Page 9 - Leather Blues

Leather Blues ix

Author’s Foreword

Leather Legacy
The Sexual Infinity of Leather

I wrote Leather Blues for the pleasure of it, to capture life
as we lived it. I completed the manuscript in 1969, and the
novel has had a wonderful life. Leather Blues is a picaresque
coming-out story of a roguish boy eager to learn the ropes,
the rituals, and the sexual infinity of leather.
Because it was written a year before the Stonewall Rebel-
lion, and fifteen years before gay book publishers came into
existence in the mid-1980s, it was first published as a zine
on a spirit duplicator in a limited edition of one hundred
copies by Lou Thomas at Target Studio in 1972—under its
original working title I Am Curious (Leather). In 1978, it
was announced as a forthcoming Drummer book, and was
excerpted in Son of Drummer. It was serialized in Man2Man
Quarterly 1981-1982. In 1984, Gay Sunshine Press published
the first trade paperback of ten thousand copies. The text of
this new edition is exactly the same as it was in 1969.
Readers and reviewers have ardently supported Leather
Blues, which has been excerpted over the years in many gay
magazines, becoming part of gay popular culture. Every
author wishes for such enthusiasm.
Perhaps such a growing acceptance of boldly sexual liter-
ature shows the maturity of gay diversity at long last embrac-
ing the erotic literary fiction that defines our homosexuality
better than does non-erotic gay literature.
Once scorned, erotic literature is now admired, and given
awards for being good yarns well told. In our gay world built
on subcultures, leatherfolk are the passionate few who have
given pedigree to this novel, pushing it into the canon of the
gay literary mainstream.

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