Partner Fred Yerkes
Larry
Townsend (27 October 1930 – 29 July 2008) was the pseudonymous author (né
'Bud' Bernhard) of dozens of books including Run Little Leather Boy
(1970) and The Leatherman's Handbook (1972) at pioneer erotic presses
such as Greenleaf Classics and the Other Traveler imprint of Olympia Press.
The Leatherman's Handbook was the first book to publicize BDSM to the
general public—it was a paperback book widely available on newsstands and at
bookstores throughout the United States.
Growing up as a teenager of Swiss-German extraction in Los Angeles a few
houses from Noël Coward
and Irene Dunne, he ate cookies with his neighbor Laura Hope Crews who was
Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind. He attended the prestigious Peddie
School, and was stationed as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of
Air Intelligence Squadrons for nearly five years with the US Air Force in
Germany (1950–1954). Completing his tour of duty, he entered into the 1950s
underground of the then small LA leather scene where he and
Montgomery Clift
shared a lover. With his degree in industrial psychology from UCLA (1957), he
worked in the private sector and as a probation officer with the Forestry
Service. He began his pioneering activism in the politics of homophile
liberation in the early 1960s. In 1972, as president of the 'Homophile Effort
for Legal Protection' which had been founded in 1969 to defend gays during and
after arrests, he led a group in founding the H.E.L.P. Newsletter, the
forebear of Drummer Magazine (1975). He lived in the Silver Lake
neighborhood of Los Angeles, the center of the Los Angeles leather scene (the
equivalent of the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco). As a writer and
photographer, he was an essential eyewitness of the drama and salon around
Drummer in which his novels were often excerpted. His signature "Leather
Notebook" column appeared in Drummer for twelve years beginning in
1980, and continued in Honcho to Spring 2008. His last novel,
TimeMasters, was published April 2008. His last writing was Who Lit up
the Lit of the Golden Age of Drummer an introduction to Gay San
Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (June 2008).
His partner of 44 years, Fred Yerkes
(August 27, 1935 - July 7, 2006).
My published books:
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Townsend