Physique Pictorial Interviews Jack Fritscher on Larry Townsend

“PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL”
No. 64 Spring 2023

INTERVIEW

Corbin Crable asks “Drummer” Editor Jack Fritscher

Leading Questions

about the Legendary Larry Townsend

Editor’s Note: Jack Fritscher, author of the fast-paced new memoir of Larry Townsend, is the founding San Francisco editor of “Drummer” magazine, His twenty books include his best-selling memoir of his bicoastal lover “Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera,” and his Lammy Finalist novel of physique contests and hustler worship: “Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982.” In 1985, he and his longtime husband Mark Hemry founded their iconic Palm Drive Video studio currently featured in the award-winning documentary “Raw!Uncut!Video!: A Love Story about Fetish Porn.” Fritscher has written how he came out on “Physique Pictorial” in the 1950s, and how deeply Bob Mizer’s style and content influenced his own development as a photographer and videographer in gay media. He and Larry Townsend were friends and collaborators for forty years. More: www.JackFritscher.com

“The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend:

Saluting the 50^th Anniversary of ‘The Leatherman’s Handbook’”

by Jack Fritscher, Palm Drive Publishing,

205 pages, including 53 pages of captioned photos/illustrations

Paperback/Kindle

1. How did you conceive of the idea to write this book about Larry Townsend?

Thirteen years after Larry Townsend died at age 77, I wrote my memoir about my friend of forty years on what would have been his ninetieth birthday to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his “Leatherman’s Handbook.” Published to great acclaim in 1972, it was the world’s first analysis of leatherfolk identity and sexuality. Like Bob Mizer who was a founder of gay culture, Larry deserves foundational attention. Guys who like Bob’s AMG images of dominance, submission, and worship are often also fans of Larry’s leather books and photos.

For all the applause around Larry’s very popular 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.

So at age 82, I wrote about this exciting writer, this activist, this man in full, warts and all, from my personal experience of him and of his big booming voice which I quote from his own vintage words folded inside yellowing periodicals, nostalgic letters, fading faxes, and recorded phone conversations. I was delighted when Durk Dehner of the Tom of Finland Foundation wrote in his review: “Larry Townsend was one of the most ethical and honest people I have had the pleasure of knowing. This is the Hollywood story of how he lived and how he died on Sunset Plaza Drive, five minutes from Sunset Boulevard.”

2. What interests you most about his life and his contributions to gay culture?

Years before Stonewall, Larry was one of the first gay authors to build a bond with readers who could not resist his powerful books. He was authentic. He was fun. He was political. He was a beloved star. He could pack crowds of fans into bookstores for his famous readings. He was also credentialed from his degree in psychology from UCLA, from his 1950s stint as Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Air Force in Germany, and from his hands-on S&M experience. He was the perfect eyewitness “Seer” to become a “Sayer.” He wrote about what he knew. He truly lived the leather life he reported on. By doing so in his “Handbook” and in his 25 years of leather advice columns in “Drummer” and “Honcho,” he shaped and analyzed the emergence and evolving future of leather life as we still live it.

Writers of erotica are sex workers, and he was genius in his super-power of connecting with his readers. He could make men cum to his words the way men came to Bob Mizer’s photos and films. That’s power! To make words that cause soft flesh to harden—and seed to shoot. Grateful leathermen still swear allegiance to the “Liege Lord of Leather” because his arousing porn also taught them how to live leather—and how to think about themselves living a performative S&M lifestyle.

He was fraternal, a brother to his readers. He was not at all patriarchal like some rude leather Daddy master barking “Thou Shalt wield the whip this way.” He was never Old Guard. He was always Avant-Garde. He never told anyone what to do. Nobody died and made him Boss. Instead, he described what guys did in BDSM so readers might have a how-to guide if they wanted to try it. He taught sex. He gave people ideas. His fans loved that.

3. What makes Townsend's "The Leatherman's Handbook" so compelling even today?

Truth. His truth remains compelling. Larry was an eyewitness of the birth of post-War leather culture. In the closeted mid-century, he dared write the truth about the way we were. Authors have been jailed and killed for daring to do what Bob and he did. He was revolutionary. He was the same age as the two rebels without a cause, James Dean and Marlon Brando, two leather avatars who imprinted our homomasculine culture. He shared a lover with that other leathery Hollywood star, Montgomery Clift. Unlike those rebels, he had a cause: gay liberation for men.

In the Hollywood of 1955, he came out in the Los Angeles bar, Cinema, which was likely the first leather bar in the world. Cinema was at the intersection of Melrose and Gower which was a hot cruising zone appreciated by Bob Mizer who was always scouting talent for his AMG Studio only five miles away

From the 1950s to his death in 2008, Larry had his hand on the pulse and other body parts of sexually active homomasculine leathermen who adored him for his honesty. He was a sexual freedom fighter. He encouraged his readers to dare do what they wanted. “The Leatherman’s Handbook” remains compelling today because it is a book of sexual principles that defy time and enable young leatherfolk to use his insights to evolve new leather and kink identities in the twenty-first century. Old Hands at leather love him because he was a journalist recording their past. New Hands like him because he was a futurist anticipating the arrival of their new next-generation leather done their way.

4. Townsend was an out gay man when identifying as such could endanger your well-being or even your life. How did he and his works provide hope for closeted gay men in the post-war era?

As a high-school teenager during the Second World War when his father was an American spy, Larry was a plane-spotter scanning the American skies for incoming Nazi fighters. That made him a perfect gay point man and lookout in our war against gay oppression. Serving in Air Force Intelligence, the son of a spy was also a spy. He knew danger. He received an award from the German Embassy in 1955 for jumping fully clothed into the Rhine River to save a drowning German boy. Never “in” the closet, Larry was always “out” to help.

In 1972, he became president of the iconic Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (H.E.L.P.) which he helped found in 1968 to defend gays during and after entrapment arrests by the LAPD. As a writer, he also led the founding of the “H.E.L.P. Newsletter,” the yellow-pulp tabloid forebear of the slick and glossy “Drummer” magazine founded in LA in 1975. Larry was well aware of the dangers from sex fascists. He was arrested three times by the LAPD for having sex. That persecution made him a committed activist just as his first novels hit the press in 1968. He, who was born “Irvin Townsend Bernhard, Junior,” changed his name in 1972 to “Michael Lawrence ‘Larry’ Townsend” and put his new name on the line. He gave gay men hope.

He was a masterful leather-identity author spying out and mapping gender legitimacy for leathermen un-closeting their virilized homomasculine selves in a post-Stonewall media culture dominated by drag, effeminacy, and Marxism—all of which have perfect rights to exist. He tolerated everyone except separatist Marxists. Closeted readers across the U.S. and Europe found hope in the novelist whose brave social actions in LA spoke even louder than his erotic words.

They liked his street cred. They liked that the rugged 6-foot-1, 250-pound author got up from his desk and practiced what he preached. They respected his community spirit in his volunteer work as an activist at H.E.L.P. and as the founding president of the Hollywood Hills Democratic Club. He also served on the board of the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation when gay Californians first set about erecting a united political and philosophical platform. He worked tirelessly to give hope to gay men.

5. Did you learn anything new about Townsend throughout the research phase of writing your book?

In researching his work, I discovered the connective tissue that held him together as a person and as an activist writer and photographer because he had given me full access to his files and archives. He was one of the most interesting people I ever met. He lived for 43 years in the Hollywood Hills not far from the Hollywood Sign with his genial and campy lover and business partner Fred Yerkes who died in 2006. In terms of relationships, it was important to me to spend some pages covering his fiery relationship with his “Leather Wife,” Jeanne Barney, the fierce LA editor of the first eleven issues of “Drummer.” There are two chapters devoted to that musical-comedy of frenemies.

Larry and I were friends without benefits for more than forty years, so there were no real Ah-Ha! moments for me because I always held my chosen brother close in my heart and head. But I did enjoy, almost at a visceral level, weaving all that intimate connective tissue together for readers interested in what the Great Man did and what made him tick.

The real lesson in the book is that gay culture can drive a man mad. If Larry’s history is anything beyond his hot skills as a writer, it is a cautionary tale warning readers about the danger of gay men growing older and losing their cool the way Larry did and Truman Capote did and Quentin Crisp did and Tennessee Williams did and Gore Vidal did who “died of booze and revenge” according to his frenemy Edmund White—a fate Bob Mizer seems to have escaped.

If Larry had paid attention to any one of them, he might have learned not to become the litigious gay old man yelling at the neighbors’ kids to get off his gay lawn, or he’d sue them for revenge! As happened, his righteous lawsuit against gay bookstores and a publisher whom he thought had done him wrong, was, in fact, the last thing he ever did. Thank God, I was lucky enough to stop it while he lay on his deathbed.

6. How has the book been received thus far?

Thanks for asking. The reviews have been some kind of wonderful. It seems that this fiftieth anniversary of Larry’s “Handbook” is the perfect time to re-visit and enjoy his nonfiction and fiction books like “Run, Little Leather Boy.” Texts and emails to me reveal there is now a Nostalgia for the Leather Past among men who lived it and among men who were born after the Titanic 1970s ran into the iceberg of HIV. For guys like that—from my own intimate life with Larry—I tried to write an entertaining and informative book that they can read fast in two nights.

After the Stonewall Riot changed gay character in 1969, its aggressive violent energy, affecting Larry, swept like a virus through gay culture igniting the divisive gay civil war over race, sex, and gender 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.

The mainstream queenstream has till now rather much cancelled Larry and ignored his work. Critics and readers seem glad this book revives him and his work with respect. I like the review by Owen Keehnen who wrote a similar book about another gay leather icon: “Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow.” Keehnen wrote; “Fritscher celebrates this key figure in the leather/kink world not by putting him on a pedestal, but by capturing him in all his full unvarnished glory, and in doing so makes a significant contribution to an often-overlooked chapter of LGBTQ history.”

7. How might have earlier publishers like Bob Mizer influenced Townsend's works in gay media?

Larry had great respect for trail-blazer Mizer. Larry told me that before he came out into bars in 1955, he had been inching out reading “Physique Pictorial” almost since its founding in 1951. In fact, when Larry founded his mail-order company, LT Publications, in 1972, he built it on Mizer’s tried-and-true independent business model for 1) creating one’s own product of words and pictures and 2) selling that product through mail order. Gay entrepreneurs like Bob and Larry were, in fact, the enterprising first gay small-business owners who were not owners of bars. Through their mail-order marketing lists, they created the first gay web linking men together coast to coast. They broke the loneliness of the closet. Then they broke the closet.

8. Both Townsend and Mizer's life works were very steeped in social justice and actively resisting censorship. Now that the battle has moved from the realm of print media to digital, what must artists do to share their works while advocating for freedom of artistic expression in the Digital Age?

You are so right. Bob and Larry both deserve gay sainthood as social justice warriors fighting censorship while championing diversity of face and race in their published pages. They helped gay lib happen. People sometimes think of Bob as a photographer and forget that he was also an editorial writer campaigning for freedom of the press. Larry through his political activism also fought against censorship. Both of them learned hard lessons about protecting their copyrights against pirates, and those lessons apply to creators in the digital age.

As mentioned in that dramatic 2008 lawsuit, Larry died trying to protect his copyright from, he said, a predatory book publisher who was selling unauthorized editions of his work. His lawsuit says everything about his lifelong mission to protect gay creators and their copyrights that he began in earnest in San Francisco on June 15, 1970, at the first Gay Writers Conference at the SIR Center for the Society for Individual Rights.

Of all the gay rights Larry championed, his passion was to alert LGBT creators—analog and digital—not to be so masochistic that they foolishly sign over their copyrights and re-print rights to publishers in order to have their writing, drawings, and photographs make it into print.

9. Ultimately, what is Townsend's legacy?

The point of my memoir is to highlight his legacy. Physically, his legacy is eighty books of fiction and nonfiction, dozens of stand-alone magazine-like booklets of prose and pictures, hundreds of advice columns, letters, emails, and an archive filled with clippings about the rise of gay culture and leather pride. His work is archived at Yale, the ONE Institute in Los Angeles, and the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago. My Townsend holdings will go with my papers to the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University. Emotionally, his legacy can be experienced by readers in the beating heart of his writings into which he poured his prayers, works, joys and sufferings. He gave his all. Who could ask for anything more?

10. Finally, what projects are you working on next?

After Larry? What encore is possible? At the moment, I’m doing the final edit on a book collection of my old and new essays about fab leatherfolk similar to Larry—like David Hurles of Old Reliable Studio who was mentored by his dear friend Bob Mizer for whom David wrote the most wonderful eulogy. Next, for fun, a collection of all my sex stories that will be a “door-stop” of a book at nearly a thousand pages—just because I want to wrap up and tie a bow around my fifty-year career of writing for dozens of gay mags that no longer exist but still deserve attention.

Mark Hemry, my dear husband of 42 years, is an internet guru and he continues to build our website of more than ten thousand pages where at www.JackFritscher.com everyone can read free the texts of all my books, including “Larry,” as well as all my other work documenting gay arts, ideas, and culture.

Last, but not least, we are currently over the moon supporting the rolling premieres of the new video documentary about our Palm Drive Video studio directed by Ryan White and Alex Clausen who montaged into their film scenes from the 160 fetish features I directed and shot, and Mark produced and edited from 1986 to 1995.

“Raw!Uncut!Video: A love Story about Fetish Porn” is currently streaming on line while playing in fifty or so gay film fests from San Francisco to Singapore, New York to Paris, Boston to Berlin, Los Angeles to Vancouver. What’s the cool backstory about this is that I came out in the 1950s on magazines like “Tomorrow’s Man” and Bob’s “Physique Pictorial” that shaped my taste and my esthetic on page and screen. Without Bob Mizer (and Kenneth Anger) forging the past like Larry, there would be no Palm Drive Video. © 2021 Jack Fritscher