Folsom Street Blues: A Memoir of 1970s SoMa and Leatherfolk in Gay San Francisco

by Jim Stewart

Folsom Street Blues --"Like Christopher Isherwood, Stewart is a camera."e-Lit Book Erotic Non-Fiction − GOLDe-Lit Book Gay/Lesbian − SILVERe-Lit Book Autobiography/Memoir − BRONZEe-Lit Book Sexuality/Relationships − BRONZEIPPY Gay/Lesbian Non-Fiction − BRONZENLA-I Writing Geoff Mains Non-Fiction Book − HONORABLE MEMTION (One winner, one honorable mention)San Francisco Book Festival Book Gay − RUNNER-UP (One winner, one runner-up)Next Generation Indie Book Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender − FINALIST (One winner, five finalists)Jim Stewart, a survivor of the Titanic 1970s, has written a wonderful memoir revealing how South of Market became hip SoMa in San Francisco. Leading a lusty life surfing the first wave of gay liberation up to HIV, he is an uninhibited writer spilling personal tales of sex, art, and friendship during that first decade of Gay Liberation after Stonewall. As carpenter, he designed and constructed the sexy interiors of Folsom Street leather bars as well as of Fey-Way Studio, the first gay art gallery in San Francisco, where as photographer he exhibited his work on the walls he built.A pioneer settler in SoMa, he was fast friends with poet-singer Camille O'Grady, the leading lady of Folsom Street leather; with Oscar-Streaker Robert Opel who was murdered in his own Fey-Way gallery; with author Jack Fritscher and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; with painter Chuck Arnett and porn mogul David Hurles; and with many other talents creating gay culture in San Francisco's influential Drummer Salon. As early as 1977, Drummer magazine published Stewart's leather photography. Folsom Street Blues continues his gift for words and images with manic, funny, and heartfelt profiles of real people who lived as if 1970s San Francisco were 1930s Berlin.Like Christopher Isherwood, Stewart is a camera. Folsom Street Blues is a picture-perfect portrait of the author as a young man among men experimenting with new identities in the sexual underground during the Titanic 1970s before the speeding first-class party, cruising on, crashed into the iceberg of HIV.Veterans of the 1970s party will applaud Stewart's humorous nostalgia. Younger readers may enjoy a safe peek into how 20th-century leatherfolk, dancing on tables and swinging from the chandeliers, helped found and form 21st-century diversity.Keep this book bedside with Edmund White's My Lives, Felice Picano's Like People in History, Jack Fritscher's Some Dance to A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, Justin Spring's Secret Historian, Patti Smith's Just Kids, and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.

Genres: LGBT, Memoir, Queer

232 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 26, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A memoir of one man's experiences in 1970's San Francisco, specifically life in SOMA. I love the gay history of San Francisco, and this book is rich with references to places, times, and people gone by. It's successfully presented as a remembrance of a lost time.

[willowdog]

Sometimes I keep reading a work hoping it will offer some incite into a subject, or I'll learn something foreign to me. Folsum Street Blues is a very narrow memoir providing a snapshot (LOL) of one man's leather scene in SF as written by a photographer of homoerotic subjects. I kept thinking that the author had just expanded on his diary which he had kept for the 7 years he was in SF. Need a bibliography of leather bars ans other gay leather meeting places or homoerotic photography studios, this book is for you. But I'm voting no on this. (After reading, found out that the author was head of the history department at the Chicago Public Library at one time.--No wonder we had this book in CPL's holdings.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Smarmy, self-important memoir of hedonistic life in 70s San Francisco unfortunately doesn't offer any memorable characterization of San Francisco, the writer's friends, etc. His colorful surroundings are reduced to party details, gallery showings, and sex. That's about all there is for anecdotes. Reads much like a diary, with little insight.

[Dustin Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great memoir exploring alternate sexuality.