Books by Jack Fritscher

"Tuning in to media literacy as a modern survival skill. Because all of human life ends up on television today, as it did fifty years ago, the principles of critical thinking need to be taught to each young generation because fake news never dies. This lively and historic pop-culture guide teaching how to decode television was written when a pre-Watergate Richard Nixon was president, and republished during the 2020 election disruption of media. It affirms that timeless principles of critical thinking do not change, nor does human behavior. This 1970 book is an artifact of its times which were then-and now. Nixon can be a synonym for Trump. The necessity of critical thinking for one's self-defense never goes away. This book suggests that the goal for a person's liberation from authoritarians and fundamentalists through education is the ability to interpret, understand, and survive the towering babble of people, media, politics, religion, art, and society. In the 1960s, high schools and universities were the crucible of revolution and change around war, race, and gender. That fact angered conservative politicians who have continued with purpose to systematically de-fund education from kindergarten to college, and have allowed student debt to rise to discouraging levels, because American citizens schooled in critical thinking are a voting population of logic, resistance, and change that questions their rhetoric, and threatens their regime, riches, religion, and reasoning. In his foreword, the author explains: "I wrote this book for teen-age students while teaching American literature on one of those progressive university campuses in the 1960s when film-crazy and politically active students enthusiastically diverted arts-and-ideas discussions of classic literary works into topical discussions of current film and media. They impelled me to reinvent my 'Literary Interpretation' classes within the department of English by adding film/television as a fourth genre to fiction, poetry, and drama as a relevant way to teach principles of critical thinking freshened via the popular culture of movie and television screens. In the half-century since, the names of people and titles of programs have changed, but the principles of critical thinking remain the same.""--

"What They Did to the Kid" is a memoir spinning as a comic novel for general-fiction readers intrigued by boys'' school tales, and baby boomers who "survived Catholic school." Ryan O''Hara, coming of age from 14 to 24, is the wise adolescent narrating readers'' entry into the secret culture of 1950''s altar boys who go to the seminary, meet priests, and must decide their own identities. The novel''s interior ticking covers the clock and calendar of boys'' emerging consciences and edgy consciousness. "The San Francisco Chronicle" says, "Jack Fritscher reads gloriously."Strong characters and snappy dialog propel the character-driven plot of male-dominant pecking order. At Misericordia Seminary (aptly nicknamed "Misery"), Ryan O''Hara exposes his own story. He''s trapped for oxygen-with 500 other boys-by the imperial Rector Karg, the disciplinarian Father Gunn "of the USMC," the tart Father Polistina, and the rebel-priest Chris Dryden "who knows Fellini and JFK." The storytelling Irish-American author gives each ensemble character-hero or villain, student or priest, man or woman-a rich back story. Black civil rights of the 60''s as well as three interesting women characters open this tale out of the suffocating seminary and on to the hot streets of Chicago''s South Side and Old Town.The compelling psychological drama hinges on the very source and aspirations of priestly vocation versus self-esteem. "Is God calling me-and what about chastity? Or is it just the ''Bali Hai'' of blind ambition and social climbing-and what about sex?" Fritscher makes deeper than usual sense of soulful coming-of-age material. The hearty supply of boarding school episodes cumulatively reveals the dueling dynamic between the boyish protagonist, Ryan O''Hara, and the callous ambition of the handsome bully, Tank Rimsky, as they fight toward the finish line of "manly men''s" ordination to the priesthood. "The hardest thing to be in America today is a man."The novel is based on an under-reported story: the Catholic Church recruited 200,000 boys into seminaries in the 1950''s. Only 20,000 were ordained. "Kid" details, in a nostalgic and not unkind take what happened to the missing 180,000 boys and the women and men in their families. Daring to step inside Catholic culture, without being parochial, this American story reveals the 1950''s roots of 21st-century "recovering Catholic" panic and angst. The millions of post-Catholic baby boomers who have exited the Church will compare notes and laugh knowingly at the dead-on characterizations. Fashionably anti-Catholic campers will say, "but, of course!"Readers might catalog "Kid" in the genre of "Young Torless, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and "Lord of the Flies." Before now, no one of the surviving 180,000 ex-seminarians has dared reveal this insider confession on the secret milieu of the Catholic education of priests. From interviews with more than a hundred former seminarians, Jack Fritscher uniquely stages their true story arcs with wit, verve, and comedy."What They Did to the Kid" is the fourth novel from Jack Fritscher whose twelve books have sold more than 100,000 copies. Jack Fritscher is a graduate of the prestigious Pontifical College Josephinum, a Roman Catholic seminary, located in Columbus, Ohio, and directly subject to the Vatican in Rome. He received his doctorate in American Literature from Loyola University, Chicago.

"Leather Blues" is the coming-out story of a rogue boy eager to lean the ropes and rituals of leathermen. This exquisitely crafted novel of initiation into bikes, bears, and man-to-man BDSM pulls no punches when Denny Sargent begins the Inferno rites of passage leathermen must courageously endure to seal their special male bonding.

In his 16th book, eyewitness gay activist Jack Fritscher, the lover and biographer of Robert Mapplethorpe, breaks the trance of received gay history in this fact-rich memoir of how "The Boys in the Band Played On" from the Titanic 1970s to 1999. Built on all new information recently unearthed, this stylishly written and illustrated "timeline archive" of art, sex, obscenity, gender, culture wars, homophobia, pop culture, and the gay mafia, will get 21st-century readers and researchers up to speed fast on the serious fun of who did what to whom when and why. Fritscher was a founding member of the American Pop Culture Association in 1968, and in 1969, as academia met popular culture, he immediately knew what to do to preserve and chronicle Stonewall and the gay culture that ensued. Back in the heyday of the First Decade of Gay Liberation, university professor and longtime "Drummer" editor Fritscher added erotic realism to the magical thinking of "Drummer" readers wanting a magazine that made newly self-inventing sex seem possible and accessible. Attention must be paid: With an average press run of 42,000 copies for each of the 208 issues over twenty-four years, millions more people read international 'Drummer' than have read, perhaps, any GLBT book. Fact-based on internal evidence in "Drummer," and in journals, diaries, letters, photos, interviews of dozens of eyewitnesses, recordings, and newspapers, Fritscher's ultimate insider's guide to the "Rise and Fall of Castro and Folsom Streets" is a brisk ride that brings back what an physical and intellectual thrill it was to pick up one's first issue of "Drummer." Professor Fritscher's "frisson" anchors San Francisco's otherwise wild Gay Lib history on the clear chronology of the issues of the legendary monthly "Drummer." This is the most complete document of the "GLBT Magazine Publishing Movement." Fritscher is the Ken Burns of "Drummer" magazine. Justin Spring, author, "Sam Steward: A Biography": "Fritscher has done all the research work most academics won't do-thus ensuring that historians, critics, and anthropologists will cut and paste with delight in years to come."Author & Book Credentials "San Francisco Chronicle": "Fritscher reads gloriously!" Marilyn Jaye Lewis, EAA Authors Association, "...an essential document of the 20th-century 'Gay Enlightenment' culled from the pages of 'Drummer.' Fritscher empowers the Truth of those revolutionary times by enabling history to tell itself." Mark Thompson, "The Advocate," editor emeritus: "Utterly unique, an invaluable testament...historically useful for decades to come." The Kinsey Institute, Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator: "Fritscher has a remarkable memory for the people, places, and pivotal events that he has witnessed over his lifetime. His long association with 'Drummer' in San Francisco placed him at the center of the revolution, and 'Gay San Francisco' is filled with significant details from those years." Brown University, Samuel Streit, Director Special Collections: "'Gay San Francisco' is remarkable history of a remarkable time in a remarkable place, proving its points by combining contemporary documents, photographs, drawings, and reportage with a first-hand and first-rate memoir that brings an unforgettable era back to life." Chicago Public Library, Jim Stewart, Department Head emeritus, Social Sciences & History Department: "Jack Fritscher as 'eyewitness' in 'Gay San Francisco' is kin to Christopher Isherwood as 'camera' in his 'Berlin Stories.' This written 'oral history' should be in every library's GLBT collection." University of Sussex, Niall Richardson, Film-Media Studies: "...chronicles an exciting and formative era from a new and original perspective no one has ever done before." University of California, David Van Leer, professor, GLBT Studies: "Fritscher is a key player in the gender of masculinity in homosexuality."

Newly revised for 21st-century readers, the author - an ordained but fallen exorcist - tells all about the evil eye, the queer eye, women and witch trials, the Old Religion, magic Christianity, Satanism, and New Age self-help.