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Gay Art,
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Titanic 70's: An Interview with Jack Fritscher
By Bill DeNoyelles
This interview with Jack Fritscher took place on July 9, 2002 at his home in Sebastopol, California. It was a hot 103 degrees as I pulled into the driveway. Upon meeting him I asked "Bar Nada?" and he replied "This is Bar Nada!" in reference to the ranch in his novel Some Dance To Remember. After a quick tour of his spacious home we settled in at the writing table in his workroom and began the interview. Throughout our four-hour conversation we drank endless cups of strong coffee punctuated by ice cold liters of water. As you can see our conversation touched on a number of serious subjects including 9/11. Our day-long conversation ended when a neighbor knocked on Jack's door to inform him that a trailer on an adjacent piece of property was on fire. We looked out to see plumes of thick grey smoke and flames threatening the dry Sonoma County grasslands. Jack quickly called the fire department. Without missing a beat he loaded his digital vidcam with a cassette, looked at me and said "Let's go!" Off we ran to film the fire and await help.
THE GAY CAVE PAINTINGS
Bill DeNoyelles: The first place I'd like to start is with Chuck Arnett and his Tool Box mural.
He is a sort of great grandfather who brought gay art out into the bar and onto the street, landing eventually onto the pages of Life Magazine (June 26,1964) with a new image of what and who a gay man could look like.
Jack Fritcher: It is interesting that that issue of Life Magazine, which was dear to my heart in 1964, was never paid any attention to by anybody until 1989 when I mentioned it in Drummer.
Now it becomes everybody's bench mark for the beginning of visibility for gay underground art as posterized particularly in bars. I think somehow that's how Stonewall happened as well. I mean that issue of Life just laid there until some journalist grabbed it and said "Look at this!" Stonewall was there in the same way. That particular evening didn't become symbolic until a journalist needing a lynchpin on which to anchor stuff decided, "OK that's the night it happened!"
The accumulation of everything that happened in June 1969 was incredible. People think there was no gay literature before Stonewall. I would give, as the best retort to that, internationally and very vividly, June 9 1969 was a gay orgy around the world because of the date 6/9/69. Everyone knew it was coming and everybody was going to be there and everybody celebrated. There were parties everywhere. But it was one of those "travel" things that occurred because we weren't institutionalized yet with foundations behind everything and with production companies, which are corporations owned by gay and lesbian people - which now produce everything. It was one of those spontaneous things like Woodstock that just swept through the gay world. There was a lot of activity and openness and being out before that [Stonewall]. So that means that there was [gay] art before Stonewall which Arnett is, of course, a good example of. Another good example who predates Arnett even is Dom Orejudos/Etienne/Stephan. Because he, in the late 50's with Chuck Renslow, had started his studio Kris in Chicago and they produced magazines like Mars in the early 60's. When you look at these magazines you see that the whole leather look was already together. This is 1967 [shows me a copy of Mars] - they were already going through their files. This stuff wasn't created just for this issue. There was also Steve Masters, a great New York artist who committed suicide, and his wife destroyed all of his work. He is a great one to pay attention to.
All the iconography was already in place in the early 60's/late 60's. By the time Renslow in Chicago and Bob Mizer from Physique Pictorial in Los Angeles got the postal laws against male frontal nudity knocked down in '69 [that also happened in the summer of '69], which allowed gay art to get away from the posing strap and drawing posing straps on pictures.
There was an upheaval in the late 60's which is what the 60's were all about from November 22, 1963 on. 9/11 has changed nothing - it has just revealed some things about people. Unborn children and immigrants and inmates who were related to people killed in The World Trade Center can get benefits. But if you're a domestic partner you can't, even more so if you're from a state other than New York.
All the art was in place. The bars and S/M have always been performance art. The bars have always been Gallery One in the gay world. The Gold Coast Bar [the legendary leather bar in Chicago run by Chuck Renslow and his empire from Kris Studio] from the fifties on had panels of art drawn by Etienne who continued to do paintings that filled up magazines like Physique Pictorial and magazines for artists who needed models when there are no models. The leather bars, unlike the campier bars which didn't do this, really did have artists. Etienne did The Gold Coast murals in Chicago, then Chuck Arnett did the panels/walls in The Tool Box, then A. Jay (Al Shapiro) did the murals in The Leatherneck in 1977.
BD: From 1964 - 1969 there were these leather places/bars going on with theatre which were, in their own right, art spaces. No one really had the idea then to put it on gallery walls.
JF: Well, in the bars because of Etienne and A. Jay with the panels. The murals then lead to other artists coming in and saying "Well, I've got these photographs, I've got these…" That opened up the whole thing and started shows, circulating shows that were on the walls of the bars and people began to say "I've got a show at The Ambush for the next month!"
BD: Very informal and organic.
JF: Right. Very informal, very organic. But also remember in the sixties happenings were quite common, everyone was doing happenings, so no one paid any attention to them. I had been doing happenings back in Michigan where I was teaching for things like Women's Awareness Week and The Peace Movement so when I came out to San Francisco in the early seventies I ran into Ron Johnson the poet who was also the manager of the No Name bar. He and I put our heads together and threw at least three happenings at the No Name in two years which had my slides, super eight films, bodybuilders in cages, people being passed overhead like now - the mosh pit - and then thrown into a toilet full of shit. There was all kinds of stuff going on in there. A bar itself is a happening. Then you formalize that happening by having eight projectors and people coming in on cue plus the music that is always part of the bar and the crowd getting into it because it was party time - everywhere! So you've got yourself an unforgettable event. It didn't get reviewed, people just crawled out on all fours and that was the
end of it.
BD: Bringing it back to the murals, these guys could just go into a bar and ask if they could paint a mural?
JF: These guys were the inner circle at the bar. Chuck Arnett was a Broadway dancer and knew set design so he was designing a set so to speak.
BD: We get through Stonewall. The seventies are happening with the bars and bathhouses. Places like The Barracks, The Red Star, The Slot Hotel and The Ambush…
JF: As I mentioned, the murals called other art people to see the walls. Don't forget all the ads for the magazines and book covers. It was commercial art that was erotic art that you could jerk off to. When Rex would do a drawing for poppers they'd be totally hot, you could jerk off to it too! How much straight art can you jerk off too? [laughs]. Well some of it you can.
When I was the editor of Drummer Magazine I was able to push Mapplethorpe, Rex and Zeus Studios to give them all their first magazine pages ever! And their first real reviews. I'd like to think I gave them real reviews not just "These guys are hot!" You know? Something that wouldn't bore the readership.
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER (SHOOTING FROM THE CROTCH)
BD: I read Drummer as part of my coming out process. It wasn't always a totally sexual thing either. I remember the mix of photos, art, plays, serialized novels, reviews and articles.
JF: Right. I would get letters from people that would say: "This is so hot I've cum 47 times to your last issue." Then get a letter that would say: "Thank you. You check the spelling, you have proper grammar, you have punctuation, if you continue things on page 68 they are actually there…"
I came to Drummer with 20 years of magazine editing experience so I thought this has got to be as real, and my goal was to make it as real as Time Magazine. Make it fun, always keep it jerkable, so you could always jerk off to it but also start in the head and work your way down. That's what I wanted it to do. I tried to make it reflect the readership by going after the artists that were creating the things that I thought reflected, already, gay culture. I figured if Mapplethorpe is taking pictures of real people having real sex who are fetishized, dramatized and formalized to the point of having real sex, there were other photographers who were more down and dirty than even he was that I thought were worth bringing up to readers to whom I was trying to reflect themselves in the writings as well as the images of Drummer. I couldn't do all that myself so I was very happy whenever any of these people would surface. I didn't even see people like Old Reliable. I knew him for a long time and if it was not for the personal connection I wouldn't have gotten him to trust me to surrender his stuff to me. By his letting go and letting me do it I was able, in just one issue, to turn him from unknown to high erotic celebrity. Which never really died, people still talk of him as a phenomenon.
BD: And high art as well.
JF: Oh yes. A few years ago he called me and said: "A French camera crew is coming to interview me this afternoon." When the French come to interview you - you know your art is serious!
BD: Absolutely. And this had never been done before. Gay life as popular culture being brought out with the masculine aspect of it. I was attracted to other possibilities. I saw Drummer as a teenager in the late seventies. Seeing the guys in Drummer was really about seeing guys I was attracted to and wanted to fuck that looked like my father and uncles who were construction workers. I thought there was hope. I remember driving down Christopher Street in the late seventies, with friends late at night after going to CBGB's and seeing hundreds of guys - cowboys, Indians, leather chaps all the way down the whole length of Christopher Street, up along the West Side Highway to 23rd Street. A huge parade of men in leather. Intuitively I knew what it was that turned me on. I knew what it was about in the pit of my stomach. I absolutely understood!
JF: It is very gut level. It's the gut level of your sexuality but it's also the same thing the fashion world identify when they go out on the street and see what the kids are doing so they can turn it into the runway next season and get it into the stores right after that. Unfortunately when that happens to anything it destroys it. So gay culture, in a way, ate itself.
I make digital documentaries at the Folsom Street Fair every year and it is like a safari to go out and bag all this stuff. Now everyone has pecs and shoulders and six pack abs and eight pack abs. It used to be that only a few people had that and they would be iconized as Mr. Drummer or International Mr. Leather on the cover of Drummer or a centerfold or they would make a movie with Wakefield Poole. Now everybody looks like that so it has been reduced, if not to absurdity, its power has been taken away. When you are filming them you get, even if someone passes by your digital lens for a second, a freeze frame or maybe a couple hundred freeze frames. Anyone can hold their face for one frame. Anyone can pose for a Mapplethorpe photograph. But nobody can hold that kind of snapshot look when you are shooting video because they just can't hold it. I'm a relentless videographer. I've been described by my best friends as relentless with my camera when I go out to get these things because I will literally run ahead to another part of the crowd to get ahead of somebody I see just be discovered by him as he comes trampling over to where I am with the camera. If you are going to do realism you've got to do that.
In 1965 I went to my first motorcycle race in my hometown of Peoria. I was gonna shoot guys. I wasn't even gay but I knew I wanted to shoot guys. I was on the outside of the track trying to shoot them but all I got were their backs or their sides. It occurred to me to go to the inside of the track because there were all these really hot guys who are the inner circle, literally. There they were and I was among them with my camera. What I would do is be standing behind the next one I was going to shoot. I would focus on his back and his head and then as the race would come around him he would spin around to follow the race and turn directly into my camera, I would click and turn as though I was looking at the race. It would happen so fast, in such an instant, that I was all prepared with focus and everything so all he had to do was turn around and I would get a wonderful set of transparencies of natural men. I found if I walked up to them and said, "Can I take your picture?" they instantly went into the snapshot pose and they lost that natural heat that they had. I had to get them without any self-consciousness. That's why average photographs look drained of personality. I have read criticisms of Mapplethorpe that have said that Lyle Heeter and Brian Ridley are showing themselves superior to the camera and that Elliot and his lover (hung upside down by his feet) look completely bored (and they probably were). Critics try and read all this stuff into it about the power of the camera and the attitude the model is giving. If you have been photographed by Mapplethorpe you know it takes a long, long time. From the time you get to the actual spot where you're supposed to be with the lights and everything is ready including him [the photographer]. That would drain the life out of anybody. He tried to shoot from the hip and didn't, I don't fault him for that.
BD: I can think of two or three pictures that are in the realm of realism or shooting from the hip. One is the photo Tony Hill, which is personally my favorite Mapplethorpe photo. It encompasses everything we are talking about today. The realism of the time and generation.
JF: I like it for that reason as well. It's also a little blurry.
BD: The other photo is Jim and Tom, Sausalito.
JF: You see neither of those pictures was taken in a studio. When you get in the studio with all the lights and everything or then he drags in the lights and shoots. Those pictures of Jim Enger [that Mapplethorpe shot-yes that is Jim Enger but it's not the Jim Enger in the other photograph you saw [that JF shot, which hangs in his kitchen] where he's onstage and is giving everything he has got through his eye. That photograph won, not that it means anything, a contest in the Bay Area. I just called it something like A Photograph of the Eye. Even though there is all this muscle, there is this one eye just cyclopsing out with all its focal intensity. It's like formalism drained the persona out. I even thought when I did his [Mapplethorpe's] pictures in Son of Drummer that these are so ritualistic they are like kabuki - so posed. To me they were like hood ornaments of sex. Like people who collect hood ornaments off a car they'll never own - a class like that. It offered an awful lot and I think his work is wonderful. I'm not saying anything against it, it's just his style. You could not have built Drummer magazine on Robert Mapplethorpe although Robert Mapplethorpe's photography could go into Drummer because it was a wider basket than the envelope he was slipping in to the basket.
BD: There were enough people shooting from the hip though … Rink and others whose pictures graced the pages of Drummer as excellent documents. People who shot pictures in sex clubs like the Headquarters or a club in L.A., or just a guy in a sling somewhere about to be fisted. They certainly look like the guy 'just happened' to get that shot. Those are some of the most extremely powerful and potent images the likes of which were never seen before.
JF: They were wonderful that way. They were the kind I went after. Guys would know someone or their lover or they'd be going to a party or something.
ROBERT OPEL, FEY WAY AND THE TITANIC 70'S
BD: Was the first decidedly gay art gallery in San Francisco Fey Way? Dedicated with a mission to showing gay erotic art and most importantly promoting gay art of an outlaw nature? There was no real 'market' for it at this time [the seventies].
JF: It was in the fifties that museums became a place that people would go, as on a date. That was the art of the ages - impresssionists, all the usual suspects of great art. Then Warhol brought art into Pop Art and made everyone aware of that and really helped pump the whole movement of film and cinema.
Jim French was already working in the sixties. There wasn't, as you say, a market for it other than the kind of jack-off market of putting it into magazines. To make a social endeavor where people came out and looked at gay art was really just the openings at the bars. All the the emigres started to come to Mecca [SF] in the seventies and Robert Opel was an emigre fleeing persecution from that fascist police chief Ed Davis in L.A. One of the things he wanted to do was something no one else had done in gay San Francisco and that was to open a gallery that was dedicated basically to the art that was in Drummer - Drummer Magazine, being the program for Fey Way. The artists you saw there were the artists you saw hanging on the walls the night
Fey Way opened. Jim Stewart, for instance, was a friend of mine from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He managed the campus theatre there. I was running an art center film program as well as teaching cinema so I got to know him and his commercial capacity. It ended up that he moved out with David Sparrow and me from Kalamazoo, lived in our house and started Keyhole studios. It was that kind of Bloomsbury Salon that circulated around Drummer as a anchor. He was very active in all these things. Rex, the Hun, A. Jay, Domino and Mapplethorpe were all there. Robert Opel had a good idea of how to merchandise this work and how to pull a party off as well. Party themes are very big. There were art parties done by the Creative Power Foundation, Wakefield Poole, Michael Maletta from New York and The Seaman Carnival. Parties like Stars and Night Flight were big happenings.
For someone to come in and actually say to an artist "OK, I'm going to hang you on the wall, you frame these things, I'll hang them on the wall, I'll sell them and I'll take a percentage." That was new! Because anybody who was doing this kind of art was still tentative, like running away saying things like "I've got this gay story, can you show it to somebody?" Because of the past. People wanted to see it. So it came out of the magazines and nobody called out the straight people with pitchforks and torches who always approach the castle at midnight screaming for the monster, right?
BD: Did Fey Way come out of Opel's streaking incident [at the 1974 Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood]?
JF: He streaked in '74. Fey Way wasn't until '78. Drummer got busted in L.A. in April of '75. Opel was doing things in L.A. The L.A. people who were involved with Drummer started trailing their way to San Francisco. It was in May of '75 that San Francisco really started to get recognized as a city happening on a gay level.
Robert [Opel] had his publicity from the streaking incident. There was also this confusion between Robert Opel and Robert Mapplethorpe as to who Robert Oplethorpe was…that had to be sorted out. When he did eventually establish himself I think he was doing a parallel act with Camille O'Grady to Robert and Patti Smith. Not in a real competitive way, you know? I think Camille was very competitive with Patti claiming, at least on my tape, that she played CBGB's before Patti ever stepped foot in the place.
BD: What was Robet Opel's relationship to Camille O'Grady?
JF: She left New York to become an earth mother on the West Coast. She was a dominatrix, poet, rock star and the female muse at the gallery. They were what you would now call domestic partners. I don't think they were having sex.
BD: She was leather player as well?
JF: Yes. Oh Yes! He gave her a place to do what she wanted to do and a place for him to do what he wanted to do. It got him coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the gay press. Not only did he have the space, he put together flyers and announcements - which worked. The place was mobbed. It was wonderful. I'll never forget the opening night of that - I even said to people at the time - that as editor of Drummer I hadn't even met some of these people because they sent their work though the mail. I got to meet some of these people for the first time. It seemed to me a night of triumph and a place of triumph. All these people had for all these years been drawing, painting or writing in their closets all around the country. Suddenly here was a gallery with the lights on full tilt boogie, the music blasting, the drugs, the whole thing! It was one of those moments like sometimes at The Barracks where the whole place would just levitate. Opel was able to pull off that kind of levitation not once but several times. But I'll never forget that first time! I sat there with A. Jay and David Sparrow and several friends of mine and said "This has never happened before! This is an absolute total first!" And of course Opel loved hearing that because he knew it was true too. That was one of the reasons he wanted to do it! It was like a huge summit.
Opel, in hanging these works, had to think of this. He knew he could in the open climate of San Francisco, despite how the police still were after the White Night Riot (on May 21, 1979) where they had burst into the Elephant Walk and beat up the patrons. Opel had that kind of climate to deal with.
BD: How did Robert Opel fund his endeavor? Was the actual space big? He lived there as well, right?
JF: It was one of those storefronts with living quarters in the back. A nice storefront, you walked right in. What was once full of merchandise before was cleared out!
BD: So Robert Opel had this art space and he's showing Camille O'Grady, Rex, the Hun, A. Jay, Mapplethorpe. It's odd, none of the Mapplethorpe exhibiton catalogs, no matter how thorough, ever mention his Fey Way shows.
JF: We were all outlaws back then. When Robert was here and I was getting him to do that cover [of Drummer 24] I went with him to the Lawson DeCelle gallery - which was gay friendly. A regular gallery over near Union Square someplace. A regular stodgy middle-aged guy owned it. I was sort of bored. I was paying attention to how distressed Robert was because they were yanking his really edgy photographs from the show. I interviewed Edward DeCelle in 1990 about this whole episode and he remembered me quite well as he had some of these Mapplethorpe things around and Robert and I came in hanging on each other. Robert was smoking a joint maybe. Edward DeCelle said he remembered that I said "No you can't put that one there, too close to the door, that one needs to go three down and move that one…"[Laughs]. Always the director. I have a filmic way of walking into a room, that's all. The room should reveal itself in a certain way as it builds…and Edward DeCelle changed it. He listened to Robert who felt the same way.
BD: Robert Opel was a great catalyst who came along when there was all this creative, sexual action.
JF: Fearless. That's how he got killed.
BD: Was the gallery sponsored by drug money?
JF: My feeling on that is, yes. Despite the capitalist statement I made earlier in this interview, there were so many people who survived without any visible means of income. I'll use myself as an example here, not that people have to do what I do. I have always had a real job in the real world. When I did Drummer I worked for Kaiser Engineers as head of their marketing and proposals writing. I don't think you can live off your art, particularly if you are a writer in this visual age. It takes me 15 hours to write something and someone who is a fool reads it in two minutes.
BD: There is the murder of Robert Opel on July 8, 1979. Did Camille O'Grady flee? What happened to those artists who were showing there at the time?
JF: Death was not fashionable in the seventies. Death in the seventies was shocking! Harvey Milk was killed [November 27, 1978] and that had to be dealt with. Jonestown had occurred ([ritual mass suicide by the People's Temple Cult] - which began in S.F., CA - in Guyana . November 18, 1978. Then Opel's death. With Opel's death everything just disappeared. There wasn't even a memorial that I know of. It was crime scene for awhile. People came and claimed their art. Everyone ran away. Nobody knew who had done the killing.
BD: The Catacombs was not only known as a space to have transcendent sex but to also see some of the 'tribe's' art so to speak, am I correct?
JF: The Catacombs was art, performance art, because S/M and leather have always been performance art. Just by the look and by the sheer role playing of it. When someone wants to act out a particular fantasy then you start to play that role so it's instantly theatre. It was a wonderful set that Steve McEachern had built in the basement of the 21st Street Catacombs. It was a wonderful place that eventually became bisexual with Cynthia Slater, who Mapplethorpe photographed. I introduced them. I also introduced Cynthia to my straight brother. It really was 2 degrees of separation, not 6. That's why I say that if there had been video people today could see who some of these people were and hear what they sounded like. A super 8 reel of film lasts four minutes and it's silent. That's why I can shoot a video and get 96% return on the footage. I had to learn as a teenager to be economical so I didn't have to edit but to compose and edit in the camera that I was shooting with - now that's art!
BD: I've always maintained that the way people talk and move actually changes over time. Actual physiological, structural changes occur. Skin pallor. The forms themselves. Evolution, de-evolution…
JF: In my own documentaries of gay parades and The Folsom Street Fair you can see that change. I feel, sometimes, "I don't want to go this year, it will be the same as last year!" If you wait 3 or 4 years though you see a tremendous change in the general look of gay men. It's rather telling. It's not just the styles, trends, fashions and fads. Basic black leather hasn't changed. The bodies have - like everybody with all the big muscles. In the seventies people looked healthy. It was peace, love and granola. The drugs were made locally so they weren't full of poison. Now it's fast food and drugs that are made in countries that hate us and are sending them in as terrorist weapons to destroy the population. The people I knew who took drugs in the seventies didn't look, in any way, as pallid and deadly as some of these people look today. It looks like their souls have been sucked out of them. When you look at the typical look of the seventies, the gay fashions of the seventies weren't very funny. The funniest they ever got was in the staged exaggerations of The Village People.
GONE AGAIN
BD: So here we arrive at the eighties and self-censorship. There was a show at the San Francisco Eagle of Jim Wigler's photographs that showed images that the gay community at large had problems with. Would you say that that is the first time self-censorship reared its head?
JF: We were totally unafraid at that time [1982] - hanging very frank photographs on the walls of bars that anybody could walk into provided they were of legal drinking age. A group of uptight homosexuals thought that particular art did not belong in a public place.
These were photos of Jim Wigler's that had guns, knives and the woods in them. It was coming up on the heels of a friend whose body was found in Tehama County who had been Mathew Shepparded to death with a gun and left there bound. And 'They' did not want to see it, it had to go. So it was taken down.
BD: Were they leather people?
JF: I don't know that they were leather people. I suspect they weren't leather people because leather people would have gotten the photos and not been afraid of them.
That's why the first page of the Mapplethorpe book talks of the 'Art Reich.'
BD: I know. I've had door after door slammed in my face trying to get my art seen in New York because I didn't know the right people or didn't have the right blood connection. It wasn't until I went to see Wayne Snellen at Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation that I met with any openness and understanding at all. He was the only one to indicate any understanding and acceptance of my work in New York at all.
JF: That's what Robert Opel did for all those artists. You want a thumbnail of what went on at Fey Way Gallery? You just said it. He understood those people, they understood him. They were able to show their stuff. It's the same feeling Mapplethorpe describes about going into the 42nd Street sex shop and feeling it in the pit of your stomach. And that feeling your feeling of acceptance at Leslie-Lohman is exactly the same thing Opel pulled off. He legitimized all those people in one night. He made them come from the closet into the Avant Garde. It wasn't so underground anymore, it was independent. It was a genre that could stand on its own. It was sex and it was culture.
BD: The sense I've had about Fey Way is exactly that. It's importance and message made it to me, even while I was in the closet, through somebody I worked for in New Jersey who knew Robert Opel and Camille O'Grady I found out, you know?.
JF: That's excellent!
If you're a writer or artist of any kind, like you doing this project, no matter what happens you have to keep moving on. That's why it might be very fortuitous, you being here, because I have all these filing cabinets that I'm trying to empty out and get rid of. I don't want or need the physical stuff. Electronically it can be scanned and stored where it doesn't weigh anything. Edit your household. I don't want someone to come and toss it into a dumpster.
BD: There is Leslie-Lohman.
JF: Art goes into a known recognized funnel of art and history and commodity because the work is valuable. It keeps it from being stuck under somebody's bed because somebody doesn't value it. I've been shown artwork by a variety of different artists including Arnett by trippy little bar guys who don't even know what they have got. They know it's Arnett and he did something and they know I might be somebody. They call me up to come over for coffee and I tell them what it is and they get that Antiques Roadshow idea that it's worth a million dollars and then you can't rescue it from them because you've told them what it is. That's the fatal flaw in analyzing this, the price goes on it.
©2003, Bill DeNoyelles
NOTES
1. Drummer Magazine. America's first gay male leather popular culture magazine. It ran from May 1975 until December 1999. 206 issues.
2. Jim Enger. Championship bodybuilder. Former lover of JF, former Mapplethorpe model.
3. Rink. Notorious San Francisco photographer who documented the burgeoning Castro Street/South of Market scene in the mid-late 70's.
4. Robert Opel. Radical visionary who streaked in the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1974. Founder of San Francisco's first gay/outlaw gallery Fey Way. Fearless and revolutionary, he was gunned down in the living quarters behind the gallery on July 8, 1979. Recently the subject of the TNN series "Famous for 15 Minutes."
5. Camille O'Grady. Poet, artist, rock singer, muse and leather player. She was Opel's co-conspirator and 'domestic partner'. She played New York's Mineshaft.
6. The Catacombs. Fist fucking club that was started in the basement of Steve McEachern's house on 21st between Valencia and Guerrero in San Francisco. Known for it's unique atmosphere, exceptional music and art which by all personal accounts indicated helped create memorable, transcendent sex scenes. 1975-1981.
7. Jim Wigler. San Francisco photographer and videographer.
Jack Fritscher is the author of the first Mapplethorpe biography Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera as well as the ground-breaking novel about the Titanic 70's Some Dance to Remember. His most recent book is What They Did to the Kid.
Bill DeNoyelles is an artist, writer and photographer currently at work on a treatise called Ghost Dance: The Gay Frontier of Outlaw Sex, Art and Environment 1963 - 1983.
Special thanks to Mark Hemry
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