Partner Ron Robertson
Queer Places:
Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Long Beach) Long Beach, Los Angeles County, California, USA
James
Robert Baker (October 18, 1947 – November 5, 1997) was an
American author of sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed
transgressional fiction. A native Californian, his work is set almost
entirely in
Southern California. After graduating from
UCLA, he began his career as a screenwriter, but became disillusioned and
started writing novels instead. Though he garnered fame for his books
Fuel-Injected Dreams and
Boy Wonder, after the controversy surrounding publication of his
novel,
Tim
and Pete, he faced increasing difficulty having his work published.
According to his
life partner, Ron Robertson,
this was a contributing factor in his death by suicide.
Baker's work has achieved cult status in the years since his death, and two
additional novels have been posthumously published. First-edition copies of
his earlier works have become collector's items. His novel
Testosterone was adapted to a
film of the same name, though it was not a financial success. Two other
books have been optioned for films, but they have not been produced.
Baker was born in
Long Beach, California and raised in what he considered a "stifling,
Republican Southern Californian household".[1]
Rebelling against his parents, he became attracted to the fringe elements of
society, including
beatniks
(anyone living as a
bohemian, acting rebelliously, or appearing to advocate a revolution in
manners), artists and gays.[1][2]
In high school during the 1960s he explored his sexuality at underground gay
teen nightclubs, while living in fear that his abusive father would find out.
At one point, his father hired a private detective to follow him, when he
suspected Baker was having an affair with a male neighbor.[3]
This family dynamic would be used in many of his novels, most extensively in
Boy Wonder.
Baker began taking drugs, and became, in his own words, "an out of control,
teenage speed freak".[3]
He also began drinking heavily, attributing it to the fact that he was
closeted.
However, even after
coming
out, his substance abuse remained excessive and "still had a life of its
own".[3]
After sobering up, he attended
UCLA film school, where he was one of the winners of the
Samuel Goldwyn Writing Awards,[4]
and directed two films: Mouse Klub Konfidential and Blonde Death.
Mouse Klub Konfidential, a film about a
Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeer who becomes a gay
bondage pornographer, was a controversial entry in the 1976 San
Francisco's
LGBT Film Festival, as some thought Baker was actually advocating
Nazism.[5]
It is also credited with having caused
Michael Medved to abandon his dream of film making and instead become a
film critic.[1][6]
Baker's lifelong ambition was to write. Upon graduating from UCLA, he spent
approximately five years writing Hollywood screenplays in the early 1980s, a
process he hated. While financially successful, he was frustrated that his
work was not being produced. "I felt like a door-to-door salesman going to all
these [story] pitch meetings ... [filled with] rabid, hideous morons".[3]
He became discouraged and disillusioned, and turned his attention to novels.
His first book, Adrenaline, was published under the pseudonym James
Dillinger. A story of two gay fugitive lovers on the run, it presaged the
satire and drug fueled violence so prominent in his later books. Here Baker
began developing the themes that dominated his following works: anarchy; angry
and somewhat paranoid gay men; the dark underside of Los Angeles, juxtaposed
with its sunny outward image; the hypocrisy of organized religion; anonymous
sex and its implications in the age of AIDS; and homophobia and the oppression
of gays in a Republican dominated America.[7][8]
Its
plot device of underdog characters forced into flight due to circumstances
beyond their control was one Baker explored in all of his subsequent work. The
modest success of this novel encouraged him to devote himself to what have
become his best known works, Fuel-Injected Dreams (a novel revolving
around a character loosely based on record producer
Phil
Spector)[3]
and the 1986 release Boy Wonder. After the novel was published, he
stopped screenwriting in order to solely concentrate on books. He spent the
bulk of each day writing and researching, and acted out characters and scenes
of his novels on videotape to perfect the dialogue.[1]
His primary focus was gay-themed writing, though he also wrote about the
entertainment industry. Mostly satirical, his writing was filled with
increasingly clear anger and disdain for the Republican
neo-con agenda, especially after the
AIDS pandemic began to take a large toll on the gay community.[3]
A very strong voice in
gay literature, Baker had admirers and detractors for his gay radical
stance, both in the mainstream literary community as well as the gay community
itself.[9]
A self-described
anarchist, Baker has been categorized as a writer of
transgressional fiction, in that his novels are frequently populated by
sociopathic,
nihilistic characters who engage in taboo behaviors such as heavy drug
use, incest,
necrophilia and other practices; and often commit acts of extreme,
surrealistic violence.[5][10]
A man of eclectic tastes, Baker cited as literary influences writers and film
directors ranging from
Proust to
Jim Thompson and
Sam Peckinpah. He also admired the punk writer
Dennis Cooper.[10]
His work is filled with pop cultural references to both film and music, as
well as politics.
Orson Welles'
Touch of Evil and
John Ford's
The Searchers are mentioned prominently in more than one of his books,
and Roxy
Music is referenced in virtually every novel he wrote. The imagery in his
novels is largely cinematic, with expressions such as "fade
in/fade out", "quick
cut" and "VistaVision";
and sentences such as "a
montage traces the next fifteen years" and "If the last
reel of Cheryl's life had been a
CinemaScope
Technicolor movie ...".[11]
With driven narratives, his books have the feel of a movie set down on paper.
After the reception of Tim and Pete, with several critics calling
him "The Last Angry Gay Man", Baker faced increasing difficulty finding a
publisher for his work and his financial position became precarious.[14][19][20]
He was only able to publish one novella, Right Wing, and that was
self-published on the Internet.[1]
Baker's
life partner, Ron Robertson, believes that this difficulty led Baker on a
quick, downwards emotional spiral.[1]
Baker killed
himself at his home on November 5, 1997, by asphyxiation in his garage.[4]
His death was noted in literary circles and mainstream press; the
Gay Times
in the United Kingdom wrote, "Baker's suicide is particularly tragic because
it robs American gay writing of a refreshingly distinctive voice quite unlike
the
po-faced prose of so many of his contemporaries."[21]
My published books:
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