Customer Reviews

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer Vol. 1 (Issues 14-20)

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Jack Fritscher in "Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer" writes a muscular multi-faceted eyewitness history. This non-fiction work is not only fascinating for the general reader but is packed with primary sources for the researcher. Fritscher, the founding San Francisco Editor-in-Chief of "Drummer" magazine has creds. He earned his academic credentials with his PhD. He earned his authority to mine and interpret the leather past by editing "Drummer", and by his writing, including his historical novel-memoir, "Some Dance to Remember". He not only talks the talk he has also walked the walk. What was happening South of Market in the 1970s, before it was gentrified, before it became SoMa, was in the vanguard of what Fritscher calls "homomasculinity". Fritscher gathered a group of gay masculine-identified artists, photographers, cartoonists, writers around "Drummer". The group grew and flexed its muscle. They sometimes lived together, worked for and with each other, exchanged art work, picked up their tools and built their own spaces. They exchanged ideas and partied together. And yes, they sometimes had sex together. He captures it all. Fritscher writes large.

Amen to everything in the reviews of Tim Brough and Jim Stewart. I am half way through this epic work and it is a page turner if I ever held one. DON'T BUY THIS ON KINDLE. You'll miss all the pics and other reproductions which are priceless. I will revise this review when I finish, but I couldn't wait to get my 2 cents in. I have never seen anything like it. It is unlocking so many doors for me, illuminating my place in history. Fritscher's novel Some Dance to Remember is probably my all-time favorite. In this memoir he provides the story behind that story. Don't miss out.

Dripping with steamy details, mingling with love of sex and art and the art that made sex, and the sex that made art. Crawling with the men (and women) that rolled, biked, strutted and crashed into San Francisco in the stormy seventies. Layercaked with detail upon detail of how lives and events pummeled into each other and the often ecstatic aftermath left in the debris. Dripping with the sweat and blood of those who dove headfirst into the maelstrom only to be destroyed by the sex, drugs and rock and roll...and those that survived. Jack Fritscher kicked their a**es and logged their names, and that is what this book (supposed to be a first in a series) is all about.

"Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer Vol. 1" logs a history of leather San Francisco as seen through the offices of Drummer Magazine, starting from its escape from the LAPD to its offices in the South Of Market neighborhood that was evolving into a sexual and artistic revolution. Stitching threads through the people and events as they move from place to place to place spotlights the remarkable diversity as it happened, and often with Fritscher either in the middle of it all or standing just outside. If there was ever such a thing as an overt underground, Drummer Magazine was probably it.

This is history without the whitewash. Grudges are spelled out and rivalries revealed. Buildings literally burn, killers pull triggers for a nickle, drugs and alcohol flow free. Robert Mapplethorpe took pictures of it. Fritscher logged it in his journals. It's not always been a ray of gay sunshine, and this book shows it all. Fritscher kept obsessive notes through his many years, all of them contained in this thick and luxuriant compilation.

The first third of the book doubles as a biography of Jack Fritscher's formative years, detailing his love of the printed word and the romance of artistic discovery. From his youthful activism to the culmination of becoming one of America's top gonzo journalists, the first quarter of "Gay San Francisco" lays the timeline of just how Fritscher decided to set aside academia and start living history. "Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer Vol. 1 (Issues 14-20)" is a companion book to the movie Milk or Fritscher's own fictional masterpiece Some Dance To Remember: A Memoir-novel Of San Francisco, 1970-1982.