A Memoir of Essays and Interviews
Profiles in Gay Courage Vol 3
Publication Date: Spring 2025
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 mid-century 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
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Inventing the Gay Gaze: Rex, Peter Berlin, Arthur Tress, and Crawford Barton
Chapter 1: Rex Requiem: Corrupt Beyond Innocence
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Chapter 2: Peter Berlin: Afternoon Tea with “The Lion in Winter”
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Chapter 3: Arthur Tress: Tressian Homosurrealism
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Chapter 4: Crawford Barton: San Francisco Photographer of Beautiful Men
Text — PDF