John Joseph “Jack” Fritscher was born on 20 June 1939 in Jacksonville and raised in a Catholic family in Peoria, Illinois. He was a Depression baby who spent the war years in rental housing. As a teenager he was around gay men using pop culture and the Beats to get out from under conformity. The family script said priest. In 1953, at fourteen, he entered the Pontifical College Josephinum for high school and college and studied Latin and Greek. He took a philosophy degree in 1961, then did graduate work in theology and the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas (1961–1963), and read humanist writers in that stretch. He has said he was celibate at the seminary, and that he probably became gay because of the Josephinum, although nothing happened to him there. In 1962 and 1963, inspired by the French Worker-Priests and tutored by Saul Alinsky, he did social-activist work on Chicago’s South Side. The Apostolic Delegate ordained him to the minor orders: porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte. The priest track then bent. In 1964 he entered Loyola University Chicago for a master’s and a doctorate. The dissertation focused on love and death in Tennessee Williams.
He reached San Francisco in 1961 and kept a base there for decades. He earned tenure at Western Michigan University, lectured at Kalamazoo College, sat on the board of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and founded the museum’s film program. At Western Michigan he created and taught some of the first courses that treated film as literature. He also worked outside the university. In San Francisco he wrote editorials for KGO-ABC TV, did technical writing for the Muni Metro, and managed marketing at Kaiser Engineers. In 1965 he published his first novel, What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, later reissued as a tale of priest abuse. In 1969 he published the gay novel I Am Curious (Leather), adventures of a leather man. In 1972 Popular Witchcraft was the first book to look hard at gay Wicca and witchcraft. Photographs and video sit in the permanent collections of the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris and the Kinsey Institute. He appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on BBC Channel 4.
Drummer, and the words he put on the page
The decade after Stonewall was when gay media invented language for a culture that had just become speakable, and Fritscher was in the middle of that work. From March 1977 through December 1979 he was San Francisco editor-in-chief of the leather magazine Drummer. The title itself ran from 1975 to 1999, the longest-lived leather magazine in the city. The official chair was only two years. Under all three publishers he was still the most frequent contributor: editor, writer, photographer. He brought Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hurles (Old Reliable) into gay media and gave pages to Robert Opel, Samuel Steward, and others. He does not claim he was their only discoverer. He put them in a monthly that leather men actually bought.
He coined homomasculinity and set that male identity inside a wider masculinist set. In 1974 he redefined S&M as “Sensuality and Mutuality,” a cultural claim rather than a porn category. On the page and on video he documented the start of the “Daddy” and “Bear” currents. He was the first writer and editor to feature older men in the gay press, in Drummer 24 (September 1978). Later he wrote Gay Pioneers and related books so the 1970s would not dissolve into bar myth, and so there would be a record of how Drummer built a language for leather men.
Man2Man, the Bear cover, Palm Drive
After he left the Drummer chair the publishing did not stop. From 1980 to 1981 he and Mark Hemry put out the quarterly Man2Man. The slogan was “What You’re Looking For Is Looking for You.” Issues carried uncensored personal ads, readers’ letters, art by Old Reliable and Rex, and articles on jockstraps, cigars, and other extreme fetishes. In November 1982 he became the first editor to put the gay Bear subculture on a magazine cover, and he helped launch dozens of new gay magazines.
In 1984 Fritscher and producer Mark Hemry co-founded Palm Drive Video, aimed at homomasculine entertainment rather than the pretty-boy default of much gay porn. Fritscher wrote, cast, and directed more than 150 fetish videos: features, and also documentary footage of street festivals and contests, including the first Bear contest at the Pilsner Inn in 1987. The 2021 documentary Raw! Uncut! Video! goes back over what that catalog did. Palm Drive Publishing, Hemry’s imprint, later carried the novels and the history books. The working life and the erotic catalog sat in the same company.
Witness, marriage, and the books
He started a gay-history archive in 1965, before Stonewall made clipping fashionable. In the record he is the first gay writer to find and interview Samuel Steward (Phil Andros); the tapes were used in a later Steward biography. He worked with photographers including Mapplethorpe, Arthur Tress, and David Hurles, and pictures appeared in The Bear Cult and elsewhere. For Mark Thompson’s Leatherfolk he wrote on the artist Chuck Arnett, and he wrote the introduction to Bear Book II.
He and Mark Hemry met on 22 May 1979, the night after the White Night riots, under the marquee of the Castro Theatre. They took a civil union in Vermont in 2000, married in Canada in 2003, and married in California on 20 June 2008, Fritscher’s birthday. The award list includes the NLA International Geoff Mains nonfiction book award in 2009 and again in 2018, and in 2020 a Samois anthology award and a lifetime achievement award. The novel Some Dance to Remember is a fictionalized canvas of Castro and plague, 1970–1982. The nonfiction Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera is his pop-culture memoir of the photographer. The altar-boy novel is a book about priest abuse. It is not a how-to.
