The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend by Jack Fritscher

Author:Jack Fritscher [Fritscher, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Larry Townsend, Jack Fritscher, Jeanne Barney, West Hollywood, French Quarter Restaurant, Santa Monica, Gay Erotic Fiction, Drummer Magazine, The Advocate
Publisher: Palm Drive Publishing
Published: 2021-07-12T07:00:00+00:00

17

COMING OUT IN 1950s LOS ANGELES

THREE MONTHS OLDER THAN JAMES DEAN

CRUISING THAT FAMOUS L.A. GAS STATION

FOR SEX

Larry was my platonic friend for almost forty years, and for all his gruff demeanor, he was so alive and kicking and contrary he was always interesting. He was a contentious West Hollywood superstar whom friends dealt with, and fans adored. Mindful of his public image, and constantly in search of an author head-shot that matched his idea of himself, he drove from Los Angeles to my home near San Francisco in 1995 and asked me to shoot him in a series of pictures, with and without his newest Doberman named “Mueller.”

Thirteen years later, during the last desperate spring of his life, he insisted he needed a new author photo so that Mark could re-start his website for him after he had let his ownership of his original domain name lapse. He also feared prosecution from new witch-hunt rulings from the U.S. Attorney General designed to cripple photographers who were suddenly required to have at least two proofs of identification plus a witnessed release to prove their models’ ages. Following the former protocols, he had no more on file for his archive of photos than a signed model release. It also depressed him that the internet claim-jumper who had bought LarryTownsend.com would not sell it back to him, he said, for less than a king’s ransom. When his new head-shot by an LA photographer arrived in Mark’s email, Larry wanted to Photoshop the truth of the original image. In Hollywood where the close-up is everything, and Hurrell lighting is something, he looked in the mirror of the photo and saw a vulnerable old man.

In 1996, when Larry asked me to write an “Introduction” to the forthcoming “Silver Anniversary Edition” of his Leatherman’s Handbook, I profiled him with the essay, “Leather Dolce Vita, Pop Culture, and the Prime of Mr. Larry Townsend.” The next year working together, we won the 1997 National Small Press Book Award for Erotica for the S&M anthology I wrote and he published: Rainbow County and Other Stories. Linguistically, he was one of the earliest leather authors coining portmanteau keywords tying leather and sex and men together to form the standard vocabulary of leathersex and leathermen.

Miffed at the queenstream’s relentless civil war of disinformation against leather males, including that which would become a kind of alleged institutional misandry at The Advocate, he continued to call out politically-correct leather-haters as he had in his purposeful opening paragraph in his own 1972 “Introduction” to The Leatherman’s Handbook:

There have been many books printed over the last few years dealing with various aspects of homosexual behavior and lifestyle. In all of these the leatherman is constantly neglected—neglected or ridiculed by the fluff or the “straight” reporter who wrote the book. In reading these previous efforts...I have been more than a little annoyed. So have many of my fellow leather people.

There is a pop-culture timeline for the always sassy man born during the Depression, a generation

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