| Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. | |
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Jack Fritscher, Professor 1972 |
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| Born | John Joseph Fritscher June 20, 1939 Peoria Illinois, USA |
| Occupation | Writer, Photographer, Videographer |
| Education | Ph.D. |
| Alma mater | Pontifical College Josephinum Loyola University Chicago |
| Period | 1939- |
| Genres | Popular Culture GLBT History Literary fiction |
| Literary movement | New Journalism American Transcendentalism American drama American film |
| Spouse(s) | Mark Hemry |
| Partner(s) | Robert Mapplethorpe David Sparrow |
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www.jackfritscher.com |
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Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. is an American author, novelist, magazine journalist, gay historian, photographer, videographer, university professor, and social activist known internationally for his fiction and non-fiction analyses of gay popular culture. In 1968, he received his doctorate from Loyola University Chicago and, as a pre-Stonewall gay activist, was an out and founding member of the American Popular Culture Association. He was first published in 1958, and his first play was produced in 1959. He is the founding San Francisco editor in chief of Drummer magazine. Among literary peers Edmund White, Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, Ethan Mordden, and Rita Mae Brown, Fritscher is the first born, the earliest published, the only documentary filmmaker, and the most explicit literary writer.
Four of his most notable books are Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - A Memoir of the Art, Sex, Salon, Pop Culture War, and Gay History of Drummer Magazine from the Titanic 1970s to 1999, and the memoir of his lover Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, as well as the British photography book, selected and edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, Jack Fritscher's American Men. His writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Greek.
His academic writing has been published in the Bucknell Review, Modern Drama, Journal of Popular Culture, Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, and Playbill. His photographs have been published by Taschen, Rizzoli, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Saint Martin's Press, Gay Men's Press London, as well as by dozens of magazines, newspapers, and book publishers including his cover for James Purdy's Narrow Rooms (1996). His videos as well as photographs are in the permanent collections of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris; the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction; and the Leather Archives and Museum. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and on BBC Channel 4 with Camille Paglia.
As the founding San Francisco editor in chief of Drummer magazine, he was its most frequent contributor as editor, writer, and photographer through all three publishers, emerging as historian of the institutional memory of Drummer, San Francisco's longest-running magazine (1975–1999). At Drummer, he introduced into gay media such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hurles (Old Reliable), and showcased talents such as Robert Opel, Arthur Tress, Samuel Steward (Phil Andros), Larry Townsend, John Preston, Wakefield Poole, Rex, and A. Jay. He was also the founding editor of the first gay "zine" of the 1980s Man2Man Quarterly (1979–1982) and San Francisco's California Action Guide (1982). With producer Mark Hemry in 1984, he co-founded the pioneering Palm Drive Video featuring homomasculine entertainment, which in 1996 expanded to Palm Drive Publishing, San Francisco. For Palm Drive he wrote, cast, and directed more than 150 video features. As an eyewitness participant, he contributed an article on artist Chuck Arnett to editor Mark Thompson's Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice. He is a frequent historical journalist for the Bay Area Reporter and Leather Times. In 1972, he was the first gay writer to unearth and interview Samuel Steward (Phil Andros); his Steward audiotapes were referenced in Justin Spring's biography of Steward, Secret Historian (2010). As a gay popular culture critic, he began collecting his extensive gay history archive in 1965.
As an analyst and framer of gay linguistics in the first post-Stonewall decade when gay journalists were inventing new words for the emerging gay culture, he coined the gay-identity word homomasculinity, and redefined S&M as "Sensuality and Mutuality" (1974). Documenting on page and on screen the dawn of the "Daddies" and "Bear" movements, he was the first writer and editor to feature "older men" in the gay press (Drummer 24, September 1978) and "Mountain Men Bears" (Drummer 119, July 1988); he was also the first journalist to write specifically about hirsute men and first editor to publish the word "Bear" on a magazine cover (California Action Guide, November 1982); additionally, he was the first videographer to shoot documentary footage of the first "Bear" contest (Pilsner Inn, February 1987). Chris Nelson photographed him for Richard Bulger's original Bear magazine as well as for the photography book The Bear Cult selected and introduced by Edward Lucie-Smith. As writer and photographer, he contributed fiction and photographs for covers and interior layouts for Bear magazine and other Brush Creek Media magazines. He wrote the introduction to Les Wright's Bear Book II and contributed to Ron Suresha's Bears on Bears: Interviews & Discussions as well as to editor Mark Hemry's fiction anthology Tales of the Bear Cult. In addition to Chris Nelson, he has been photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, Daniel Nicoletta, Arthur Tress, David Hurles, David Sparrow, Robert Opel and his nephew Robert Oppel, and Jim Tushinski.
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Fritscher was raised in Peoria, Illinois. His father was the child of Socialist Austrian-Catholic immigrant stonemasons (arrived 1885) and his mother was the grandchild of Irish-Catholic immigrant steelworkers (arrived 1847). His uncle and namesake was the noted World War II Catholic army chaplain, Father John B. Day. Born during the Great Depression and growing up during World War II in rental housing, he was that generation of gay persons who in their teens, during the 1950s, rebelled against conformity through the birth of pop culture and the Beats; in their twenties, during the 1960s, they marched for peace and civil rights; and, in their thirties, during the 1970s, they dared secure the cultural and esthetic foundations of modern gay liberation in its first decade after the Stonewall riots.
In 1953 at age fourteen, he received a Vatican scholarship to the Pontifical College Josephinum where he attended both high school and college studying Latin and Greek, earning a degree in philosophy in 1961, followed by graduate work in theology and the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas (1961–1963). He was also schooled by Jesuits in the Humanism of Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus, and Jacques Maritain. In 1962, and 1963, inspired by French Worker-Priests and tutored by Saul Alinsky, he worked as a social activist on the South Side of Chicago in the same neighborhoods worked twenty-five years later by Barack Obama. He was ordained by the Apostolic Delegate with the orders of porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte. In 1964, he entered Loyola University Chicago and completed his master’s and doctoral programs, writing the first ever dissertation on Tennessee Williams titled Love and Death in Tennessee Williams(1967).
In 1961, he first arrived in San Francisco establishing the city as the home base of his peregrine life. From there, as a university professor, beginning in 1965, he taught at Loyola University Chicago, received tenure at Western Michigan University, and was repeated visiting lecturer at Kalamazoo College. From 1968 to 1975, he served on the board of directors of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts where he founded and directed the museum film program. In 1969 he founded and taught the first film-as-literature courses at the Western Michigan University Department of English. In San Francisco, he transformed his academic credentials and his publishing career in the Catholic press into the straight corporate world as editorial writer for KGO-ABC TV, as technical writer for the San Francisco Muni Metro, and as manager of marketing at Kaiser Engineers, Inc. (1976–1982).
With twenty years' editorial experience, he entered post-Stonewall gay publishing as founding San Francisco editor in chief of Drummer magazine (March 1977-December 31, 1979); he was one of only two editors in chief in Drummer history. He also contributed to the start-up of dozens of other emerging gay magazines as well as to book anthologies for new publishers such as Gay Sunshine Press and Bowling Green University Press. His first novel was What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy (1965), and his first gay novel was I Am Curious (Leather) aka Leather Blues (1969). He authored the first nonfiction book on gays and magic in Popular Witchcraft Straight from the Witch's Mouth (1972). His solo anthology Corporal in Charge and Other Stories was the first book collection of leather fiction and the first collection of fiction from Drummer. The title entry "Corporal in Charge" was the only play published by editor Winston Leyland in the Lambda Literary Award Winner Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine - An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics & Culture (1991).
On May 22, 1979, the night after the White Night riots, he first met his spouse Mark Hemry under the marquee of the Castro Theatre during the post-riot Castro Street peace demonstration which also celebrated the birthday of Harvey Milk. With a Civil Union in Vermont (July 12, 2000) and a Canadian marriage (August 19, 2003), they were constitutionally married in California (June 20, 2008). His previous significant partners were David Sparrow and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Novels
Non-Fiction
Academic & Professional Publications
Short Fiction Anthologies
Plays and Screenplays
Short Fiction Magazine Erotica
Jack Fritscher Appearing in Others Works
2010
2009
2008
2007
2005
2002
2001
1999
1998
1990
1978
1975 Faculty Research Fellowship Grant, Western Michigan University, Department of English: Completion of Interviews Conducted in 1972 of Samuel M. Steward (aka Phil Andros)
1974 National Endowment for the Humanities, Literature and Culture in America, University of California, Berkeley
1969 Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne Research Grant, American Popular Culture Association: Interviews of Anton LaVey, Frederic de Arechaga, and Others for Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth
1969 Filmmaker Grant, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: 16mm Film for Television: Kalamazoo Art Center