Page 476 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

P. 476

458 Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

because my editor [Embry] told me I had to in order to review it.”
Such hand-jive gives some measure of the longevity and reach of the
Embry grudge system and Blacklist. Six years after Some Dance was pub-
lished and won a Finalist Lambda Award, Karr lumped Picano and me
together: “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen ‘The gay Gone with the Wind’
bandied about on a dust jacket.”
Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and the movie that played repeatedly at the
Castro Theater in the 1970s, was a paradigm of gay survival. In an age of
AIDS, I wanted to make that connection. In Some Dance to Remember, the
protagonist’s name is specifically Ryan O’Hara and his nickname is “Scarlett
O’Hara.” The “American Civil War” and the “Burning of Atlanta” prefigure
the “gay civil war over gender” as well as the “burning of the Barracks on
Folsom Street” at the same moment that GRID/HIV/AIDS and the VCR
changed gay culture in 1981.
Despite Karr’s politically correct a priori feminist principles that
estranged him intellectually from considerations of homomasculinity, he
was nevertheless an insightful arts critic whom I liked personally. As a prin-
cipal reviewer for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco, he penned gener-
ous reviews of my books and videos, and particularly my magazine work,
for which any writer would always remain grateful.

Jack Fritscher is an anarchist of gay sexual prose, the man who
invented the South of Market prose style (as well as its maga-
zines, which have never been the same without him). In antholo-
gizing his work from the dozen magazines in which it originally
appeared, under the title Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of
Captain O’Malley and Other Stories, Gay Sunshine Press has done
Fritscher’s fans and his initiates a favor, and also thrown down
a gauntlet (black leather, of course) to other writers. Fritscher’s
writing is a cold slap in the face, an awakening to words and the
expression of sexuality that never loses its sting....His sex is decid-
edly unsafe, most at home with spit and slaps, piss and dirty rec-
tums. It is aggressive, abusive, extreme, and at times (I have to say
it), politically incorrect....Fritscher has roamed the furthest corners
of sexuality, and can lead you on head trips unequaled by any
other gay writer I know of. You may resist, as I did, some of the
aggression, machismo, and sexual practices, only to be won over by
Fritscher’s prose....Fritscher is a knee in the groin. —John F. Karr,
Bay Area Reporter, June 27, 1985

471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481