Page 10 - Leather Blues

x Jack Fritscher

Leather Blues is a signature book that, driven by this pas-
sion of its fans, has, for nearly fifty years, stood the test of
time which has encoded Leather Blues as a textual eyewitness
of our leather roots before Stonewall. Its status as an iconic
leather book, I hope, does not diminish the entertainment
impact of its intended eroticism.
In revolutionary 1969, this seminal novel was consid-
ered erotically radical. Post-HIV, it seems even more sexually
avant garde.
In terms of characters, structure, scenes, psychological
flow, imagery, iconography, and dialogue, literary historians
analyzing our gay roots, might note that Leather Blues reflects
the 1950s-1960s gay zeitgeist of post-World War II mascu-
line identity expressed by Marlon Brando in The Wild One,
and by auteurs of independent films from the sexual under-
ground: Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kom-
mandos; John Waters’ favorites George and Mike Kuchar;
Andy Warhol, Blowjob, Bike Boy, the Velvet Underground;
Roger Corman’s heavy-metal biker exploitation movies star-
ring William Smith, such as The Wild Angels and Angels Die
Hard; and Dennis Hopper, director of the counter-culture
classic Easy Rider.
These artists, along with William Carney’s leather novel
The Real Thing, John Rechy’s City of Night, and my friend
James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works, were some of
the avatars enhancing my eyewitness life in leather. Gener-
ously compared by GLBT culture analysts and critics such as
Michael Bronski and Ian Young to the novels of Jean Genet,
Dennis Cooper, and Samuel Steward (Phil Andros), Leather
Blues is gay identity literature representing gay male writing
in the mid-twentieth century.
I wrote Leather Blues to be an authentic, erotic, roman-
tic, psychological, and literary thriller, driven with scenes
and dialogue that I tried to make as vivid and entertaining
as the screenplays I admire. In fact, it is a movie disguised as

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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