Jack Fritscher is a novelist, journalist, photographer, videographer, playwright, screenwriter, tenured university professor, arts critic and pop culture historian who specializes in American literature, creative writing, criticism, American pop culture and masculine-identified, gay pop culture. During much of the 1970's Fritscher edited Drummer, perhaps the most important and influential gay publication to come out of San Francisco’s Gay Golden Age (1970-1982). Fritscher is also the author of the leathersex classic Leather Blues, several volumes of gayrotic short stories - Alyson Books’ anthology Jacked features the best of these - and an acclaimed biography of his friend and lover, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Certainly a writer as prolific as Jack Fritscher could not be pigeonholed in any category. Two of his most important books, now back in print, indicate the scope of this man’s mind. Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch’s Mouth, first published in 1972, was the first book of its kind to show the link between witchcraft and racial, gender, and sexual liberation. In this book Fritscher, himself an ordained (though excommunicated) exorcist, writes about the evil eye, the queer eye, grimoires, priapic magic, Satanism and New Age self-help. Popular Witchcraft also features Fritscher’s interview with the late Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. This second edition has the Fritscher/LaVey interview in full, as well as other choice bits that were censored out of the first edition. Being as we are in a new age of censorship, this new edition of Fritscher’s Popular Witchcraft has come to us right in the nick of time.

Popular histories of gay life in the 1970's, like the recently-released documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, make New York City the center of the gay world. Those who survived San Francisco’s Gay Golden Age (1970-1982), like Jack Fritscher, know better. Some Dance To Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco, 1970-1982, first published in 1990, is Fritscher’s tribute to this amazing time. Those who only know Gavin Newsom’s yuppified San Francisco should read Fritscher’s riveting account of gay gyms, leatherbars and sex clubs in the pre-AIDS Castro and South of Market neighborhoods. The cast of characters is as big as all San Francisco, and include a drop-dead gorgeous blond bodybuilder, a madcap gonzo writer, an erotic video mogul, a fabulous cabaret chanteuse and a Hollywood bitch TV producer, just to name a few. As if that wasn’t enough, real life characters like Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Dan White and Dianne Feinstein take their turns within Fritscher’s pages. At 438 pages, Some Dance To Remember is nothing less than an epic, which is probably why The Advocate called it “the gay Gone With the Wind.”

KINGS IN THEIR CASTLES: PHOTOGRAPHS of QUEER MEN AT HOME by Tom Atwood, Foreword by Charles Kaiser; University of Wisconsin Press, 92 pages; $35.

Who would have thought that so many good books would come out of the University of Wisconsin Press? The publisher of the new edition of Jack Fritscher’s Popular Witchcraft is also responsible for this interesting and unique photo collection. Arguing that “gay men are actually more interesting with their clothes on,” photographer Tom Atwood captured an assortment of gay artists, authors, musicians and designers, fully clothed, in the familiar surroundings of their homes. Among the dignitaries (and their homes) who appear in Kings In Their Castles are novelist Michael Cunningham, composer Ned Rorem, film maker John Waters and even Hedda Lettuce! Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis, puts all of this into perspective with his very incisive foreword.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner and many books. You may reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.