The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer

I've had this book hanging around and was cleaning off my bookshelves and almost gave this away without reading it. Then I had second thoughts, figuring I could give it away AFTER I read it. Well, guess what. I'm going to keep it on my shelf. I love reading about gay men's lives pre AIDS and this book fit the bill. If they are pretty steamy, well so be it--certainly tells things like they were. Jack Nichols had a fun time it sure seems, he never said he regretted any of it. He ended up normal it sounds, not screwed up or drugged out...nothing like that. I was surprised to read that things were as out in the open as they appeared to be during that time period. But this was a real enjoyable book and I am SO glad I've read it. And so glad Jack has lived to tell about it all.

This is really not so much an "erotic adventures" book as it is a charming story about the romantic adventures of an idealistic young activist exploring gay life in America in the 1960s. Indeed, after finishing the first chapter in which Nichols describes his first erotic encounter with a new friend he's met on a Florida beach, I jokingly told friends this book looked like it would simply be pure "erotic homosexual propoganda". I'd never read such romantic hyperbolic descriptions of homosexual sex. Indeed, I suspected I had missed out on something all these years. I was almost jealous. If I had been heterosexual, I'd probably felt I'd really missed life's greatest experience: "homosexual sex"! However, beginning with the second chapter, everything became "real" as Nichols commences a long quest trying to find his lost love. In the process, he discovers that some people you encounter in life are not what they pretend to be. He hitches rides all over the country, finds hustling is one reliable means of survival, befriends his missing love's lesbian sister to bolster his position in a future reunion and explores gay and straight culture in small towns and large cities. Being tall, masculine and handsome made everything easier and more interesting. Nichols has a great ability to make those strange characters he encounters come vividly to life. If you took the best of John Rechy and Jack Keroac and blended them together, you'd end up with a book like this. The title seems to promise either masturbatory material or a dated 1960s sex memoir. This book is much more. It is a timeless story about life and romance, an exploration of the interaction between sex and love.

Nichols's erotic memoir is his personal, sexual history of the years between 1961 and 1964, when gay life in America was alleged to have been one big closet. In fact, young, good-looking men like Nichols had the time of their lives, if they were discreet. AIDS was unheard of; and it was easier to seduce good-looking "straight" men in that simpler time. From 42nd Street in New York to 21st Street in Miami Beach, Nichols covered the waterfront. As erotica, "The Tomcat Chronicles" is as stimulating and more literary than most of today's sex fiction. It is also required reading for all who are interested in gay American history and in the life of one of the gay community's most important activists and authors.