Roger: Gay Icon

(Daryll Roger Hanson)

Daryll Roger Hanson — known professionally by the single name Roger — was a physique performer and adult film star whom Jack Fritscher profiled after seeing him perform live at San Francisco’s Nob Hill Theater, in the Drummer 21 feature “Pumping Roger: I Did!” (March 1978), illustrated with photographs by Wakefield Poole. Sixteen years later, in a 1994 phone call preserved in Fritscher’s journals, Roger’s former partner and manager, Jim Bacon, told Fritscher how the story ended: Roger had died in a 1982 car crash at age twenty-seven. Fritscher revisited the same haunting image of Roger decades later in his 2020 poem “Death and Desire on Venice Beach,” published in Homosurrealism magazine.

Drummer No 021 Mar 1978
Pumping Roger: I Did

Homosurrealism Magazine
August 20, 2020
Death and Desire on Venice Beach