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| THRUST Vol 1 No 4 |
| Shot solo by Jack Fritscher, in-your-face Cover Photograph, the color "butt shot" of Mr. America, Chris Duffy. Issue includes 2-page Inside-Front-Cover and Contents Page of Chris Duffy reclined, introducing Cover Copy which reads "Chris Duffy, Mr America, Palm Drive Video's "Sunset Bull" 80 square inches of thrust...and that's no bull." Interior full-color feature article, with 4 pages of text written by Jack Fritscher, titled, "Chris Duffy: A True Raging Bull," includes 10 Fritscher photographs of Chris Duffy, plus, on page 4, 2 photographs shot by Jack Fritscher of Mike Jacob for the Palm Drive video, My Nephew, My Lover. Also featured is an Armando Aguilar layout, full page, featuring Chris Duffy and Palm Drive Video. On page 11 is a joke-y small color photograph of Jack Fritscher posed as a "gangsta" by photographer Mark Hemry. Cover and layout design created by Armando Aguilar, Art Director, Thrust Magazine, Magcorp, Los Angeles..With his initiation into national publishing through the American pop culture of the Catholic press, Jack Fritscher began his writing and photography career in journalism with a long series of short fiction, feature articles, interviews, news stories, reviews, and photographs. Fritscher has written that the Catholic press with its emphasis on masculine men as athletes, priests, soldiers, martyrs, and heroes provided pages of fertile incubation for his gay male and sadomasochistic imagination. A long-time editor and writer for the bi-weekly, coated-stock slick news magazine, The Josephinum Review, Fritscher's first two-page interior photography spread, titled, "The Long Last Days before the Priesthood: Story for School's End," appeared in The Josephinum Review, May 22, 1963, pages 4 and 5. The 23-year-old Fritscher's storyboard design layout consisted of 12 black-and-white photographs he cast, directed, and shot of a pensive 25-year-old blond seminarian waiting out the last weeks before his ordination to the priesthood. Although Fritscher was still "pre-gay" by four years, the gay subtext of the photo spread is adroitly coded in photograph #6 which shows the blond seminarian, stripped to the waist, floating in close-up of pecs, broad shoulders, and a face just breaking the quiet surface of a pool, with the Whitmanesque caption: "And I will wonder/that I do not die,/giving glory/immersed/in the torrents of Him." Fritscher wrote the 62-line blank verse poem that he then wrapped as text around his twelve photographs. Fritscher's mentor in the Catholic press was also the straight editor for The Josephinum Review. |