor and longtime "Drummer" editor Fritscher added erotic realism to the magical thinking of "Drummer" readers wanting a magazine that made newly self-inventing sex seem possible and accessible. Attention must be paid: With an average press run of 42,000 copies for each of the 208 issues over twenty-four years, millions more people read international 'Drummer' than have read, perhaps, any GLBT book. Fact-based on internal evidence in "Drummer," and in journals, diaries, letters, photos, interviews of dozens of eyewitnesses, recordings, and newspapers, Fritscher's ultimate insider's guide to the "Rise and Fall of Castro and Folsom Streets" is a brisk ride that brings back what an physical and intellectual thrill it was to pick up one's first issue of "Drummer." Professor Fritscher's "frisson" anchors San Francisco's otherwise wild Gay Lib history on the clear chronology of the issues of the legendary monthly "Drummer." This is the most complete document of the "GLBT Magazine Publishing Movement." Fritscher is the Ken Burns of "Drummer" magazine. Justin Spring, author, "Sam Steward: A Biography": "Fritscher has done all the research work most academics won't do-thus ensuring that historians, critics, and anthropologists will cut and paste with delight in years to come."Author & Book Credentials "San Francisco Chronicle": "Fritscher reads gloriously!" Marilyn Jaye Lewis, EAA Authors Association, "...an essential document of the 20th-century 'Gay Enlightenment' culled from the pages of 'Drummer.' Fritscher empowers the Truth of those revolutionary times by enabling history to tell itself." Mark Thompson, "The Advocate," editor emeritus: "Utterly unique, an invaluable testament...historically useful for decades to come." The Kinsey Institute, Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator: "Fritscher has a remarkable memory for the people, places, and pivotal events that he has witnessed over his lifetime. His long association with 'Drummer' in San Francisco placed him at the center of the revolution, and 'Gay San Francisco' is filled with significant details from those years." Brown University, Samuel Streit, Director Special Collections: "'Gay San Francisco' is remarkable history of a remarkable time in a remarkable place, proving its points by combining contemporary documents, photographs, drawings, and reportage with a first-hand and first-rate memoir that brings an unforgettable era back to life." Chicago Public Library, Jim Stewart, Department Head emeritus, Social Sciences & History Department: "Jack Fritscher as 'eyewitness' in 'Gay San Francisco' is kin to Christopher Isherwood as 'camera' in his 'Berlin Stories.' This written 'oral history' should be in every library's GLBT collection." University of Sussex, Niall Richardson, Film-Media Studies: "...chronicles an exciting and formative era from a new and original perspective no one has ever done before." University of California, David Van Leer, professor, GLBT Studies: "Fritscher is a key player in the gender of masculinity in homosexuality."