Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache

How Music Came Out

by Martin Aston

Little, Brown Book Group
2016

Martin Aston’s Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out (2016) is a 600-page chronological history of LGBT influence on popular music from 1907 to the present, built from more than 90 new interviews. Jack Fritscher is referenced multiple times in the book’s account of San Francisco’s disco-era gay scene of the 1970s and ’80s, the period during which he was founding editor of Drummer magazine.

For further reading: Jack Fritscher’s own account of this era, “A Monograph: How Popular Songs Enhanced Twentieth-Century Gay Identity, Culture, and Literature.”