"At Stonewall," Jack Fritscher wrote, "gay character changed." In June 1969, the legendary Stonewall Rebellion in New York's Greenwich Village began the national gay civil rights movement. Fritscher, one-time lover of Robert Mapplethorpe and early intimate of elegant Picasso biographer and "Vanity Fair" author John Richardson, is the highly acclaimed novelist, award-winning historian, and polished prose stylist. His best-selling "Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982" pairs perfectly with his nonfiction tour de force "Gay San Francisco" as "roots" landmarks in gay literature. "The Advocate" said that "Fritscher writes...wonderful books" and that he made "the Castro mythic." In his fiction collection celebrating Stonewall turning forty, Fritscher-turning seventy-unreels nine perfectly crafted stories introduced by literary critics Richard Labonté of A Different Light and by Mark Thompson of "The Advocate." Labonté: "A sterling collection...perfectly catches our bitchy bravura." Thompson: "Hilarious, exquisite, empowering stories about how fabulous we are." Editor Mark Hemry selected the tales in this edition to show, first, how Stonewall affected gay culture (on the Gay Axis connecting Stonewall to San Francisco), and, second, how Fritscher in the West Coast school of writing helped build the national aftermath of the East Coast Stonewall. Among fellow authors such as Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Felice Picano, and the pseudonymous Andrew Holleran, Fritscher is the eldest and the first published (1950s) and is the only lifelong magazine editor, journalist, and photographer. His truly distinctive contribution to GLBT literature has been his widening-precisely with his recurrent themes of humanism and eros-the liminal diversity of the gay literary canon in books such as his controversial memoir of his affair with the much-damned photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in "Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera." "Stonewall " surveys the fictive essence of his 50-year career capturing the character, dialogue, and nuance of the gay culture whose emotional curves he loves. Willie Walker, founder of the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco, has observed: "Fritscher is a prolific writer who since the late 1960s has helped document the gay world and the changes it has undergone." Guided by a rather good sense of gaydar in this new collection, Fritscher celebrates gay "drama" and diversity and "brilliant gay voices" in these nine tales scanning the curvature of the gay Earth--from the 1906 earthquake in "Meet Me in San Francisco" through the 1969 Stonewall rebellion up to gay marriage in "Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way." Recommended for public and academic libraries, and for special collections of gay literature and GLBT studies, as well as for coffee-house, commute, vacation, and bedside reading. "'Stonewall' is pitch-perfect." Thomas Long, editor, "Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly," University of Connecticut
Jack Fritscher emerging from the gay past exists, both now and in the future, as a pioneer participant in gay culture and as a critic chronicling analytical witness to that history. He is the double-jointed author of literary fiction as well as of erotic fiction, including 4 novels, 5 fiction anthologies, 3 nonfiction books, and 2 produced plays. He is also the director and videographer of 170 feature videos. A Gemini, born June 20, 1939, he has balanced twin careers in literature and erotica--often recombinantly.
MID-CENTURY GAY WRITERS
A gay pioneer from the 1960s, he wrote the 1968 novel, "I Am Curious (Leather)," began before Stonewall his research on "Popular Witchcraft," befriended the legendary and elderly gay author Sam Steward (Phil Andros) in 1969, and became the founding San Francisco editor shaping the legendary "Drummer" magazine (1975) which published his features, fiction, and photographs for 25 years in more than 62 issues. Those writings and photographs, annotated with historical commentary by the author, are available free online at this site.
In 1953 at age 14, he came out into the closeted gay world by writing a "gladiator novel" while attending the Vatican's ultra-exclusive Catholic seminary, the Pontifical College Josephinum, where the bullies were not the jocks but the opera-and-liturgy queens. His short fiction was first published in 1958 in the Catholic press.
Also adolescents at this time, his American gay peers were John Rechy; William Carney; Rita Mae Brown; and Dorothy Allison; as well as Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White who founded their Violet Quill in late 1980.
These mid-century careers made possible the next generation: the fin de siecle writers who appeared after HIV in 1982. They rose during the late-80s invention of history's first viable small lesbigay book publishers whose anthologies took the place of the once-flourishing gay magazines which by the millennium had collapsed because of internet competition.
DIVERSITY, PERVERSITY. THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
As a diverse wild card among his 20th-century contemporaries, Fritscher is the only Catholic writer, and the only actual holder of an earned PhD in literature. In addition, he is the only writer who also composes and creates as a photographer and videographer. In 1966, he wrote the world's first PhD dissertation on Tennessee Williams titled "Love and Death in Tennessee Williams: His Philosophy and Theology." Themes and rituals of Catholicism thread through his fiction and nonfiction from the incarnational "Some Dance to Remember" to the passion and death of "Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera." His formal training in philosophy, theology, literature, and criticism is the architecture of his sweeping historical work on witchcraft, the drama of Tennessee Williams, the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the popular culture of homosexuality. His photography is a succession of heroic and suffering images from the "Roman Martyrology of the Saints."
