Jack Fritscher - The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend

The Life and Times

of the Legendary

Larry Townsend

Author, The Leathermans Handbook

27 October 1930 29 July 2008

A Memoir

On the 90th Anniversary of His Birth

and the 50th Anniversary

of The Leathermans Handbook

Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.

Archival Edition

Jack Fritscher-Mark Hemry Archives

Palm Drive Publishing

The Sexual Revolution

of the Titanic 1970s

Epigraph

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy

they smashed up things and creatures and

then retreated back into their money or

their vast carelessness or whatever it was

that kept them together, and

let other people clean up the mess they had made.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Larry Townsend, age 20, self-portrait, 1950, shot shortly before he volunteered for the U.S. Air Force and served as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of Air Intelligence Squadrons with the U.S. Air Force in Germany (1950-1954).

Los Angeles Times , April 14, 1955

UCLA Student Gets Medal for Rhine Heroism

Irvin T. Bernhard, 24, UCLA sophomore [name later changed to Michael Lawrence Larry Townsend, July 19, 1972], was presented with a medal and scroll yesterday by Dr. Richard Hertz, German Consul General in Los Angeles, for saving a 9-year-old German boy from drowning in the Rhine River at Bonn last August.

Gov. Karl Arnold of the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen sent the scroll and medal to Dr. Hertz for presentation to Bernhard, who was a member of the U.S. Air Force when he performed the heroic feat.

The youngster had been riding along a Rhine River road on his scooter when he had an accident and fell into the deep river. As a swift current spun the boy around in the water, Bernhard, who was eating at a nearby sidewalk caf, got up, raced to the river, and dived in fully dressed.

I swallowed an awful lot of the Rhine, but the two of us made it back to shore all right, Bernhard, who lives at 624 Veteran Avenue, West Los Angeles, recounted yesterday in the German Consulate at 3450 Wilshire Blvd. Accompanying the young man to the Consulate was his sister, Mrs. Ralph J. Tingle of 621 S. Barrington Avenue, who proudly looked on as Dr. Hertz gave the awards.

THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER LARRY

HIS 90th BIRTHDAY

THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF

THE LEATHERMANS HANDBOOK

Thirteen years after Larry Townsends death, I am writing this valedictory memoir about my friend on his ninetieth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of his Leathermans Handbook which was the first analysis of leatherfolk in the twentieth century. For all the praise around his legend, no one has yet bothered to study his life, his writing, or his historical context. No one has mounted exhibits of the photos he shot, or of the hundreds of erotic drawings and photographs he commissioned as a gay arts patron to illustrate his publications. At age 82, I am writing about this writer, this activist, this man in full, warts and all, from my personal experience of him and of his big booming voice which I am quoting from his own vintage words folded inside yellowing periodicals, nostalgic letters, fading faxes, and recorded phone conversations.

Im not exposing anything secret here about him or his inner circle of Drummer editor Jeanne Barney, Drummer publisher John Embry, film director Roger Earl, and film producer Terry Legrand, because in life, and in business on page and screen, these exhibitionists, always acting out, lived large in plain sight, and doubled-dared anyone to make a crack. While Im diving deep in this memoir, in this dissonant Hollywood musical-comedy, I could, in fact, dive deeper into my memory and archives, but these people who were my friends are too recently deceased to go there in this quantum writing that folds time elliptically while repeating a few stories to stir in spiraling new facts and feelings each time with more Rashomon information. This apologia for them contains an apology to them. Because I am a fallible human writing about other fallible humans, I wish my commemoration to give the benefit of the doubt to all the living and dead. So what I opine in this memoir I write allegedly. Didnt Chaucer, grown old, ask forgiveness for any slights in his Canterbury Tales ? Im just a documentarian letting the found footage play, like Magnus Bishop, the pop-culture professor, who is the narrator of my novel Some Dance to Remember .

After the Stonewall Riot changed gay character in 1969, its aggressive violent energy, affecting Larry, swept virulent through gay culture igniting the divisive gay civil war that began at the Stonewall Inn and continues to this day in politically-correct cancel culture over who and what is authentic, proper, and kosher enough to represent gay folk. For instance, gay literary criticism is often twisted by all kinds of purity tests around politics, sex, race, and gender. For all its vaunted equality and diversity, it is often applied exclusively, arbitrarily, and without nuance. Can politically-correct thinking cancel critical thinking?

Larry Townsend as avatar and victim is a case in point of who gets to march in the Pride Parade. The gay literary establishment that recruits diversity had no place at the table for gay folk-author Townsend, and little understanding of his hearty gay pop-culture literature that spoke authentically to the psyche at the heart of male homo sex uality. To his credit as a psychologist and healing mentor, he dared champion consensual sadomasochism as an empowering analgesic ritual for men trying to cope counterphobically with PTSD caused by exposure to lifelong homophobia.

San Francisco novelist Frank Norris wrote: A literature that cannot be vulgarized is not literature at all. Vulgar means popular in the same good way the Vulgate Bible stories were written as accessible pulp-fiction for ordinary people. In literary reckonings, Larry tried to shrug off the insult that his best-selling pop-art vulgate novels were squeezed out of the gay canon, but a draft up your kilt is always cold.

Canons are a construct of social engineering. Canons rarely open. Canons stay stodgy because of competitive passions over incoming reputations and politics, as well as over ages-old bourgeois fears that formerly illegal adult subject matter and vocabulary, no matter how brilliant or essential, will somehow taint the polite literary canon, lose arts funding, threaten classrooms of innocent students, and ruin the reputations of publishers, bookstores, and journals that acknowledge it. You know. Ulysses. Lady Chatterleys Lover. Howl .

The canon of American pop music rejected rap before accepting a vulgate art form that is as essential to Black culture as literary erotica is to gay culture. S&M literary erotica is to mainstream gay literature what tough-and-sexy film noir is to mainstream Hollywood studio family fare. Like the named genres of Gay Mysteries and Gay Sci-Fi, this genre, often historicized as Gay Pulp Fiction, might be more distinctly dubbed Gay Literotica or Gay Leatherotica.

Thanks to scholars of progress and balance, there is a post-Stonewall reclamation effort around lost LGBT Literotica. One champion of this genre of gay American literature is Harvard professor Michael Bronski who thanked Larry Townsend for his help in gathering research material for Bronskis nonfiction book, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps. In his Introduction, Bronski wrote that while reclaiming