RAINBOW COUNTY AND 20 OTHER STORIES. Readers will thrill to Fritscher's well-reviewed style and imagination. He is, writes the BAY AREA REPORTER, the author who invented the South-of-Market "leather" prose style and the butchest, funniest, best male-male magazines with special cult appeal to men who like men masculine. Critic MICHAEL BRONSKI has termed Fritscher's leather fiction as wonderfully "romantic." RAINBOW COUNTY crosses over from pure gay literature to the terrain of actual American literature. These highly diverse stories are blessed with wit, erotic ingenuity, poetic intelligence, and rough-and-tumble sex scenes. Fritscher does for writing what his lover Mapplethorpe did for photography: happily confuse the issues by making sex intelligent and therefore all the sexier. Geoff Mains, the author of URBAN ABORIGINALS, wrote in THE ADVOCATE, "Jack Fritscher writes wonderful books!" He's right. Fritscher is absolutely epicentric to gay literature. His stories and his style are what you've been wishing someone would write to turn on both your dick and your brain. You'll love the stories about soldiers, young men at summer camp, fathers and sons, rough trade, cowboys, swimmers, wrestlers, muscleguys who prefer men with ordinary bodies for sex, even some very sexy X-Files type science fiction! Read two pages a night and call us in the morning. These stories are even aptly illustrated in the coffee-table book by the same author, titled, "JACK FRITSCHER'S AMERICAN MEN."

Rainbow County and Other Stories (Volume 3)

LGBTQ+ Books

FRITSCHER, JACK

Literature & Fiction

Palm Drive Publishing

Palm Drive Publishing is proud to bring this classic of gay literature to a new generation of readers! Some Dance To Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, has been referred to as "the gay Gone with the Wind." But such words do not do justice to this story. Some Dance To Remember uses the quintessential gay love story between a writer and a bodybuilder to capture the tone, setting, style, events, and essence of the Gay Liberation Generation of the 1970s. It is a lyrical romance, a comedy, a tragedy—all this and more—wrapped up in the historical context of the life and times of San Franciscans during the decade that changed the world. You'll never forget this story of life, love, and loss, and the extraordinary San Francisco storyteller who lived it.This historical epic seethes with sex, love, and passionate characters with unique motivations. Lives are built, lives are destroyed. This sweeping memoir-novel tells the story of the golden mythic time after Stonewall. It was the time of the rise of the Castro and of Folsom Street. It was the time of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Robert Opel and his Fey-Way Gallery. It was the time of the White Night riot. It was the time of the burning of the Barracks South of Market. It was the time when the mysterious "gay cancer" first sent the city of San Francisco into hysteria.This moving story brims with ideas and meticulous details. Entertaining, sharp-witted, and totally enthralling, this story chronicles an extraordinary time in an extraordinary place that shall never be forgotten."San Francisco's where you go to lose a lover."Ryan O'Hara takes the lead in this wild story of love, sex, fear, and abandon. He is a writer, coming to San Francisco during this golden age to seek a voice not only for himself but also for the burgeoning gay liberation movement galvanizing the country. Enter Kick Sorensen, Ryan's "perfect man," the drop-dead blond bodybuilder who may or may not be all he seems. From bodybuilding to muscle sex to the bathhouses to gay porn to the hustlers, the story unfolds. Their romance leads them to careen movie-like in and out of the lives of very unique and very human people—gay and straight—and thus show this golden decade for the important time it was—and has remained. WINNER! FOREWORD MAGAZINE GAY/LESBIAN FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD“As a document of our times and our lives, Some Dance to Remember has no peer.” – LAMBDA Book Report, Jack Garman“Jack Fritscher didn’t invent the Castro. He just made it mythical. HEADY EROTIC, COMIC.... A comprehensive fictional chronicle of the best of times....If one can learn American history via the novels of Gore Vidal, one can learn gay American history through Some Dance.” – The Advocate, David Perry“Cinematic intensity....A brilliant record of gay life before AIDS....An astonishing, astounding spectrum of queen lives....This sprawling saga...has not lost a whit of its muscular passion, its punch immediacy, or its transformative literary impact.” – Books to Watch Out For (www.btwof.com), Richard Labonté“Staggeringly original and completely absorbing....Here is San Francisco’s gay male scene in the 1970s and ’80s as never told, or documents before.” Michael Bronski, Author of Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom

Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982

LEATHER BLUES: A NOVEL OF LEATHERFOLK By the author of the award-winning leather history GAY SAN FRANCISCO, SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER: A MEMOIR-NOVEL OF SAN FRANCISCO 1970-1982, and MAPPLETHORPE: ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY CAMERA. LEATHER BLUES is a coming-out story of a rogue boy eager to lean the ropes and rituals of leathermen. This exquisitely crafted novel of initiation into bikes, bears, and man-to-man BDSM, pulls no punches when Denny Sargent begins the Inferno rites of passage leathermen must courageously endure to seal their special male bonding. LEATHER BLUES is an intimately sophisticated odyssey of hard-balling sex, of untender mercies, and of the night-hawks men call “Riders of the Storm.” “Jack Fritscher is an anarchist of gay sexual prose, the man who invented the South of Market leather prose style.” —John F. Karr, Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco

Leather Blues: A Novel of Leatherfolk: The Adventures of Denny Sargent

Literary

Folsom Street Blues -- "Like Christopher Isherwood, Stewart is a camera." AWARDS: <ul>
<li>e-Lit Book Award: Erotic Non-Fiction − GOLD</li>
<li>e-Lit Book Award: Gay/Lesbian − SILVER</li>
<li>e-Lit Book Award: Autobiography/Memoir − BRONZE</li>
<li>e-Lit Book Award: Sexuality/Relationships − BRONZE</li>
<li>IPPY Award: Gay/Lesbian Non-Fiction − BRONZE</li>
<li>Next Generation Indie Book Award: Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender − FINALIST </li>
<li>San Francisco Book Festival Award: Gay − RUNNER-UP </li>
<li>London Book Festival Award: Wild Card - RUNNER UP</li>
<li>New York Book Festival Award: Bigography/Autobiography - HONORABLE MENTION</li>
<li>Hollywood Book Festival Award: Wild Card - HONORABLE MENTION</li>
<li>New England Book Festival : Gay - HONORABLE MENTION</li>
<li>NLA-I Writing Award: Geoff Mains Non-Fiction Book − HONORABLE MENTION </li>
<li>Los Angeles Book Festival : Wild Card - HONORABLE MENTION</li>
</ul>Jim Stewart, a survivor of the Titanic 1970s, has written a wonderful memoir revealing how South of Market became hip SoMa in San Francisco. Leading a lusty life surfing the first wave of gay liberation up to HIV, he is an uninhibited writer spilling personal tales of sex, art, and friendship during that first decade of Gay Liberation after Stonewall. As carpenter, he designed and constructed the sexy interiors of Folsom Street leather bars as well as of Fey-Way Studio, the first gay art gallery in San Francisco, where as photographer he exhibited his work on the walls he built. A pioneer settler in SoMa, he was fast friends with poet-singer Camille O'Grady, the leading lady of Folsom Street leather; with Oscar-Streaker Robert Opel who was murdered in his own Fey-Way gallery; with author Jack Fritscher and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; with painter Chuck Arnett and porn mogul David Hurles; and with many other talents creating gay culture in San Francisco's influential Drummer Salon. As early as 1977, Drummer magazine published Stewart's leather photography. Folsom Street Blues continues his gift for words and images with manic, funny, and heartfelt profiles of real people who lived as if 1970s San Francisco were 1930s Berlin. Like Christopher Isherwood, Stewart is a camera. Folsom Street Blues is a picture-perfect portrait of the author as a young man among men experimenting with new identities in the sexual underground during the Titanic 1970s before the speeding first-class party, cruising on, crashed into the iceberg of HIV. Veterans of the 1970s party will applaud Stewart's humorous nostalgia. Younger readers may enjoy a safe peek into how 20th-century leatherfolk, dancing on tables and swinging from the chandeliers, helped found and form 21st-century diversity. Keep this book bedside with Edmund White's My Lives, Felice Picano's Like People in History, Jack Fritscher's Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, Justin Spring's Secret Historian, Patti Smith's Just Kids, and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.

Folsom Street Blues: A Memoir of 1970s SoMa and Leatherfolk in Gay San Francisco

Biographies & Memoirs

Stewart, Jim

Historical

Breaking the straight trance of received TITANIC history, San Francisco author Jack Fritscher reclaims gay history by writing a pitch-perfect sex epic of gay survival. TITANIC “outs” the forbidden gay love story of the world’s most famous cruise, featuring the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the posh lovers Michael Whitney and Edward Wedding, and the working crew including the rugged Balkan Stoker, the redheaded Royal Purser Felix Jones, and the ship’s second carpenter Michael Brice and Third Officer Sam Maxwell. TITANIC sank April 15, 1912, creating a media frenzy. Fritscher said, “In movie-newsreel footage shot three days later on the deck of the rescue ship CARPATHIA immediately after it docked at Chelsea Piers in New York, a dozen of the surviving TITANIC crew, mostly sailor lads in tight white pants hiding little, showing lots, can be seen in very intimate horseplay, camping around, and posing in life jackets, pretending to faint. Of the 885 male crew on TITANIC, 693, or 78 percent, died. Altogether, 1,352 men perished. If, according to Kinsey, one out of six ordinary men is gay, 225 gay men died. If two out of six in the travel industry are gay, 450 gay men died, making TITANIC an overlooked but essential chapter in gay history.” In the TITANIC canon, and in the gay literary canon, the novel has won praise for its writing style, its precise accuracy in mixing fictional and historical characters, and its heritage as the first novel dealing with gay men on TITANIC. Into this historic realism, Fritscher, writing in top erotic form, inserts the magical thinking of gay eros. You will never forget this story ripped from the secret pages of a TITANIC diary! Fritscher’s fast-paced plot speeds along like a film. It has comic dialogue, high-drama queens, extremely able seamen, class-conscious sex, and the suspense of who will survive this story that begins like a musical comedy and ends with a sinking feeling. Fritscher looks through the prism of the TITANIC microcosm to dramatize hidden gay history. It’s an historical peek into how early twentieth-century gay folk, learning to save their own lives, helped invent modern homosexual identity, diversity, and politics.

Titanic: The Untold Tale of Gay Passengers and Crew

Genre Fiction

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.

Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999 (Eyewitness Drummer)

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Janice Shapiro lived her life with curiosity, joy, abandon, and openheartedness. These 36 vignettes speak of her deep, personal relationships spanning her early years in Philadelphia through her full and multi-faceted adulthood in San Francisco.
With warmth and humor, her stories reveal the woman so many people loved, and the life she embraced passionately until her premature death at 68 from cancer.

Philly Girl

Shapiro, Janice E

Community & Culture

Telling her comic story at the end of the 20th century, Laydia Spain O'Hara, untangles the past of fourteen characters' lives tied together in a small southern Illinois town from the mid-1950s of Elvis through the mid-1960s after Kennedy's Camelot. Her madcap tale of faces unmasking--and conflicts resolving--is a human journey about women's coming of age and inventing one's self despite all gossip while keeping the torch of true love burning. In a love triangle with her two best friends, Jessarose and Mizz Lulabelle, Laydia Spain outwits convention, opens her own boarding house, and discovers a solidarity in new ideas of family, home, and the human heart that mirror the vast social changes sweeping American culture during the mid-century. 
In the tradition of spunky small-town girls whose vernacular voice descends from Huck Finn, Laydia Spain dares to take on her own father, Big Jim O'Hara, the postman and accordion champ who named her Laydia Spain; Mister Henry Apple, the prescription-eating pharmacist who marries the bleach-blond Mizz Lulabelle; and Mister Wilmer Fox, the red-headed traveling salesman whose revolving returns to the little town of Canterberry always upset everyone's plans to live happily ever after. 
Ultimately, the dark-skinned cinnamon girl, Jessarose, who takes off on the road to fame and fortune as a roadhouse blues singer, defines the direction of love, because, while "the human face is a limitless terrain that just pulls you right in....the geography of women is where nature itself takes course homeward bound, the long route or the short, the high road or the low." 
Comic, good-humored, nostalgic, and as vivid as a fast-talking film script with music, Jack Fritscher's sixth book of fiction is lean writing laced with witty observations and a couple of tear drops of genuine human compassion. This is a real storyteller's tale--a very polished tale--of lively characters living in a specific place at a time that has reached the level of myth in American popular culture.

The Geography of Women: A Romantic Comedy, A Novel

Romance

Leather Blues : A Novel

Contemporary

RAINBOW COUNTY: STORIES FOR BEARS, DADDIES, AND LEATHERMEN. Readers will thrill to Fritscher's well-reviewed style and imagination. He is, writes the BAY AREA REPORTER, the author who invented the South-of-Market "leather" prose style and the butchest, funniest, best male-male magazines with special cult appeal to men who like men masculine. Critic MICHAEL BRONSKI has termed Fritscher's leather fiction as wonderfully "romantic." RAINBOW COUNTY crosses over from pure gay literature to the terrain of actual American literature. These highly diverse stories are blessed with wit, erotic ingenuity, poetic intelligence, and rough-and-tumble sex scenes. Fritscher does for writing what his lover Mapplethorpe did for photography: happily confuse the issues by making sex intelligent and therefore all the sexier. Geoff Mains, the author of URBAN ABORIGINALS, wrote in THE ADVOCATE, "Jack Fritscher writes wonderful books!" He's right. Fritscher is absolutely epicentric to gay literature. His stories and his style are what you've been wishing someone would write to turn on both your dick and your brain. You'll love the stories about soldiers, young men at summer camp, fathers and sons, rough trade, cowboys, swimmers, wrestlers, muscleguys who prefer men with ordinary bodies for sex, even some very sexy X-Files type science fiction!

Rainbow County: Stories for Bears, Daddies, and Leathermen

Short Stories & Anthologies

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