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.