Page 195 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer 175

Sequencing the genome of the gay press: How the early marginal gay press of Drum-
mer grew out of the specific underground press of the Catholic press. Three short
stories by Jack Fritscher, beginning as a teenager, published in the national biweekly
The Josephinum Review between 1958 and 1963 when Fritscher left the closet of the
Catholic priesthood for a life in Chicago.

Opposite page. “63 and Cottage Grove, Chicago, 1963,” three photographs. How
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“gay rights” evolved as “civil rights.” In summers 1962 and 1963, Jack Fritscher, like
many other gay people, was active in civil rights, marching with Martin Luther King,
Jr., schooled by Saul Alinsky, and being carried bodily out of Mayor Richard Daley’s
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office, while living and working in the ghetto at 63 and Cottage Grove, Chicago.
Pictured at the El stop corner that Black Muslims claimed as their own until a detente
cordiale is Fritscher’s fellow seminarian and longtime straight friend (since 1953),
Frank E. Fortkamp, Episcopal vicar of Brunswick, MD (2007). Fritscher detailed this
experience in his article “Church Mid-Decade” 1965.
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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