©Jack Fritscher. See Permissions, Reprints, Quotations, Footnotes
Flippin’ the Bird...
Homomasculinity:
Why We’re Not Gay Anymore...
by Jack Fritscher
- This entire feature "Homomasculinity: Why We're Not Gay Anymore..." is also available in Acrobat pdf.
- Author's historical introduction
- Actual feature article as published
- Illustrations
written November 9, 2000
Original editorial written June 1982 and published in the first issue of
the California Action Guide, July 1982.
Straight publisher, Michael Redman, looking for an editor for his new tabloid ’zine the California Action Guide, ran an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle which I answered. He wanted to begin a gay magazine to accompany his straight tabloid, the San Francisco Pleasure Guide. We met at a café on 24th Street above Castro and during our three-hour conversation came to an accord based on our liking one another, and on the drawers full of writing and photography I had ready to go. Michael Redman was a highly successful and honest entrepreneur who, unlike gay publishers, actually paid salaries and paid them in full on time. He did “real business” not “gay business.” Mark Hemry was also hired as a producer to help create the publication.
I wrote this editorial as a kind of actual “Masculinist Manifesto” to be analog to what I was writing regarding the fictional “Masculinist Manifesto” in Some Dance to Remember which I was in the last stages of writing. (I completed the novel in 1984.) The editorial was illustrated with a photograph by David Hurles, Old Reliable.
The California Action Guide, which was sold in bookstores and in street-corner racks, was successful, but because of the sudden shocking advent of death caused by the plague of GRID, the first name for AIDS, publication ceased. Advertising dropped like a rock, and no sex publication can survive without the hustlers and masseurs who keep gay rags alive with their expensive display ads. I was not unhappy to stop, not because the tabloid was based not on politics like the Bay Area Reporter, but because it was deeply rooted in commercial urban sexual activity which I–far from being a Puritan preferring the abstract safety of sex on page and screen–thought was no longer safe, unless, foolhardy, one wanted to join in and become part of the experiment of what was safe and what was not.
Sometime after this half-militant and half-satirical editorial, Drummer editorial assistant Ken Lackey received a “Letter to the Drummer editor” based on a similar article I had written for Drummer, “Solosex.” The writer was commenting on, ultimately, the on-going political trouble of writing erotica against the rise of politically-correct lesbigay fascists. In Drummer 128, Lackey titled the letter, written by “GC, Portland, OR,” the “Good Jack Chronicles.” The text read: “I’ve been enjoying Jack Fritscher’s contributions to Drummer–the article in issue 123 on solosex/fetish videos was about as comprehensive as one could wish for...and without a hint of self-congratulation for being about the best of the bunch!...As a fellow Loyola U. (Los Angeles, though) graduate, let me express the wish that he’ll be able to continue his work without the interference of the new neo-fascists and their rapidly assembling storm-troopers, the new American (!??!) Neo-Nazis [the politically correct].”
Ken Lackey answered with the comment: “I’ll bet Jack could lick ten neo-fascists with one hand tied behind his back!”
And to this day, I resent how much time and energy has been taken out of my life and my writing fighting the Marxist-Leninist attempt by the politically correct to take over gay male homosexuality. They may work as convenient dramatic antagonists in Some Dance to Remember, but, as God is my Scarlett-O’Hara witness, I will never ever forgive any one of them for the in-fighting and intra-mural weakening they have done to harm the homosexual liberation movement. Gay lib could better have spent its energies doing outreach to the straight world to effect change in laws and perceptions of homosexuality for gay women and gay men. For the politically correct, their hateful goal is the (failed) system of Marx and Lenin–not gay liberation. The politically correct? I spit on their graves. –Jack Fritscher, November 9, 2000
Flippin’ the Bird...
Homomasculinity:
Why We’re Not Gay Anymore...
by Jack Fritscher
San Francisco. This first issue of the California Action Guide celebrates homomasculinity! What’s that, you ask? Graffiti sprayed at 10th and Harrison says: “QUEERS AGAINST GAYS.” California Action Guide is not against anyone or anything. Our only “philosophy” is to each his own.
However, we do understand men who don’t like to be called gay. Homosexual once was the word, but these days that sounds too genitally oriented; it seems to exclude our whole-body sensuality as well as our main sex organ: the head.
Outside of this special first-issue editorial to clue you into where CAG is coming from, you’ll not find us on any soapbox. But we would like to make some observations, because we know there are men, like you, out there who have no problem with being homosexual or queer. The California Action Guide prefers the word homomasculine.
Homomasculine men are mainly men who prefer other men who act like men.
The trouble homomasculine men have is not with their own preference, but with something none of us bargained for: the commercialized, politicized so-called “Gay Lifestyle.” Who needs it? Certainly not a man secure in his own male identity. We came out to bond with other masculine men, not to be part of a pack of clones, gay activists, and lesbians. All these folks have their rights and pleasures, which a man can respect without putdown, but they hardly concern homomasculinists who don’t give a fuck how many greeting card shops and ice cream parlors cater to the Castroids.
The California Action Guide is a homomasculinist-sensualist tabloid ’zine created to entertain men wanting to read about, and, especially, contact other masculinist men whose style ranges from easy loving to hardballing. It’s a simple approach to a group of men no other erotic rag is making. CAG is middle-of-the-road sucking and fucking with a click to the left into what might too quickly call kink. We’re only raunchy and S&M in the sense that in the 1980s sensibility of sanitized deodorants and urban terror, men who prefer other men as their release, assert their down-right upright homomasculinity not only through TLC, but also through some natural-juiced hard-balling Sensuality and Mutuality.
Gay may have been the word for the 1970s. For the 80s, we need homomasculinity to pull our non-commercial male hearts and minds and dicks back on the true course of our sexual preference: to make love with men and not be hassled, because we handle manlove the way men, not gays, handle it. When we homomasculinists are turned off to the bar-bath-boutique street-flaunting of “The Gay Lifestyle,” figure how much more turned off straights are.
Not that straights are by any means our judges; but straights, we know from experience, can handle homomasculine men. They like the dignity of our braving out our preference. Straight daddies who want to experiment will for sure have sex with a homomasculine man while they wouldn’t be caught dead with a gay. Straights and homomasculinists have this in common: what, if anything, does the commercialization, corporatization, and exploitation known as “The Gay Lifestyle” have to do with men loving other men?
So some stuff is fucked up. So what? Let it be. What is, is. What the California Action Guide has for you are monthly issues of stories, interviews, letters, and very hot personal classified ads for all kinds of “KICKS AND TRICKS,” whether you prefer you men as chicken, veal, or fullgrown beef. CAG is not vegetarian! And is chock full of men you can contact!
This is your paper. Send us your stories, your letters, your photos, your drawings, your ads. Put some energy out and get some energy back.
If you’re truly a man hunting other men, then right here in the homomasculinist pages of the California Action Guide, you’ll find that what you are looking for is looking for you!
©1982, 2003 Jack Fritscher
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