Jack Fritscher

John Joseph "Jack" Fritscher (born June 20, 1939) is an American author, university professor, historian, and social activist known internationally for his fiction, erotica, and nonfiction analyses of pop culture and gay male culture.

An activist prior to the Stonewall riots, he was an out and founding member of the Journal of Popular Culture.

Fritscher became highly influential as editor of Drummer magazine.

Fritscher was born June 20, 1939, in Jacksonville and raised in Peoria, Illinois.

His family was Catholic.

Born during the Great Depression and growing up during World War II in rental housing, Fritscher was part of the gay generation who in their teens, during the 1950s, rebelled against conformity through the birth of pop culture and the Beats.

From a young age he was raised to believe he should be a priest.

In 1953 at age 14, Fritscher attended the Pontifical College Josephinum, for both high school and college, studying Latin and Greek.

While in school, Fritscher earned his first publication (1958) and the production of his first play (1959).

He has said that while he was celibate at the seminary, "I probably became gay because of the Josephinum, although nothing happened (to me) there."

He earned a degree in philosophy in 1961, followed by graduate work in theology and the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas (1961–1963).

He was also schooled by Jesuits in the Humanism of Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus, and Jacques Maritain.

In 1961 Fritscher arrived in San Francisco and established a base there.

In 1962 and 1963, inspired by French Worker-Priests and tutored by Saul Alinsky, Fritscher worked as a social activist on the South Side of Chicago.

He was ordained by the Apostolic Delegate to the orders of porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte.

In 1964, he entered Loyola University Chicago and completed his master's and doctoral program, writing a dissertation on Tennessee Williams entitled Love and Death in Tennessee Williams (1968).

Beginning in 1965, he taught at Loyola University Chicago, received tenure at Western Michigan University, and was a regular visiting lecturer at Kalamazoo College.

His first novel was What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy (1965), and his first gay novel was I Am Curious (Leather) aka Leather Blues (1969).

From 1968 to 1975, he served on the board of directors of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts where he founded and directed the museum film program.

In 1969 he founded and taught the first film-as-literature courses at the Western Michigan University Department of English.

He authored the first book to investigate gay Wicca and witchcraft, Popular Witchcraft Straight from the Witch's Mouth (1972).

As an analyst and framer of gay linguistics in the first post-Stonewall decade when gay journalists were inventing new words for the emerging gay culture, Fritscher coined the gay-identity word homomasculinity, as well as redefining S&M as "Sensuality and Mutuality" (1974).

As such, he self-described as homomasculinist, which falls within the larger group of masculinist men.

In San Francisco in between academic posts, Fritscher used his academic credentials and publishing career in the Catholic press to find jobs as an editorial writer for KGO-ABC TV, as a technical writer for the San Francisco Muni Metro, and as manager of marketing at Kaiser Engineers, Inc. (1976–1982).

Fritscher has published both fiction and nonfiction.

Documenting on page and on screen the dawn of the "Daddy" and "Bear" movements, Fritscher was the first writer and editor to feature "older men" (Drummer 24, September 1978) in the gay press.

Fritscher entered post-Stonewall gay publishing as founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer (March 1977-December 1979), San Francisco's longest-running magazine (1975–1999).

He was one of only two editors-in-chief in Drummer history.

Fritscher was the magazine's most frequent contributor as editor, writer, and photographer through all three publishers, emerging as historian of the institutional memory of Drummer.

While at Drummer, Fritscher introduced into gay media such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hurles (Old Reliable), and showcased talents such as Robert Opel, Arthur Tress, Samuel Steward (Phil Andros), Larry Townsend, John Preston, Wakefield Poole, Rex, and A. Jay.

After leaving Drummer, Fritscher published eight quarterly issues of the raunchy gay zine Man2Man between 1980 and 1981.

Primarily created on typewriter, under the slogans "What You're Looking For Is Looking for You" and "The Mag You Can Stick Your Nose In," issues ranged from 44 to 60 pages.

His short-story collection Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O'Malley (Gay Sunshine Press, 1984) was the first collection of leather fiction, and the first collection of fiction from Drummer magazine.

The title entry Corporal in Charge was the only play published by editor Winston Leyland in the Lambda Literary Award Winner Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine - An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics & Culture (1991).

Fritscher's academic writing has been published in the Bucknell Review, Modern Drama, Journal of Popular Culture, Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, and Playbill.

His photographs have been published by Taschen, Rizzoli, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Saint Martin's Press, Gay Men's Press London, as well as by dozens of magazines, newspapers, and book publishers including his cover for James Purdy's Narrow Rooms (1996).

His videos and photographs are in the permanent collections of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris; the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction; and the Leather Archives and Museum.

He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on BBC Channel 4 with Camille Paglia.

Fritscher's eyewitness recollections and interviews of Drummer history was published in 2007 as GAY PIONEERS How Drummer Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999.

A selection of Fritscher's writing in Drummer was published in 2008 as Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer.