Jack Fritscher, the founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine and curator of the Drummer Archives since 1977, is the award-winning author of twenty books popular with readers and researchers including memoirs of his bicoastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe, his friend Larry (Leatherman's Handbook) Townsend, and his "gentleman caller" Tennessee Williams. His new Profiles is holistic gay history written by a New Journalist who lived the life. In essays, interviews, and photos, Fritscher's masterful writing sheds new Gay Pride light on authentic leatherfolk founders, icons, and superstars too often under-reported by gatekeepers of gay-history timelines: AIDS poet, Thom Gunn; race-sex-and-gender photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe; Society of Janus founder, Cynthia Slater; Mineshaft manager, Wally Wallace; godfather of gay writing, Samuel Steward; young Provincetown playwright, Tennessee Williams; filmmaker Wakefield Poole's art-director, Ed Parente; Old Reliable Video hustler-art photographer, David Hurles; leather fashion designer, Rob of Amsterdam; and the filmmakers of the 1975 classic Born to Raise Hell, Terry LeGrand and Roger Earl.