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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 midcentury modernism to develop his unique perspective. In his tete-a-tete 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.
