Independent Press Award 2024
LGBT+ Fiction: Distinguished Favorite

CASTRO STREET BLUES
A Covid Comedy
of Gay San Francisco

A Novel by
Jack Fritscher

Desperate Husbands:
A Gay Hero’s Journey through Covid

This amuse-bouche gay pop-culture novel of arts, ideas, and history, packed with comic dish, is a meta-fiction memoir told by a marvelously unreliable third-person narrator. The “coming-out novel” meets the “elder-exit novel” in the circle of life when the closet of quarantine disrupts a happily married couple aging in place.

The longtime husbands are survivors from 1950s homophobia to their rowdy post-Stonewall life of fifty years in San Francisco. Their pre-Covid queer life flashes by in homosurreal memory scenes of magical realism, gay travel, late-night movies, online cruising, and their own video-selfie diaries of friends gone with the wind of AIDS.

The author keeps this tale of lockdown, school bullies, wicked priests, body image fascism, climate change, and gay marriage real and authentic with time-capsule headlines ripped from the news around MAGA insurrectionists, gay-bar shootings, and the migration of Black Leather Swans to Palm Springs.

This literary fiction is as entertaining as the author’s award-winning Lammy Finalist Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982.

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Reviews: "What the Critics Say"

• “Jack Fritscher reads gloriously.” San Franscico Chronicle
• “Jack Fritscher writes wonderful books...careful writing...a world of insight.”
  — Geoff Mains, The Advocate
  
• “Jack Fritscher is an icon and pioneer provocateur from San Francisco’s sexual heyday alongside sex idols Peter Berlin, Annie Sprinkle, David Steinberg, Rumi Missabu, and the Cockettes.” —San Francisco Magazine
  
• “Jack Fritscher is a prolific writer who since the late 1960s has helped document the gay world and the changes it has undergone.”
  —Willie Walker, founder, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco