Al Shapiro (A. Jay): Drummer’s Founding Art Editor and Harry Chess

Allen J. Shapiro, known as Al Shapiro and under the pen name A. Jay, was a gay Jewish American artist working from the 1960s through the 1980s. He is credited with the first gay comic strip, The Adventures of Harry Chess: The Man from A.U.N.T.I.E. He sits on the same short leather and gay SM art list as Tom of Finland — work that drew bodies and the tension between concealment and display in that era’s gay scene. He died at home of AIDS-related complications on 30 May 1987, with his partner Dick Kriegmont there.

Upstate New York, pecs, and Pratt

Shapiro grew up in upstate New York. In high school he wrestled and, in his own words, became totally fixated on men with big pecs and fine nipples — a fixation that never left the drawings. After graduation he served in the U.S. Army in South Korea after the Korean War. In the 1960s he moved to Manhattan and enrolled at the Pratt Institute, hoping to design Broadway sets. He later illustrated children’s books as a day job beside the other line of work.

Harry Chess: serial hero under a spy parody

Harry Chess started because of a 1964 New York Times ad. Clark Polak wanted a cartoonist for a new gay magazine called Drum; Shapiro answered. After Drum folded he kept the strip going in Queen’s Quarterly (QQ). He designed Harry as an alter ego: “I am Harry and Harry is me and we are all together.”

The look borrowed from Stan Lee and James Bond — spy parody with a gay cruising engine underneath. That is why people call it the first gay comic strip: not a single gag panel, but a serial hero who was openly after other men.

San Francisco, Drummer, Caldron

He met lifelong partner Dick Kriegmont through Kriegmont’s personal ad in The Advocate. In 1974 Shapiro moved to San Francisco to live with him; they used Pacific Heights and South of Market. In 1977 Drummer co-founder John Embry hired Shapiro as art director and Jack Fritscher as editor-in-chief and sent them to move the magazine from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Shapiro handled the visual side and drew for Drummer, for the sex club Caldron, for Leatherneck, and for gay bathhouses he actually used. Both men left late in 1979; the club atmosphere under his line stayed in the visual memory of the period.

Afterlife on the joke mountain

Shapiro was close to Dom Orejudos (Etienne); in 1978 they shared a gallery show at Fey-Way Studios and were also shown together at Eons in Los Angeles. He was friends with Tom of Finland and with Domino. His drawings fed later erotic artists including Bill Schmeling.

Fritscher called him “the best of my pals and friends” and “one of the Original Drummer Daddies.” In Fritscher’s 2006 autobiography the claim is monumental: if there is a gay Mount Rushmore of four pioneer pop artists, the faces are Chuck Arnett, Etienne, A. Jay, and Tom of Finland. The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago holds some of the work. That is the afterlife a leather cartoonist actually gets: a strip people still name, club flyers in an archive, and a seat on a joke mountain next to Tom.