Days of Love

Celebrating LGBT History
One Story at a Time

by Elisa Rolle
2014

Elisa Rolle’s Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story at a Time (2014) chronicles more than 700 same-sex couples across 2,000 years, from Alexander the Great to contemporary Lambda Literary Award winners, each profiled in a postcard-style entry with photographs. Jack Fritscher and Mark Hemry’s own entry appears on page 558, alongside figures like Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, and Marlon Brando.

Jack Fritscher & Mark Hemry

Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. is a San Francisco novelist, magazine editor, historian, photographer, university professor, and social activist tutored by Saul Alinsky (1962), and known internationally for his fiction and non-fiction analyses of gay popular culture. Arriving in San Francisco in 1961, age 22, unaware his future soul-mate Mark Hemry, in Missouri, was age eleven, he began his career with his 1965 novel, What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy. In 1967, he wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Tennessee Williams, and as a founding member of the American Popular Culture Association insured inclusion of a gay-studies plank (1968), and publication of his gay-lib book, Popular Witchcraft (1972). As founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine (1975-1999), he revived the career of Edith Sitwell’s darling, and Gertrude Stein’s protege, Samuel Steward (Phil Andros); welcomed Tom of Finland to America; and gave Robert Mapplethorpe his first magazine cover.

Together since 1979: 36 years.

Jack Fritscher (born June 20, 1939)
Mark Hemry (born May 14, 1950)
Anniversary: May 22, 1979
Married: June 20, 2008