Mark Hemry – författare

This Leather Origin Story of investigative journalism is an eyewitness oral history about a soon-to-be-lost generation of a once-important subculture of gay pioneers. In our leather archetribe, Drummer helped create the very culture it reported on. Drummer was a revolutionary idea evolving in monthly motion. Drummer portrayed our desires to organize our thoughts to inform our practices to create our leather identity. In 214 issues from 1975 to 1999, Drummer was a first draft of leather history and the "magazine of record" for our BDSM species within generic LGBT history. Gay Pioneers continues the leather-heritage GPS mapping Fritscher began in his NLA-I award-winning book, Gay San Francisco. Curious how high we leatherfolk once flew? Fritscher based this book on the "black-box flight recorder" he recovered from the "take-off, cruising altitude, and crash" of Drummer. Young readers will get up to speed fast on the backstage fun and games of who did what to whom, and how Drummer shaped 20th-century leather for 21st-century leatherfolk. Grounded on evidence inside Drummer, and in eyewitness diaries, letters, and interviews, this fact-checked masterwork recalls the thrill it was for millions of readers to pick up their first issue of Drummer. For that a price was paid. Against all odds, Drummer survived 24 years of stress from cruel censorship, plague, and politics that got the Drummer staff arrested, causing Drummer to move from disaster in Los Angeles to destiny in San Francisco. Gay Pioneers is a living history of leatherfolk written in human blood tattooed on human skin.

A lively memoir of West Hollywood author-activist-influencer Larry Townsend whose signature Leatherman''s Handbook was a founding text for gay men worldwide in the 20th century. Celebrating Townsend''s 90th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his Handbook, this homage to Townsend written by his close friend of 40 years is vivid as a screenplay. Like a biographical film comedy sauced with honest realism, it stars the best-selling author of nearly 80 books who, long before the glitter bomb of Stonewall, helped found the new world of gay publishing, politics, and popular culture.

The propulsive text, based on the testimony of intimate friends, especially his "Leather Wife" Jeanne Barney, reveals the rise and fall of the private man in all his unvarnished glory struggling behind his public persona even as he fights for the rights of other independent authors, and ends his life in a huge scandal of self-defense, suing floundering gay bookstores to protect his copyrights. 

The illustrated memoir offers readers unfamiliar with Townsend''s leather milieu a charming and intimate profile of the author as a psychologist, author, and healing mentor whose Handbook was such a years-long bestseller that he literally educated American and international gay popular culture about the nature of leather people, principles, and practice. In Europe in 1977, Der Spiegel reported that in the world scene of leathermen, "The Leatherman''s Handbook by a certain Larry Townsend is considered their Bible." He was an entertaining teacher who was not didactic, prescriptive, or old guard. His writing was a declaration of gay diversity. He challenged politically-correct mainstream censors condemning as pornography the consensual sadomasochism he championed as a kind of empowering analgesic ritual for men trying to cope counterphobically with PTSD caused by exposure to lifelong homophobia. 

This memoir unwrapping gay history spotlights the operatic Townsend, founding president of the Hollywood Hills Democratic Club, through revealing quotes from his own writing. It breaks down the barriers between so-called "low" and "high" culture and focuses on filling in the gaps that a neglect of gay popular culture by the politically-correct gay establishment has made in our understanding of the workings of broadband gay society.

What Townsend wrote in 1972 describing his own Handbook applies to Fritscher''s 2021 handbook about Townsend: "...a definitive exploration of the gay S&M leather scene...written by a qualified writer who has observed it all from the inside." Jack Fritscher, PhD, qualified as a founding member of the American Popular Culture Association in 1968, is the 1970s editor-in-chief of Drummer who invited Townsend to write for that magazine for twelve years. Fritscher, who stayed true to his friend to the scandalous end, is the perfect eyewitness in this candid documentary memoir of gay history. A fascinating, witty, and wise story of leather lives well lived from the 1950s to 2008. 

WINNER! Independent Press Award: LGBT Nonfiction

DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE! NYC Big Book Award: LGBT Nonfiction

Jack 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."

INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD 2024 DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE LGBT FICTION

Desperate Husbands

A Gay Hero''s Journey through Covid

This 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.