JACK FRITSCHER, Ph.D.

OPENING LINES
from the Published Novels, Short Fiction, Nonfiction,
Feature Articles, Essays, Plays, and Screenplays
written by Jack Fritscher

A partial list of 175 entries compiled by Mark Hemry

Opening Lines available in PDF

In the end, he could not deny his human heart. --novel, "Some Dance to Remember"

Memory came back to me, it did, like a sort a vision, the kind you dream when you're barely half awake an so half asleep someone could drop beans in your mouth an you'd just swallow em. --novel, "The Geography of Women: A Romantic Comedy"

Falling into the liquid of time, born, he worked his way into reason.--novel, "What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy", the pre-quel to "Some Dance to Remember"

Denny Sargent, eighteen, kicked his sheets to the floor in the fitful hours before the summer dawn. --novel, "Leather Blues: The Adventures of Denny Sargent"

I began this book as an unbeliever in the occult. I leave it, if not believing, then not disbelieving. What is here, simply, is the popular culture of American sorcery. --nonfiction book, "Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth"

Love hides where? The question dogged Dermid on the hunt with his gang of lads, slumming through Dublin, looking for love hiding inside the pubs, revealing in doorways, cruising through the pathways of St. Stephen's Green. --short story, "Chasing Danny Boy"

Listen here, boy, there'll be no hibernatin till after I finish tellin you this bedtime story about Big Daddy when he was himself hardly more than a boy and how he turned into a six-foot-five man and what he done to earn that reputation he got that famous summer on Bear Lake when the canoe overturned late around midnight and Big Daddy on his thirty-fifth birthday saw them two young hairy fishermen floppin like bears in the water next to drownin with their rubber boots suckin them down to the clear rock bottom and them able to stand just barely with their chins on the surface of the moonlit water.... --short story, "Three Bears in a Tub: A One-Sentence Romance"

On the title page of his dog-eared Billy Budd, Ryan wrote, in the most legible scribble of all his random notes, what must have come to him, suddenly, as a single, illuminating, uninterrupted, crystalline vision of sexual elegance. --photography book, "Jack Fritscher's American Men"

This is a memoir, not a biography, of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It's a detective story told in a confessional. For nearly twenty years, I have kept notes, letters, photographs..., --nonfiction memoir, "Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera"

Aboard Titanic. At sea. Westbound. Wednesday, 10 April, 1912. Every night was a night to remember. The Astors had retired early from the grand first-class ballroom. --novella, "Titanic"

Sebastian, that certain summer, I found intolerable, scooping up rentboys with a net along the nude beach on the Bavarian strand. --short story, "Brideshead of Frankenstein Revisited"

His buckskin loincloth hung soft an long between his powerful thighs; he was a blond warrior, young, no more n nineteen, with perfect white teeth when he finally smiled. --short story, "My Baby Loves the Western Movies"

The media call it "Punk Rock" and to me punking always meant fucking. I got my curiosity through the New York Times and from hanging out with sickboy Mapplethorpe who was all over his punk diva, that poetic Patti Smith girl who was actually happening. --short story, "CBGB 1977: Hunting the Wild Mapplethorpe Model"

In his eighteenth summer between senior high and college, Engine remembered, he had beat off exactly 358 times for an average of nearly four loads a day. --short story, "That Boy That Summer"

Blind meat makes me crazy. --short story, "A Sucker for Uncut Dick"

Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. The British critic Edward Lucie-Smith told me that if my once-upon-a-time lover Robert Mapplethorpe had written a monograph on how and why he shot his photographs, the world would have had an invaluable insight into his work. Because Robert wrote nothing, his beautiful work stands on its own. Answering why and how I write my literary erotica is like skating a figure 8 on an ice cube, naked. Anne Rice and I started out on Castro Street at the same time; both of us have double careers writing fiction and literary erotic fiction. --essay on writing, "Porno Ergo Sum: The Incredible Lightness of Being Male" in "The Burning Pen: Sex Writers on Sex Writing"

Tempting, the taste for Big Beefy College Boys with built chests, hot nipples, big dicks, sweaty buttholes, daddies' money, fast cars. --short story, "Big Beefy College Jocks"

Once upon a decade in a time-warp far away, guys in cotton polo shirts--nubbed with the deep pile of a hundred fresh washings--cruised carefully, eyeing the khaki-chino baskets pulled tight against inseams that shot down slack-legs with creases carefully ironed into place, right down to the pegged cuffs. --short story, "The Princeton Rub"

Powell: (Softly, jerking himself) Ahh, sucking those guys off today, Jesus, in the fucking john, ahh. --two-act play, "Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O'Malley"

Quantico, interrogation room, 3 AM, USMC Slap Captain: fleet champion kickboxer, clad in fatigue pants, military-issue teeshirt, heavy combat boots. --short story, "USMC Slap Captain"

Downtown, noon hour, bookstore, backroom, video booths, and in walks the Basic Suburban Daddy: good-looking, early thirties, six-one, robust, husky, not fat from his wife's cooking, looking--in his dark blue, suburban-mall Macy's business suit--like he probably played a little ball in college. --short story, "Nooner Sex"

Officer Mike Leonardi graduated from the San Francisco Police Academy righteously proud of himself. --short story, "Officer Mike: San Francisco's Finest"

Double your pleasure; double your fun: that's my theme song. --short story, "Black-White-and-Brown Doublefuck"

Cole Ridge can put his rubber seaboots up on my bed anytime his ship's in port. --short story, "Cruising the Merchant Marines"

Gay sex is free, so a hustler bar is a strange place for a gay man, because a hustler bar is not "gay." --short story, "Hustler Bars: Show Me the Money"

Dogmaster--you've seen him, built like a pit bull, big, squared off heavy muscle, vet, professional trainer, Special Services Kennel for the County Deputies' K-9 Patrol. --short story, "Young Deputy K-9 Cop"

When a guy blows himself, he blows me away. --short story, "Fisting the Selfsucker"

Ricardo Rosenbloom arrived unlikely in my life, because everyone else I ever met needed money, time, encouragement. --short story coded for Robert Mapplethorpe, "Caro Ricardo"

"Lover trouble," O'Riley said, "Just like Bette Davis." --short story, "B-Movie on Castro Street"

Last summer, Kick was my general contractor. --short story, "The Best Dirty-Blond Contractor in Texas"

Earthorse shifted his big, blond, muscular body uneasily, remembering nothing from before the Final War. --short story, "Earthorse"

Hollywood. 5 AM. This is what it is after a hard night under red light doing standup sex at the Meat Rack. --short story, "By Blonds Obsessed: Hollywood 1981"

Mantits are the great underdiscovered underground pleasure of 20th-century foxes. --erotic feature article, "Tit Sports"

Gay reality often reads like fiction mainly because the gay sense of adventure, that sense of openness to experience, causes fantasy to turn into fact and , once turned, that fact is often so outrageous in its reality, it sounds like fiction to people too chickenshit to pursue their fantasies. --erotic feature article, "Wet Dreams, Golden Showers"

Talk to me, Fetish Boy! --erotic feature article, "Fetish Noir: Alternative Sex Games for Your Inner Wild Child"

I confess, if you want to see a real redneck red neck, peel back the foreskin on a good ol' boy's southern-fried, dirty-blond, uncut dick. --short fiction, "Foreskin Fever"

Believe it or not, I just finished with the Adams brothers, or was it, they just finished with me? --short fiction, "The Adams Boys and Me"

On the morning of his eighteenth birthday, Giles flipped his hot dick out on the red Formica top of the kitchen table. --short fiction, "Goatboy"

The big blond Polock was eighteen and a fullback on a football scholarship. --short fiction, "Beercan Charley"

On Christmas morning of the year I was fourteen, my dad handed me a special present he had bought and wrapped for me himself. --short fiction, "Daddy's Big Shave"

When I see a young daddy, I want to eat his shorts. --erotic feature article, "The Daddy Mystique"

The kid was four days into Frisco from Oklahoma: long, lean, lanky cowboy with one of those dry Oakie accents that stops a grown man's heart mid-beat. --short fiction, "New Kid in Town"

I shot my lover this morning. With the garden hose. Just as a joke. I mean, he'd slept in late, and then walked bare-ass out into the cabbage garden where I had been working up a two-hour sweat. --short fiction, "Cabbage-Patch Boys"

Maybe because my Swedish dick is big, blond, and uncut, I'm sort of a sex maniac. --short fiction, "Stand by Your Man"

Husky, young and handsome and hung, Ryan had it all: the All-American high-school baseball-hero body, the cocky attitude of Sean Penn, and the dick of a porn star. --short fiction, "Black Dude on Blond"

Leo was Contestant Number Three the night he fell for Contestant Number Four. Their eyes met and fixed on each other, wordlessly saying all, the summer they both entered the End-Up Bar "Jockstrap Contest." --short fiction, "Contestant Number Three"

The southern California sun melted into Scott's lean blond torso. --short fiction, "Wish They All Could Be California Boys"

To say Todd was hung like a Seahorse, I'd also have to confess this summer I've indulged a taste for sweet blond meat. --short fiction, "Beach Blanket Surf-Boy Blues"

Fuckin buckin beckonin butthole/sweatwet bud, touchable, tongueable,/ kissable, lickable, edible, fuckable,/worshipful hot young manhole. --poem, "In Praise of Fuckabilly Butt"

"Wanna be the ham in a sandwich?" Washburn asked the kid. --short fiction, "Video Casting Couch"

Guerneville, California: Suddenly this summer, the hot hit at the Russian River is Nuke McKinney's mixed-media Palm Drive Video Tent. --short fiction, "Young Russian River Rats"

Upfront you might say I run the switchboard at the Hotel California. --short fiction, "Telefuck"

You watch the Horsemaster mount his Stallion, Instant Centaur. --short fiction, "The Horsemaster"

Sarge is hot. --short fiction, "Firebomber: Cigar Sarge"

Flashblinded, like a deer caught in poachers' headlights, the blond Bodybuilder with the dropdead looks breaks into a sweat. --short fiction, "The Lords of Leather"

Young man; young, young, young man: Miss du Bois knew, long before we all knew, the ache that stays for the memory of some young man who, for one afternoon one summer, thrilled us with no more than a dropdead vision of himself. --erotic essay, "A Beach Boy Named Desire"

Animal was hung big and uncut, his name lost in the prison records. --short fiction, "Foreskin Prison Blues"

Loneliness grows like thistle in a heart cracked and drained of love. --longer fiction, "How Buddy Left Me"

"War criminal!" Lieutenant J. G. Steve Drosky, USAF, could hardly believe the verdict pronounced by the slope military judge, down for the mock trial, from Hanoi. --longer fiction, "The Shadow Soldiers"

Nicargua, shit, a nightmare, hanging upside down by my boots lashed to the fan in the center of the room, I spin in slow circles, bombed. --short fiction, "From Nada to Manana"

The beautiful young men,/ forced laboring in Sardinia,/ sweating in the steel mills,/ hung, hanged by the wrists,/ strung up for whipping. --poem, "The Young Turks Dream of Derek Jarman"

Tonight, twenty minutes into the Future, in a high mountain desert, beyond the Federal Gestalt Line, manimal screams echo deep from the ritual painstream chambers of the Giant Robo Prince Sodom. --"RoughNight@Sodom.Cum"

Come on, muthafuck, eyeball these size 12's up close. --poem, "Foot Loose"

Inch for inch, pound for pound, Big Boyd Grymkowski was the best buddy a flyjockey could want back in those bombs-away days when our lives depended on each other in the United States Air Corps. --short fiction, "Wild Blue Yonder"

Dear Dr. Strangelove, I live in Hubbub, Texas, but was raised in the Midwest and then in Texas in a Christian home, but for the last few years I have been a practicing homosexual. --short fiction, "Wait Till Your Father Gets Home"

You want to hear about the 10-inch doofer? --short fiction, "Big Doofer at the Jockstrap Gym"

Swimmers' Bodies/ Long, lean, hardmuscled/ Water Jocks, Sunfreckled shoulders." --poem. "Photo Op at Walt Whitman Junior College"

Once upon a time I was a college professor, back during the war in Nam and the war on campus: the complete cliche. --short fiction, "The Assistant Freshman Football Coach"

I woke up in this fish story suckling his big dick. --short fiction, "Father and Son Tag Team"

On the last day of spring, June 20, 1973, at high noon, at the corner of 18th and Castro in San Francisco, Robert Place found the face of God in a pornographic photograph. --longer fiction, "Rainbow County"

Looking into a cowboy fella's face/ man-to-man, you can read him complete:/ how hard his Levi-thighs feel;/ how his crotch rides in rough-out chaps;/ how his salt-sweat gloves taste/ when he bites the leather fuckfinger/ in his strong white teeth/ to pull the glove off his hand..." --poem, "The Real Cowboy"

Foreman Dogg Katz was a young fox with a goatee, so Peter Eton-Cox made a phone call to S&M Ranch. --short fiction, "S&M Ranch"

All these calisthenic nights,/ olympic fun in bed,/ in the red lamplight,/ changing changling faces/ fascinated by my decathalon sense of sex. --poem, "The Old Shell Game"

Tonight was our first time together: Christmas Eve. --short-short fiction, "Sleep in Heavenly Peace"

Joint in his mouth, he sat on the toilet with the stall door as wide open as his thighs. He was so hot he was cool. It was the summer of ‘72 and Market Street was all torn up for the new BART subway, which is where this guy had climbed from at the end of a hard day of digging, setting his bare butt down on the black horseshoe topping the porcelain commode.--short fiction, "Worship Me"

Dear Dr. Strangelove, I like seducing straight guys. Not that straight is better than gay, mind you, just less accessible, and so more of a challenge. --short fiction, "Seducing Butch: Tattooed Aryan Biker"

"Wet dreams?" she asked. "All dreams should be wet dreams." --longer fiction, "I Married an Aqua-Nymph"

Massive! My dad was built big like a cocky powerlifter. --short fiction, "Buzz Spaulding's Training Academy"

2 AM. Channel 69. Late Show. Masterslave Theater. (CC) 4-Stars. Buck's Bunkhouse. Drama. Outlaw cowboy Buck Foucault (Buck Ford) discovers "what you're looking for is looking for you" when he meets existential Rancher (Bob Nevada) who changes Buck's mind about serving--as all men must--the Ultimate Master. --produced screenplay, "Buck's Bunkhouse Discipline"

"Murder me," Ada said. --short general fiction, "Sweet Embraceable You"

"Tis the season to be jolly: fa la la la." --one-act play, "Kweenasheba"

His life was a silent movie. --short general fiction, "The Unseen Hand in the Lavender Light"

Nanny Pearl, whose name was Mary Day, was eighty-four years old on October 2, 1972. --short general fiction, "Silent Mothers, Silent Sons"

After Skagway in Alaska, in the long arctic light of the last summer solstice of the millennium, Brian Kelly, heading north, heading toward true north, realized that the twilight of the gods must not be desperate. --short general fiction, "The Story Knife"

Mrs Dalloway each night decides to buy the flowers herself. On the Mrs Dalloway channel. On satellite dish. All Mrs Dalloway. All the time. --short general fiction, "Mrs Dalloway Went That-A-Way"

Wilson: In the summer of 1918, in the village of Ekaterinburg, in Russia, a murder was committed. --screenplay, "Duchess; Berlin 1928"

Hard-ass cruising. Like two-fisted combat at the USMC Depot where some little shaved-head boot is gonna be ordered for the first time in his life to take on another man with his bare hands. Palms and pits running sweat, man. Ain't that a fantasy walk into the Leatherneck. --feature article, "The Leatherneck: Ultimate Bar of the 70's"

Christmas gives me fucked-out eyes. Lots of parties. Terrific tumbles at the tubs. Men visiting San Francisco for the holidays. --erotic feature article, "Leather Christmas 1977"

Capricorn Sadist (Dec.22 - Jan 20): You're a cold fucker whose sun sign, bridging one calendar year to the other, indicates slaves by the pair for the New Year. Your domestic scene should keep quite scrubbed up, unless you prefer to live like the raunchy goat you are. --satiric astrological column, "Astrologic Capricorn"

"Up a steep and very narrow stairway." Hot spots get too hot not to cool down. So hit them while you can. Like the Mine Shaft in New York, New York. Two floors and a roof "garden" of whatever flips your switch. --erotic feature article, "The Mine Shaft"

Darth Vader has nothing on artist Etienne's "Captain Kirk." In fact, Star Trick's Captain Kirk has nothing on at all. At last, Star Trek's best special effects hang revealed. No longer is the enterprising spacemeat basketed in those bouncy JC Penney pajamas. --essay, "Artist Dom Orejudos is Etienne!"

"Crimes Against Nature," written and performed by the Gay Men's Theater Collective, has been the held-over hit of the 1977 San Francisco Season. Like "A Chorus Line" and "Hair," "Crimes Against Nature" is a high-energy semi-musical in which the characters/actors expose the most private truths of their lives. --essay, "Crimes Against Nature"

He chews Redman tobacco, wears a railroad engineer's cap at the helm, and often pisses over the side of Courageous, the 12-meter yacht he skippered to the America's Cup crown. --feature article, "Gay Jock Sports: Wrestling, Boxing, Rollerballing, Bodybuilding, and Film"

Dune body babyman,/ stretched on spread-eagle wheels,/ the CHP oughta getta shotta you:/ hot mirage of "haute" stuff. --poem, "Dune Body"

Aquarius Sadist (Jan.21 - Feb 18): Admit it, asshole. Your are BST: Bent, Sick, and Twisted. You have an inventive mind inclined to be into progressive S&M. You fear you've already gone too far sexually when in reality you're only half as BST as 1978 will make you. --satiric astrological column, "Astrologic Aquarius"

Let's cut through all the queenly bullshit about "Salo," the last and most controversial vision of Pier Paolo Pasolini. If you're alive and gay, you waited two years for the US release of this film. --critical essay, "'Salo': Pasolini's Last Picture Show"

San Francisco. December 31, 1977. The "Night Flight" party was a golden New Year's Eve night in the Golden Age of San Francisco--and a shock to the old over-easy attitude of Sodom-by-the-Bay. --review essay, "'Night Flight' 1977: The Night Everybody Was a Star and the Virgins Jumped into the Volcano"

In the main gym at San Quentin the cement is wax-smooth. The work of thousands of bare male feet. In the showers at Auschwitz, the cement is scored with the long finger-nail scratches of humans clawing their way futilely out of small places. Here at the Big Bastille on the Bay.... --feature article, "Prison Blues: Confessions of a Prison-Tour Junkie"

Aries Sadist (Mar 21 - Apr 19): In spring, a young man's love turns fancy. Try topping a trick wearing Adidas tennies and a Lacoste shirt. Yeah, just try it. --satiric astrological column, "Astrologic Aries"

Probably nine outta ten guys found their first sex at the movies. You remember: the way the bright screen made your teenage eyes half-blind to the dark stranger who sat down in the next seat. His leg pressed against yours. --feature article, "A Night at San Francisco's Nob Hill Theater"

No two ways about it: I love, adore, and worship Roger. I would eat his shorts. I would sleep on Roger-printed sheets and pillowcases. I would hang Roger wallpaper inside and outside my house. On my deathbed, I'd settle for one last glimpse of his Charles-Bronson face and Botticelli body. --satiric feature article, "Pumping Roger: Porn Star at the Nob Hill Theater"

Whats' longer than a man's dick and thicker than a Texas finger? Cigars: Coronas, Panatellas, Maduros. Advertising dictates that a man doesn't smoke his cigar--he wears it! --feature article, "Cigar Blues: What This Country Needs Is a Good 5-Cent Fetish"

4-Stars. "Sebastiane" is a must-see two-cum British movie about a Roman soldier who refuses the love offered by his commander. --film review, "Derek Jarman's 'Sebastiane'"

Forget the spear-and-sandal peplum epics of Steve Reeves and Arnold Schwarzenetc with bouffant girls hanging like butch insurance off their thighs. Sebastiane is out--re-released hard on the heels of Director Derek Jarman's latest film, Edward II. --film review, "Derek Jarman's 'Sebastiane' Redux"

Sometimes it's best just to dive right into a shitty job. --book review, "'End Product: The First Taboo"'

Alright. So where's "Drummer" get the leather balls to assume, yeah, assume to track, report, and chronicle what's happening in the masculine world of gay men? --essay, "'Drummer': The American Review of Gay Popular Culture"

If you want to know exactly where Tony Bennett left his heart, chances are you'll find it in a footlocker at the handball palace called the Catacombs. Saturday nights, by invitation only, the baaad and the beautiful haul ass into San Francisco's Mission District. --feature article, "The Catacombs: Fistfucking in a Handball Palace"

"Us bike bums are a breed a-fuck-part." --short fiction, "Redneck Biker"

Leo Jul 2 - Aug 21. There once was a maned man named Leo/ who figured, "Why cop a plea-o?"/ When accused by his lover of humping another,/ he roared out "con brio,"/ "Climb in for a trio!" --satiric astrological column, "Astrologic Leo"

They share housing in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco. They are two of the biggest men in international track and field. Al Feuerbach at 6-1 and 242 pounds is the blond American shot-put champ. Mac Wilkins at 6-4 and 253 is the dark American 1976 Olympic gold medalist in the discus. --review, "'Sports Illustrated': Some Babes in the Woods"

Good as Gay Lib is, the total gay lifestyle as it has been commercialized means that gay men basically screw around only with other gay men. Gone are the pre-Lib days when a gay guy adventured out to find a straight male to ball with. The gay lifestyle has been merchandised into a ghetto lifestyle. --essay, "Homomasculinity: Let Us Now Praise Fucking with Authentic Men"

"I'm not interested," he says, "in the casual trick who wants to get tied up for three hours, fucked, and then be untied, and let go." --feature article, "Mondo Bondage 1978"

We are born believing the Human Fallacy: we have control, and we have free will. Only to a point. --essay, "Bondage: Life Is a Learning to Surrender Control"

In SFO gay guys talk about sex, gyms, and real estate. They worry about being hot, too hot, or not hot enough. --satiric essay, "Castro Street Blues 1978"

"Drummer," the magazine of gay popular culture, has tracked the "Red Queen" in his/her rapier-like dissection of gay rip-off stereotyping. "Drummer" strives to be the authentic chronicle of gay fantasies, realities, attitudes, fads, postures, and politics. --essay, "Butch Enough?"

You say your ass is falling out? After a successful all-night orgy and fantasy trip, every guy feels this way. But usually your cooperative ass tucks back in and is ready for a new go-round next weekend. --medical feature article, "Dr. Dick: 'Drummer' Goes to the Doctor"

When "Drummer" throws a party, everybody comes: in leather, denim, uniforms, chains, and flesh-flash. --essay, "'Drummer' Goes to Its Own Party"

When a Scottish regiment pulls on its tartan kilts, you've got a good shot of bearded, beefy men in full military uniform. Thick wool socks hug thicker calves. Muscular thighs rub hairy against tartan plaid. --photo essay, "Scottish Games"

If you saw the movie Topkapi, you know about leather breeches, close-shaved hair, and olive-oil grappling. Brawn and breeches (which stand upon their own) are the uniform of an ancient, yet modern, race of heroes: Turkish olive-oil wrestlers. --feature article, "Young Turks in Leather"

Rexwerk! The name smacks of Germanic discipline, of heroized masculinity, and of the art that imitates life--if a man goes to the right places when he cruises out to be with other men. --review, "Rexwerk and the Artist Rex"

"The Rex Video Gallery: Corrupt Beyond Innocence." This first and only Rexwerk video turns your screen into an erotic master's personal gallery. --review, "'Rex Video Gallery': Drawings from the Ceiling of the Toilet in the Sistine Chapel"

"Streetboys, ex-cons, and hustlers are my only hardon," Old Reliable says. "Nothing beats looking up at a tough young streetwise punk straddling my chest, flexing his muscles, and talking nasty to me. Sure it's dangerous, but danger is my only hardon." --feature article, "Call Him 'Old Reliable' Because He Is"

Jack Fritscher: When you were a young boy, did you let dirty old men in their 20's suck your dick and ass? Old Reliable: I wish dirty old men had approached me. Even as an adolescent, I had my eyes on several older guys." --interview, "Old Reliable/David Hurles: A Legend in His Own Time"

"Yeah, buddy! Gimme a pair of young hillbilly brothers with 20 inches of dick between 'em." That's what I said. That's what I got. Right off Hollywood Boulevard. --photo caption essay, "Those Adams Brothers"

San Francisco. Cow Palace. 34th Grand National Rodeo. Thursday: Cattlemen's Night. The 4WD trucks and horse vans stand empty in the foggy parking lot next to hot steaming pile of manured straw. The night wind breeds a chill. Inside the Cow Palace, working cowboys have shelled out up to eight bucks a head for box seats to watch the show cowboys strut their stuff in the annual Grand National. --feature article, "Grand National Rodeo Blues"

Have you ever passed a news stand and had a magazine yell out to you: "Buy me!" --review, "'High Performance Magazine': Or, Sex without a Net"

Sagittarius Sadist (Nov 22 - Dec 21): New romance possible in the beginning year. However, your bad attitude and tendency to know-it-all can ruin the relationship even before it gets off the ground. That's really mean! --satiric astrological column, "Astrologic Sagittarius"

In the good old usta-be's of Saturday matinee marquees, we mostly stuck out peckers--the whole front row of us--through the holes punched in the greasy bottoms of our buttercorn boxes. --feature, "Nobody Fucks Lex Barker Anymore 1979"

Everything must change. Nothing, not even the California Motorcycle Club (CMC) Carnival stays the same. So give us an OI! Give us a VAY! Gone are the CMC's of yesterday! --review, "Seaman's Semen's End: CMC Carnival 1978"

Wakefield Poole: Is this a Dewar's Profile? Jack Fritscher: More like a Do-er's Profile. Wakefield Poole: Then this interview is your movie. Jack Fritscher: Are you ready for your close-up, Mr. Poole? --interview, "Dirty Poole: Everything You Fantasized about Porn Director Wakefield Poole, But Were Too Wrecked to Ask"

Frank Cross, a 51-year-old former priest and proficient S&M Top, demonstrates his homemade trapeze, a wondrously wicked device for securing a Bottom to tit clamps. --feature article, "The Janus Society: Kiss and Don't Tell"

There is one sin in life:/ when a man asks you to wrestle/ and you refuse to strip. --poem with photo spread, "Bare-Ass Wrestling"

"The Deer Hunter" is the most macho, brutal, sadistic, and purposefully violent movie ever filmed. Delivering way more than Deliverance dared, The Deer Hunter follows three men from their small town in the 60's to the full blowup of their action and torture in Vietnam. --film review, "'The Deer Hunter'"

The body count is rising. So is "Drummer"'s gorge. "The Good Die Young" is not much salve when men you know die before their time. --essay, "The Most Dangerous Game in the Whole Wide World 1979"

Good Old Noodles is one tough boxer. He has his name, "Noodles Romanoff," embroidered in gold script across the back of his maroon sateen robe. He wears a white towel collared around his neck. --feature article, "Noodles Romanoff and the Golden Gloves"

American Flats, Nevada. This ghost town is host town for man-to-man exploration. Today's sensually sophisticated Man-imals go beyond the limiting label "gay." --essay for photo spread, "On Target: Target Studios Photographer Lou Thomas Glamorizes the American Male"

Manhattan. One Arthur Tress photograph is worth a thousand words; but meditations on Tress, like "Meditations on the Way of the Cross," expose access to the secret world of masculinity at once dominant and submissive, esthetic and sexual, urban and urbane. --prose poems, "Meditations on Photographer Arthur Tress: Male Apocalypse Now"

The Brothel ain't the Hotel California where "you can check in, but you can never leave." Check-out time at the Brothel is anytime you want to check out the broth-of-a-boy in the suite next door.--feature article, "The Best Little Brothel in San Francisco"

Mr. America looks like an "a-sexual-all-Americanned boy" compared to the sexually upfront All American Men of the International Mr. Leather competition. --feature article, "The First International Mr. Leather (IML) Contest 1979"

No man is alone. No matter how private or personal or secret or severe his magnificent obsessions, a man deserves to enjoy his own satisfactions by celebrating them man-to-man with other homosensualists. --feature essay, "The List: Hard2Find Obsessions"

I must confess that running a Personals Ad Club through the mail for several years can give a man an education. A wise friend, who's an expert at meeting new friends through Personals Ads, always maintains that what you're looking for is looking for you. --essay, "What You're Looking for--Omigod!--Is Looking for You"

Nothing stirs the memory like death. Nothing dries tears like laughter. Al Shapiro, the artist who was "A. Jay," was one of the Original "Drummer" Daddies. He died 21 days ago. --feature obituary, "Al Shapiro, A. Jay, & Harry Chess: Confessions of a Comic Stripper"

Rubber baby-buggy bumpers. I confess. That's how this kid started out in rubberoticism, moving on immediately to harder stuff like rubber training pants which led inevitably to my summer-camp rubberized swim briefs: mine and the blond hunk of a Norwegian lifeguard whose own latex trunks, white in the style of the 50's, rubbed up against my hardening 10-year-old body every time he helped me climb into the inner tubes we used for floaters on Lake Winnekaka. --cover feature article, "Rubberotica 1988"

Dude! You wanna march to a different "Drummer"? Run, as in "bike run," is Anglo-Saxon short-speak for Rendevouz. Get the picture? Current manhunting rendevouz don't take place in cozy French cafes. "RendeVOO!" That campfire shout, in the American West these days, means a shit-kicking 3-day weekend in the woods with bearded guys in full leather buckskins, wearing fur animals on their heads, and shooting black-powder rifles. This info is real as bear shit in the woods. --cover feature article, "How to Hunt Buckskin-Leather Mountain Men and Live among the Bears"

Remember coming home very late from twenty tricks at the baths, and you were still horny in a way that only your own hand could satisfy, stroking strokes and pounding pud e-x-a-c-t-l-y the way you liked. --cover feature article, "Solo Sex: Who's Who in J/O Video: A Guide to Surviving a Hard Day's Night in the Age of Abstinence"

Bodybuilders aren't born. They're built by Boeing. (I know. I bought one.) Cameras do not simply love bodybuilders. Cameras grow weak with desire when competition bodybuilders flash their tanned pecs and oiled biceps, thrusting out the display of their powerful thighs behind the slingshot of their nylon posing trunks. --"Muscle Worship: How to Judge Bodybuilding on Stage and in Private"

Jim Enger, a California bodybuilder from Alabama, recently won the first physique competition he ever entered. At 5-7, and 178 pounds, Enger took his first contest "hands-down" according to judge bodybuilder Rod Koontz at the AAU Junior Mr. Iron Man contest, Oceanside, California --feature article in Dan Lurie's "Muscle Training Illustrated", "Jim Enger: On the Way Up!"

In these last days of the American Empire, the Colosseum is open and the gladiators are on exhibition. The mindfuck of Clint Lockner and Dan Pace together, live, on stage, hardens your dick and melts your eyeballs. Clint is from Colt Studios. Dan is from Zeus. --feature article, "Live on Stage: Dan Pace and Clint Lockner--A Pair of 10's"

In the beginning, the Leather Gods said, "Let there be Eden." And there was. And they found San Francisco good. --historical essay, "The Rear-View Mirror: How SOMA Began"

From Amsterdam to New York, from Berlin to LA, from Houston to San Francisco, sex makes a man thirsty. Bars slake thirst. A pal takes a pal out for a drink. Historically, in the awakening Sodom-Oz of San Francisco, the sexual network of the Post-WWII 1950's South-of-Market workingmen's hotels banged out a code on the heat pipes that some bars were hotter than others. --historical essay, "The Rear-View Mirror: Bars and Bikes--The Incredible Lightness of Being Leather"

"The Wild One" rode across American drive-in screens in 1953, two years before James Dean's "Reb el without a Cause" (1955), and 16 years before "Easy Rider" (1969.) Brando's archetypal leather image, via flamboyant underground S&M filmmaker Kenneth Anger's blasphemous "Scorpio Rising", started integrating into street/bar style. --historical essay, "The Rear-View Mirror: Leather's Founding Daddies"

In 1959, San Francisco-born Tony Tavarosi, was recruited by Certain Powers to head back to New York to check out the changing male-bar scene. Ten years before Stonewall, bits and pieces of leather had begun appearing nightly as a quiet sex-statement that guys who wanted to look like guys, and not like fags and drags. --historical essay, "The Rear-View Mirror: Inventing the Leather Bar--Red Bulbs, Black Paint, Back Rooms, and Public Sex"

Tony Tavarosi, a native San Franciscan, came out at the age of 12, circa 1945, under the tables of the curtain-draped booths of the South China Café on 18th Street, a few doors west of Castro.--historical essay, "The Rear-View Mirror: Remembrances of Remarkable Men

The Grunts called him "Dirt." Two tours in-country, he had Nam in his blood, and his blood pumped through the heart of darkness. --prose poem for photo spread, "J. D. Slater Is Dirt."

Chuck Arnett, who invented the Tool Box bar, lived lowlife to the hilt. Once he had set his Folsom juggernaut in motion, he turned his awesome primitive talent to sketching gut-wrenching sex scenes. --feature obituary, "Artist Chuck Arnett: His Life and Our Times"

When principles collide with issues, principles win. The Declaration of Independence survives because it is a document of principle, not a document of issues hot in 1776. Principle clarifies issues. Civil rights is a principle. Gay rights is an issue. Pursuit of issue per se causes political myopia...Give a person an issue and he will eat fire for a day. Give a man a principle and he may think clearly for a lifetime. --introductory essay, "Leather Dolce Vita, Pop Culture, and the Prime of Mr. Larry Townsend" in Larry Townsend's "The Leatherman's Handbook", Silver Anniversary Edition

Our changing sex-styles have no more memory than the remembrance we give them. Raunch artist Rex is to drawing what Robert Mapplethorpe is to photography. Both epitomize the sleaze slice of the S&M leather pie. --cover feature article, "Remembrance of Sleaze Past, Present, and Future: Alternatives to the Queer Theory of Vanillarinas"

Round up the usual suspects, and head for Missouri where The Academy shows in spades what the "Show Me" state promises. The Academy is a Training Center facility staffed by real, straight cops and prison guards. A man, daring enough to be incarcerated for pleasure, can act out, act up, and live the reality of arrest, booking, cell time, bondage, and rough police interrogation. --cover feature article, "The Academy: Incarceration for Pleasure"

Don Russo! What a piece of work! Rock-hard, handsome, hung, and always horny. He cruised into San Francisco airport like a smart-bomb. He climbed into my red ford F-100 pick-up truck. "Hey," he said. --feature article with photo spread, "Russo-Mania!"

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