Fresh from 1999's Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot, this tasty collection follows in the 4-part series of Jack Fritscher's seminal Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O'Malley and Other Stories as well as Rainbow County and Other Stories, actual Winner BEA National Small Press Book Award. "I was right hailing Fritscher's stories for their creativity, insight, and intensity. Fritscher has carved out a niche in the world of short-story fiction that is hard to match. To my taste, he stands as unique and memorable. This is swell fiction in the best Fritscher manner ... mental and physical ... What an unsettling, surprising, and scandalously sexual writer " -John F. Karr, Manifesto Reader and Bay Area Reporter

Gathered from hot gay magazines (where test-marketed by readers), 22 diverse stories by this popular cult author include: the bittersweet romance of San Francisco hustler/punk, "How Buddy Left Me"; the daring race-card of "Black on Blond"; the Foucault-existentialism of the speech-and-hearing impaired "Bear" of "Prison Blues." Author pumps variety with two 'chamber-music' sex pieces: "Horsemaster" and "Cigar Sarge." Refreshing also are the virginal coming-out/coming-of-age/coming-to-grips stories: "Frathouse Pledge, " "Goatboy, " "Wish They All Could Be California Boys, " and "Beach-Blanket Surfboy Blues." The intense Fatal Attraction revenge-story "The Lords of Leather" stands alone as a High Dramatic Moment in Gay Time.

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Archetypal Fathers and Sons connect in the classic Christmas story, "Daddy's Big Shave" as well as in "The Daddy Mystique." Featured also is the performance-art piece: " Praise of Buckabilly Futt." Screenwriter Fritscher especially hits the mark with the video-oriented: "Casting Couch, " "Taping the Uncut Hillbilly Brothers, " and "Guerneville: Young Russian River Rats." Also includes the author's 5-story novella, Boyfriends of San Francisco, a teen sex comedy, which was filmed by famed San Francisco director J. Brian: J. Brian's Flashbacks

Breaking the straight trance of received TITANIC history, San Francisco author Jack Fritscher reclaims gay history by writing a pitch-perfect sex epic of gay survival. TITANIC "outs" the forbidden gay love story of the world's most famous cruise, featuring the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the posh lovers Michael Whitney and Edward Wedding, and the working crew including the rugged Balkan Stoker, the redheaded Royal Purser Felix Jones, and the ship's second carpenter Michael Brice and Third Officer Sam Maxwell. TITANIC sank April 15, 1912, creating a media frenzy. Fritscher said, "In movie-newsreel footage shot three days later on the deck of the rescue ship CARPATHIA immediately after it docked at Chelsea Piers in New York, a dozen of the surviving TITANIC crew, mostly sailor lads in tight white pants hiding little, showing lots, can be seen in very intimate horseplay, camping around, and posing in life jackets, pretending to faint. Of the 885 male crew on TITANIC, 693, or 78 percent, died. Altogether, 1,352 men perished. If, according to Kinsey, one out of six ordinary men is gay, 225 gay men died. If two out of six in the travel industry are gay, 450 gay men died, making TITANIC an overlooked but essential chapter in gay history." In the TITANIC canon, and in the gay literary canon, the novel has won praise for its writing style, its precise accuracy in mixing fictional and historical characters, and its heritage as the first novel dealing with gay men on TITANIC. Into this historic realism, Fritscher, writing in top erotic form, inserts the magical thinking of gay eros. You will never forget this story ripped from the secret pages of a TITANIC diary Fritscher's fast-paced plot speeds along like a film. It has comic dialogue, high-drama queens, extremely able seamen, class-conscious sex, and the suspense of who will survive this story that begins like a musical comedy and ends with a sinking feeling. Fritscher looks through the prism of the TITANIC microcosm to dramatize hidden gay history. It's an historical peek into how early twentieth-century gay folk, learning to save their own lives, helped invent modern homosexual identity, diversity, and politics.

"What They Did to the Kid" is a memoir spinning as a comic novel for general-fiction readers intrigued by boys' school tales, and baby boomers who "survived Catholic school." Ryan O'Hara, coming of age from 14 to 24, is the wise adolescent narrating readers' entry into the secret culture of 1950's altar boys who go to the seminary, meet priests, and must decide their own identities. The novel's interior ticking covers the clock and calendar of boys' emerging consciences and edgy consciousness. "The San Francisco Chronicle" says, "Jack Fritscher reads gloriously."Strong characters and snappy dialog propel the character-driven plot of male-dominant pecking order. At Misericordia Seminary (aptly nicknamed "Misery"), Ryan O'Hara exposes his own story. He's trapped for oxygen-with 500 other boys-by the imperial Rector Karg, the disciplinarian Father Gunn "of the USMC," the tart Father Polistina, and the rebel-priest Chris Dryden "who knows Fellini and JFK." The storytelling Irish-American author gives each ensemble character-hero or villain, student or priest, man or woman-a rich back story. Black civil rights of the 60's as well as three interesting women characters open this tale out of the suffocating seminary and on to the hot streets of Chicago's South Side and Old Town.The compelling psychological drama hinges on the very source and aspirations of priestly vocation versus self-esteem. "Is God calling me-and what about chastity? Or is it just the 'Bali Hai' of blind ambition and social climbing-and what about sex?" Fritscher makes deeper than usual sense of soulful coming-of-age material. The hearty supply of boarding school episodes cumulatively reveals the dueling dynamic between the boyish protagonist, Ryan O'Hara, and the callous ambition of the handsome bully, Tank Rimsky, as they fight toward the finish line of "manly men's" ordination to the priesthood. "The hardest thing to be in America today is a man."The novel is based on an under-reported story: the Catholic Church recruited 200,000 boys into seminaries in the 1950's. Only 20,000 were ordained. "Kid" details, in a nostalgic and not unkind take what happened to the missing 180,000 boys and the women and men in their families. Daring to step inside Catholic culture, without being parochial, this American story reveals the 1950's roots of 21st-century "recovering Catholic" panic and angst. The millions of post-Catholic baby boomers who have exited the Church will compare notes and laugh knowingly at the dead-on characterizations. Fashionably anti-Catholic campers will say, "but, of course "Readers might catalog "Kid" in the genre of "Young Torless, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and "Lord of the Flies." Before now, no one of the surviving 180,000 ex-seminarians has dared reveal this insider confession on the secret milieu of the Catholic education of priests. From interviews with more than a hundred former seminarians, Jack Fritscher uniquely stages their true story arcs with wit, verve, and comedy."What They Did to the Kid" is the fourth novel from Jack Fritscher whose twelve books have sold more than 100,000 copies. Jack Fritscher is a graduate of the prestigious Pontifical College Josephinum, a Roman Catholic seminary, located in Columbus, Ohio, and directly subject to the Vatican in Rome. He received his doctorate in American Literature from Loyola University, Chicago.

By the author of the award-winning leather history GAY SAN FRANCISCO, SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER: A MEMOIR-NOVEL OF SAN FRANCISCO 1970-1982, and MAPPLETHORPE: ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY CAMERA. LEATHER BLUES is a coming-out story of a rogue boy eager to lean the ropes and rituals of leathermen. This exquisitely crafted novel of initiation into bikes, bears, and man-to-man BDSM, pulls no punches when Denny Sargent begins the Inferno rites of passage leathermen must courageously endure to seal their special male bonding. LEATHER BLUES is an intimately sophisticated odyssey of hard-balling sex, of untender mercies, and of the night-hawks men call "Riders of the Storm." Leather Roots: Jack Fritscher specializes in writing about the Sexual Infinity of Leather. He is the pioneer leather author who was the founding San Francisco editor of the legendary DRUMMER magazine, the lover of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and the longtime personal friend of leather icons Larry Townsend and Sam Steward (Phil Andros). He has won many awards including two National Leather Association-International Literary Awards, the Pantheon of Leather Award, and the Erotic Authors Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Critics have praised Leather Blues as a classic in the "required reading" of leather literature. Bottoms have come out on it. Tops have pushed their skills. Readers curious about the leather scene come off safely imagining themselves as fantasy players. "No one chronicles the shadow-lands of American masculinity better than Jack Fritscher." Mark Thompson, author, Leatherfolk "If Kenneth Anger had written an SM novel after making his biker-orgy film Scorpio Rising, it would be Leather Blues. Jack Fritscher is the master of gay leather fiction." Larry Townsend, author, The Leatherman s Handbook "Leather Blues is...terse and concentrated....distills the 1960s leather-biker-outlaw sex scene in just 91 memorable pages....Fritscher, one of the great Drummer magazine editors, seems to have been everywhere and done everyone during the good old days of leather culture." david stein, author, Boots, Bondage, and Beatings "Jack Fritscher is an anarchist of gay sexual prose, the man who invented the South of Market leather prose style." John F. Karr, Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco

In his fiction collection celebrating Stonewall turning forty, Fritscher-turning seventy-unreels nine perfectly crafted stories introduced by literary critics Richard Labonte of A Different Light and by Mark Thompson of The Advocate. Recommended for public and academic libraries, and for special collections of gay literature and GLBT studies, as well as for coffee-house, commute, vacation, and bedside reading. 'Stonewall' is pitch-perfect. Thomas Long, editor, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, University of Connecticut"

SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER has been reviewed as "the gay GONE WITH THE WIND." But such popular praise does not do literary justice to this eyewitness classic of the 1970s, that "first golden decade after Stonewall." This best-selling epic of San Francisco's Castro and Folsom streets seethes with sex, drugs, panic, and passionate characters: a gay writer, a drop-dead gorgeous bodybuilder, a cabaret singer, a Vietnam vet, a Hollywood bitch, and a rough-trade porn mogul. Narrator Magnus Bishop channels Ryan O'Hara, a writer pioneering a tell-all voice in the emerging subculture of gay magazines. When Ryan meets Quentin Crisp's "perfect man" in Kick Sorenson, lust and politics collide. Steroids rule Castro Street. Gender fascism divides queens versus clones into gay civil war over correct queer identity. White assassinates Milk. Gay rioters burn City Hall. Ryan, romancing the morphing trickster Kick, cruises through nightclubs, ecstatic sex, and leather rituals in legendary bathhouses. Sprung from Isherwood's CABARET, 1970s San Francisco mirrored 1930s Berlin: decadent, dazzling, diverse, doomed. It's all here. A city. A murder. A plague. A lost civilization. A love story. SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER is dedicated to Jack Fritscher's 1970s bicoastal lover, Robert Mapplethorpe. "My God, what a book It's all there, done with Fritscher's usual elan and verve. I wouldn't be surprised if he has written what will be looked on as that period's Great American Gay Novel. What lovely stuff -Sam Steward (Phil Andros) "Jack Fritscher didn't invent the Castro. He just made it mythical. HEADY, EROTIC, COMIC....A comprehensive fictional chronicle of the best of times....If one can learn American history via the novels of Gore Vidal, one can learn gay American history through SOME DANCE." - THE ADVOCATE, David Perry "Cinematic intensity....A brilliant record of gay life before AIDS....An astonishing spectrum of queer lives....This sprawling saga...has not lost a whit of its muscular passion, punchy immediacy, or transformative literary impact." - BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR, Richard Labonte "STAGGERINGLY ORIGINAL and completely absorbing....Here is San Francisco's gay male scene in the 1970s and 1980s as never told, or documented, before." - Michael Bronski, Author of CULTURE CLASH: THE MAKING OF GAY SENSIBILITY

These 22 stores are archetypes of Gay Desire that pleasure the mind as much the libido! Gathered from hot gay magazines (where test-marked by 1,000 s of readers), 22 diverse/perverse stories by this best-selling cult author include: Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O Malley which was the only gay play published in the Queer Canon, the literary history anthology, GAY ROOTS. The futuristic Earthorse: Harvest balances the fantasy of sweaty sex pieces like K-9: Dog Dik and a night at the sex-clubz, Selfsucker. The LA night in Hustler Bars leads to the LA 5 AM of Judy Garland in By Blonds Obsesses. Fritscher dishes up Marines in USMC Slap Captain, athletes in teenage Circle Jerk, blue-collars in The Best Dirty Blond Carpenter in Texas, cops in Officer Mike, and sailors in Cruising Merchant Marines. Daddies and sons and frat boys all take a tumble in Nooner Sex, and Big Beefy College Jocks.

In his 16th book, eyewitness gay activist Jack Fritscher, the lover and biographer of Robert Mapplethorpe, breaks the trance of received gay history in this fact-rich memoir of how "The Boys in the Band Played On" from the Titanic 1970s to 1999. Built on all new information recently unearthed, this stylishly written and illustrated "timeline archive" of art, sex, obscenity, gender, culture wars, homophobia, pop culture, and the gay mafia, will get 21st-century readers and researchers up to speed fast on the serious fun of who did what to whom when and why. Fritscher was a founding member of the American Pop Culture Association in 1968, and in 1969, as academia met popular culture, he immediately knew what to do to preserve and chronicle Stonewall and the gay culture that ensued. Back in the heyday of the First Decade of Gay Liberation, university professor and longtime "Drummer" editor Fritscher added erotic realism to the magical thinking of "Drummer" readers wanting a magazine that made newly self-inventing sex seem possible and accessible. Attention must be paid: With an average press run of 42,000 copies for each of the 208 issues over twenty-four years, millions more people read international 'Drummer' than have read, perhaps, any GLBT book. Fact-based on internal evidence in "Drummer," and in journals, diaries, letters, photos, interviews of dozens of eyewitnesses, recordings, and newspapers, Fritscher's ultimate insider's guide to the "Rise and Fall of Castro and Folsom Streets" is a brisk ride that brings back what an physical and intellectual thrill it was to pick up one's first issue of "Drummer." Professor Fritscher's "frisson" anchors San Francisco's otherwise wild Gay Lib history on the clear chronology of the issues of the legendary monthly "Drummer." This is the most complete document of the "GLBT Magazine Publishing Movement." Fritscher is the Ken Burns of "Drummer" magazine. Justin Spring, author, "Sam Steward: A Biography" "Fritscher has done all the research work most academics won't do-thus ensuring that historians, critics, and anthropologists will cut and paste with delight in years to come." Author & Book Credentials "San Francisco Chronicle" "Fritscher reads gloriously " Marilyn Jaye Lewis, EAA Authors Association, ..".an essential document of the 20th-century 'Gay Enlightenment' culled from the pages of 'Drummer.' Fritscher empowers the Truth of those revolutionary times by enabling history to tell itself." Mark Thompson, "The Advocate," editor emeritus: "Utterly unique, an invaluable testament...historically useful for decades to come." The Kinsey Institute, Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator: "Fritscher has a remarkable memory for the people, places, and pivotal events that he has witnessed over his lifetime. His long association with 'Drummer' in San Francisco placed him at the center of the revolution, and 'Gay San Francisco' is filled with significant details from those years." Brown University, Samuel Streit, Director Special Collections: "'Gay San Francisco' is remarkable history of a remarkable time in a remarkable place, proving its points by combining contemporary documents, photographs, drawings, and reportage with a first-hand and first-rate memoir that brings an unforgettable era back to life." Chicago Public Library, Jim Stewart, Department Head emeritus, Social Sciences & History Department: "Jack Fritscher as 'eyewitness' in 'Gay San Francisco' is kin to Christopher Isherwood as 'camera' in his 'Berlin Stories.' This written 'oral history' should be in every library's GLBT collection." University of Sussex, Niall Richardson, Film-Media Studies: ..".chronicles an exciting and formative era from a new and original perspective no one has ever done before." University of California, David Van Leer, professor, GLBT Studies: "Fritscher is a key player in the gender of masculinity in homosexuality."

Tim Brough collected a wide variety of information for my latest book. "First Hand: An Erotic Guide To Fisting" starts with a history from noted Leather historian Jack Fritscher Ph.D. (which reads like a chronology of San Francisco through '60's and '90's) and ends with a hot piece of fiction from former Drummer magazine contributor and disabled-rights advocate, Michael Agreve. In between covering health with a Doctor and Physical Therapist, club life with two club presidents, the online experience via the webmaster of the RedRightWeb site, a man who recounted his first encounter with footing, and, in the book's sixth chapter, dozens of brief interviews where the participants related their thoughts about handballing.

These nine entertaining stories (defining diverse) spin a fast read: edgy in some tales, nostalgic in others, lustrous always. Lammy Provocateur Fritscher is the best kind of award-winning author: one who disappears behind his characters, dialog, and textured plots. His stylish fiction carries the 20th-century reader through the door of Y2K. Here is human love, new and ageless, in all its tender genders, comic banana slips, identity ironies, and family silences. The subtext: people crave, not sex, but intimacy and connection. Stories include: the breathless satire, "Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way"; the reflexive college-faculty comedy, "The Unseen Hand in the Lavender Light"; the love story, "How Buddy Left Me"; the Alaskan cruise-ship adventure, "The Story Knife"; the Hitchcockian suspense-thriller, "Missing Persons"; the hospital-issue drama, "Silent Mothers, Silent Sons"; and the tale of two couples all surrogately wrong for each other in "Sweet Embraceable You" (told twice here: as brilliant little story and as snappy one-act play first staged in San Francisco). This fresh collection of diverse entertainments also includes an easy-to-read indie screenplay, "Duchess: Berlin 1927". Appealing. Accessible. Amazing.

Fresh from both Best Gay Erotica 1997 and 1998, Jack Fritscher's 4th collection of fiction follows on the heels of the National Small Press Book Award to his 3rd collection, Rainbow County and 11 Other Stories. Titanic is a novella anchoring eleven very diverse and quite literate short stories of erotic themes. Titanic is at long last the forbidden gay love story of the most erotic cruise in history, featuring the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the Stoker, the Purser, and the Lovers who...you will never forget this story ripped from the secret pages of a Titanic diary

In this cineplex book of "Fritscher Features", Hollywood finally tells the true stories hidden in the coded subtexts of cinema "Eros" meets "style" in these eleven stories where sex and brains and worlds collide. Includes:

- Brideshead of Frankenstein Revisited

- Billy Budd-Jones

- Punk Rock@CBGB

- Seducing Butch

- Buck's Bunkhouse The Screenplay]

- My Baby Loves Western Movies

- Bedtime Story: Tales From the Bear Cult

- The Night the YMCA Made Me a Man

- I Married an Aquanymph

RAINBOW COUNTY: STORIES FOR BEARS, DADDIES, AND LEATHERMEN. Readers will thrill to Fritscher's well-reviewed style and imagination. He is, writes the BAY AREA REPORTER, the author who invented the South-of-Market "leather" prose style and the butchest, funniest, best male-male magazines with special cult appeal to men who like men masculine. Critic MICHAEL BRONSKI has termed Fritscher's leather fiction as wonderfully "romantic." RAINBOW COUNTY crosses over from pure gay literature to the terrain of actual American literature. These highly diverse stories are blessed with wit, erotic ingenuity, poetic intelligence, and rough-and-tumble sex scenes. Fritscher does for writing what his lover Mapplethorpe did for photography: happily confuse the issues by making sex intelligent and therefore all the sexier. Geoff Mains, the author of URBAN ABORIGINALS, wrote in THE ADVOCATE, "Jack Fritscher writes wonderful books " He's right. Fritscher is absolutely epicentric to gay literature. His stories and his style are what you've been wishing someone would write to turn on both your dick and your brain. You'll love the stories about soldiers, young men at summer camp, fathers and sons, rough trade, cowboys, swimmers, wrestlers, muscleguys who prefer men with ordinary bodies for sex, even some very sexy X-Files type science fiction