Some Critics Profile
“Veteran author, Jack Fritscher, is an anarchist of Gay sexual prose, the man who invented the South of Market prose style…as well as its magazines…” —John F. Karr, Bay Area Reporter
“Gore Vidal…James Baldwin…Andrew Holleran…Jack Fritscher…classic!” —David Van Leer, The New Republic
“Jack Fritscher’s prose is…stark, subtle, smooth and suggestive, richly erotic.” —Richard Labonté, In Touch.
“Jack Fritscher’s short-story anthology Stand by Your Man [is] the most literate of the lot of erotic fiction in a strong year of gay literature.” —Richard Labonté, The Advocate.
“Fritscher’s Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley is a collection of twenty-one assertively sexual and imaginatively arousing pieces…elegant fantasies…rough-and-tumble orgies of the mind…the title tale is actually a twenty-page torrent of S&M wordplay” —Richard Labonté, In Touch, Los Angeles
“Fritscher’s cool quiet sadomasochistic material in Leather Blues is sometimes heavy-duty S&M…surreal mix of dreams and memories…almost Proustian in his associations…a power and beauty that is breath-taking…Fritscher shows us just how good the choice of words can be.” —T. R. Witomski, Connection, New York
“…from the pen of Drummer’s original daddy, its founding San Francisco editor-in-chief, Jack Fritscher. Devotees…will find a lot to like…literate, funky, honest…even funny by intent…a good read.” —NBN Newspaper
“Jack Fritscher is a master of gay prose pornography, a rarity in our…video-oriented culture….He plays with the brain, man’s most accessible and effectively reached sexual organ….The manner in which he manipulates language, sensuality, feeling, nuance, style, atmosphere, and even one’s visual sense…is enough to guarantee…sensational status for many, many years.” —Q, Philadelphia Gay News
“Jack Fritscher has roamed the furthest corners of sexuality, and can lead you on head trips unequaled by any other Gay writer I know of. You may resist, as I did, some of the aggression, machismo, and sexual practices only to be won over by Fritscher’s prose….[He] writes with sweat and wit, dirt and desire. Fritscher is a knee to the groin….His sex…is aggressive, abusive, extreme, and at times (I have to say it), politically incorrect. But his free-wheeling prose creates a believable world of hedonistic sensuality. Forms of sex some readers might find unpalatable in life become arousing within the realm of fantasy, and Fritscher’s work is clearly such. Within Fritscher’s forbidden world we are safe, and that is what fiction is for….Fritscher, as a key creator of Drummer magazine, is godfather to the contemporary South of Market man…” —John F. Karr, Bay Area Reporter
“Jack Fritscher writes…wonderful books, full of careful writing and a fine sense of words. Full of compassion and humor…full of hot horny fantasies that make good one-handed reading…his writing surges with lyricism and insight….Fritscher creates his text from images, memories, and fantasies…His writing becomes a frieze, a fine carving, lovingly crafted….He shows man as tester and prover, as erotic dreamer, as self-lover, and as shaman crossing old barriers and old prejudices…There is a world of insight packed into his metaphors.” —Geoff Mains, author of Urban Aboriginals, in The Advocate
“Jack Fritscher’s writing is a potent aphrodisiac. The reader will pant for his own chance at manhandling (or being manhandled) during a stimulating read….Fritscher knows the rhythms of writing fuckprose. Like Rechy, he joins words in powerful couplings…remarkably hot sex scenes….Fritscher is a poet of porn [who through fantasy will] chase away periods of safe-sex melancholy.” —Joseph D. Butkie, Bay Area Reporter
“S/M Fiction [has become] unabashedly romantic…the endless quest for love…Phil Andros…John Preston…Jack Fritscher….Corporal-in-Charge by Fritscher is perhaps the best book of the lot. It is a collection of short pieces, all of which deal with S/M and individual consciousness. Like Genet’s work, Fritscher’s are essentially masturbatory fantasies which deal in a closed world of the imagination. They are as violent, cruel, and explicit as any of the other writing [by Andros and Preston whose Mr. Benson Fritscher edited]—and as romantic ….Fritscher is actually talking about the fantasy of romance. His work is not romantic per se, but rather, is how we think and talk about sex and romance….Fritscher’s Leather Blues…is explicit sexuality with the theme of the young man learning from the older. It is also a masculine version of true love…between equals, both of whom have learned to love themselves and one another. [Such transcendentally “cruel” romance] explores and expands our sexualities—and our lives and minds…a way to keep anchored to tradition so that we can go out of ourselves without ever losing ourselves…Readers want their sexuality reaffirmed, and graphically drawn…by presenting an S/M sexuality in the confines of romantic tradition…The S/M makes the emotional content more varied and vital. It is the romance which makes the more frightening aspects…palatable and easier to deal with.” —Michael Bronski, Gay Community News, Boston
“Fritscher…is at his best in his erotic, inventive use of language…Fritscher is truly our Pynchon of Porn.” —Thor Stockman, GMSMA News, New York
“Jack Fritscher and his high-brow, gutter-level ruminations [offer] privileged glimpses of that unique cock-stiffening domain of which Fritscher is the sole demiurge….As a writer, Fritscher is hard to categorize….He’s a jittery stylist with a kinetic verbal sense….[His style] works spectacularly….There’s enough ghettoized angst to keep the Manhattan gay literati wired for months.” —Aaron Travis/Steven Saylor, Drummer Magazine, San Francisco
“…a very particular style and rhythm….The subject matter is as varied as Fritscher’s imagination, which seems endless and without remorse. What may really surprise you is that amid the graphic descriptions of every act known to man, there are actually ideas here.” —Drummer Magazine, San Francisco
“Jack Fritscher’s gift for language makes me think of the poet Dennis Cooper…a strong element of romanticism….unlike most writers of dirty stories, Fritscher loves words as well as what they describe…one of the hottest books….” —Ian Young, author, The Stonewall Experiment, in The Body Politic, Toronto
“Jack Fritscher does for gay writing what his bicoastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe did for photography.” —Tom Phillips, We the People
“As a document of our times and our lives, Jack Fritscher’s novel Some Dance to Remember has no peer.” —Jack Garman, Lambda Book Report