Allen J. Shapiro (7 February 1932 – 30 May 1987), 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 also drew for Drummer, for the San Francisco sex club the Caldron, for the Leatherneck bar, and for gay bathhouses he actually used. He was Drummer’s founding art editor. Jack Fritscher, once the magazine’s editor-in-chief, called him “the best of my pals and friends” and “one of the Original Drummer Daddies.” He died of AIDS-related complications in 1987. For leather and gay SM art, A. Jay sits on the same short list as Tom of Finland.
Upstate New York, pecs, and the Army
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 — a day job that sat beside the other line of work.
Harry Chess and Drum
Harry Chess started because of a 1964 New York Times ad. Clark Polak wanted “a cartoonist for a new gay and sophisticated 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 and The Slot
He met his 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 Fritscher as editor-in-chief and sent them to move the magazine from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Both left late in 1979. Promotional art for Caldron, The Eagle, and The Slot still carried his line. In 1978 he and Dom Orejudos (Etienne) shared a gallery show at Fey-Way Studios; they were also shown together at Eons in Los Angeles. Shapiro was close to Orejudos and Tom of Finland, and friends with Domino.
Death, influence, Mount Rushmore
He died at home of AIDS-related complications on 30 May 1987, with Kriegmont there. His drawings fed later erotic artists including Bill Schmeling. Fritscher’s 2006 autobiography put it as a monument: 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.
