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INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD 2024 DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE LGBT FICTIONNYC BIG BOOK AWARD 2024 DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE LGBT FICTIONPINNACLE BOOK ACHIEVEMENT AWARD LGBT FICTIONDesperate 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."

At midnight on the historic night of July 29, 1971, High Priest Anton LaVey sat down with journalist Jack Fritscher in the dramatic sanctuary of his Church of Satan in San Francisco to speak frankly about the role of the Satanic Church and Satanism in the ongoing revolution around sex, race, and gender. This seminal interview, conducted in the fifth Satanic Year, is the first and earliest in-depth interview given by Anton LaVey whose Satanic Bible was published only two years before in 1969. Marcello Truzzi wrote in Fate magazine: "This is the most candid and informative interview that Anton LaVey has given anyone for publication to date."LaVey and Fritscher hit it off. LaVey responds graciously, humorously, and definitively about how and why he founded his Church while he addresses American religions, white wicca, the Manson Family, and the death of Jayne Mansfield. He sets the record straight declaring to Fritscher that he played the Devil in Roman Polanski''s Rosemary''s Baby.Growing more golden over the past fifty years, this interview has entered the classic "Canon of Satanic Literature" in the Church of Satan. Certainly, the candid conversation catches one of the most intriguing men of the 20th century around the moment when the Swinging 1960s became the Titanic 1970s that helped shaped the myth, magic, and mysticism of our new century. Here is the truth of what Anton LaVey said. He himself frequently endorsed the accuracy. This is the original question and answer format of the interview.

"Stan Grozniak, the once-rising star of 1990s gay cinema, almost self-sabotages a prestigious directing gig with writer-producer (and soon to be ex-boyfriend) Barry, after casting his rediscovered teenage summer stock crush. Still haunted by the death of Rick Dacker, the sexy star of his cult favorite action trilogy, Stan attempts a romance with actor Lance Holtzer, his 'Tulsa' from a small town Ohio production of the musical GYPSY. When Jason Daw a gay adult video star, invites him to direct an epic porn feature, he risks it all while finding the means to confront a long-lost and once overly affectionate uncle. Discovering more about himself than he wants to admit, he traces his recent success with past obsessions. Framed through a visit to Stan's boyhood home where he made short films with his brother, the tale of his rise to cinematic success, and the sacrifices he made, captures the passion and heartache of making love, making movies, and the occasional riot"--

"Tuning in to media literacy as a modern survival skill. Because all of human life ends up on television today, as it did fifty years ago, the principles of critical thinking need to be taught to each young generation because fake news never dies. This lively and historic pop-culture guide teaching how to decode television was written when a pre-Watergate Richard Nixon was president, and republished during the 2020 election disruption of media. It affirms that timeless principles of critical thinking do not change, nor does human behavior. This 1970 book is an artifact of its times which were then-and now. Nixon can be a synonym for Trump. The necessity of critical thinking for one's self-defense never goes away. This book suggests that the goal for a person's liberation from authoritarians and fundamentalists through education is the ability to interpret, understand, and survive the towering babble of people, media, politics, religion, art, and society. In the 1960s, high schools and universities were the crucible of revolution and change around war, race, and gender. That fact angered conservative politicians who have continued with purpose to systematically de-fund education from kindergarten to college, and have allowed student debt to rise to discouraging levels, because American citizens schooled in critical thinking are a voting population of logic, resistance, and change that questions their rhetoric, and threatens their regime, riches, religion, and reasoning. In his foreword, the author explains: "I wrote this book for teen-age students while teaching American literature on one of those progressive university campuses in the 1960s when film-crazy and politically active students enthusiastically diverted arts-and-ideas discussions of classic literary works into topical discussions of current film and media. They impelled me to reinvent my 'Literary Interpretation' classes within the department of English by adding film/television as a fourth genre to fiction, poetry, and drama as a relevant way to teach principles of critical thinking freshened via the popular culture of movie and television screens. In the half-century since, the names of people and titles of programs have changed, but the principles of critical thinking remain the same.""--

A Woman’s Voice. A Memoir. In 1919, Virginia Day was born into 9,000 years of continuous local civilization in Kampsville near the Koster archeological site. Her diary is itself a charming anthropological artifact from the 1920s and 1930s. She hunted arrowheads and ginseng; delivered mail with her postman father; and was best friends with the Kamp twins, Edna and Edwina, at the Kamp Store owned by their father, Joseph Kamp, son of Kampsville’s founder. In 1991, the Kamp store became the Visitor’s Museum of the Center for American Archeology.    At fourteen in 1933, she dared pay a pilot 75-cents to fly her over Kampsville and Jacksonville; and she began her eyewitness “Daily Diary” about high-spirited teen life in Jacksonville with jobs, movies, and dating at Routt High School where she met varsity scholarship letterman George Fritscher in 1935. Her brother John B. Day married them in July 1938.    She left her heart in Kampsville and Jacksonville. On her last visit to Kampsville in 1980, she was as delighted to meet the young archeologists as they were to trade stories with her who donated to them the arrowheads, pottery shards, and river pearls she’d collected seventy years before anyone heard of Koster.    This diary of a girl and her family is not a history of big world events. It’s a playful American story of Southern Illinois nostalgia told in the eager voice of the teenage author happily involved in family, courtship, and the popular culture of two small heartland towns. 

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."