Page 162 - The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend

146 The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend

29

A MONTAGE RECAP
A KING TUT SARCOPHAGUS IN THE TV ROOM
AN EARTHQUAKE
“A SHOCKING REVELATION
FROM TOM OF FINLAND”

In a final summary montage of the Great Man, Larry Townsend’s
last novel TimeMasters was published in April 2008, a hundred
days before his death. His last published writing was his “Intro-
duction” to Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer—A Memoir
of the Sex, Art, and Salon of Drummer Magazine 1975-1999. His
lover of forty-three years, Fred Yerkes, died two years before him
on July 7, 2006, succumbing alone late at night while watching
television. Larry, waking in the night and missing him in bed,
found him just before dawn lying peacefully on the big leather
couch that sat next to their six-foot-tall King Tut sarcophagus.
The colorful coffin stood upright in the corner of the screening
room they had furnished with dozens of Tut knickknacks from
the Franklin Mint. Both Larry and Fred, like many gay men,
had been deeply touched by the traveling “Treasures of Tut-
ankhamun” exhibit that set records for museum attendance in
1978. When gay marriage became legal in California on June 16,
2008, six weeks before Larry died, he wrote to Mark and me the
constant refrain he had voiced earlier that month while we were
cruising around LA in that gas-guzzling Cadillac Escalade whose
luxury he loved:
I’d like to have someone to marry. Fred and I would have
been married. Thank God, though, for the domestic-
partner law because it saved me so much trouble when
Fred died.

©2021 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK