Profiles in Gay Courage

This essential art history by eyewitness-participant Fritscher examines one of 20-century art's great questions of influence and mentorship - George Dureau to Robert Mapplethorpe- two icons colliding around race, primacy, and originality. In lively transcripts, beloved New Orleans painter-photographer-sculptor Dureau holds court on life, lensing black men, and mentoring Mapplethorpe. While ambitious student Robert eclipsed his teacher by inflecting George's regional work for New York tastes, neither was a villain in the ten-year tutorial-duel that ended when both suddenly stopped shooting black men in 1988. This legacy book, authenticated by friends and family, is a mandate. Both photographers asked historian Fritscher whom they knew for years to tell their stories. So he first wrote about his 1970s bicoastal lover Robert in Drummer magazine in 1978, and began recording George immediately after Robert's death in 1989. His immersive introduction curating the overshadowed Dureau leads Virgil-like through important chat sessions captured by phone, and video on Dureau's French Quarter balcony, 1989-1991, revealing Dureau, demanding, generous, uproarious, pursuing art despite the odds surrounding homosexuality, race, and disability. This is George speaking for himself, fit and on top before the Millennium, Hurricane Katrina, and Alzheimer's took their toll. Fritscher's release of this archival material, part of his Mapplethorpe canon, is a great gift and an act of love for Dureau, Mapplethorpe, and their models. This illustrated fast-read is essential art research illuminating two Titans at the end of the 1980s, recalling the way they really were before their lives became legends that became myth.

Historian Jack Fritscher's newest book, Inventing the Gay Gaze: Rex, Peter Berlin, Arthur Tress, and Crawford Barton, is the third volume in his award-winning series Profiles in Gay Courage showcasing twentieth-century artists speaking to the twenty-first century in this revealing book of lively annotated oral-history interviews as enjoyable as heart-to-heart conversations in an artist's private atelier. The artist Rex drawing his pointillist pictures, and the three photographers, Berlin, Tress, and Barton, speak for themselves inventing their own authentic queer eye during the Stonewall 1970s dominated by the politically-correct gaze of censors, and by the influence of their common frenemy Robert Mapplethorpe whose spirit infuses this boundary-breaking book. Eyewitness Fritscher has known these artists since the 1970s when as editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine, he first published their pioneering work. He canonizes his iconic friends by curating their specific avant-garde histories within the context of mainstream gay history that readers will find informative and entertaining. In four unfiltered conversations, he profiles the reclusive anarchist Rex who designated him to hear his deathbed confession. In his chat with photographer Peter Berlin, celebrating Berlin's 80th birthday, Berlin details how his camera-eye created his strutting alter-ego. In dialogue with ethnographic photographer Arthur Tress, Tress explains using the magical realism of midcentury modernism to develop his unique perspective. In his tête-à-tête visit with the dying Crawford Barton, the key photographer of 1970s Castro Street, Barton recalls escaping the homophobic American South to document diversities of men in San Francisco. For art lovers, LGBTQ+ archives, book groups.