Richard A. Lupoff: Remembering Frank

A couple of pages into Not so Good a Gay Man I wasn’t reading Frank Robinson’s autobiography. I was settled in an easy chair in Frank’s lovingly restored Victorian in the Castro. Frank was sprawled on the couch, a huge window behind him. It was a sunny afternoon in San Francisco.

The room was dominated by a huge TV monitor, rising from a sea of DVDs. Frank was a technophile. He was always an early adopter of high-tech devices, hence the giant screen. He’d been the first member of the local science fiction community to install a computer. Well, actually it was a dedicated word processor, one of the few that IBM ever built. It was a huge thing, straight out of a steampunk novel. But at the time it was a marvel. The rest of us were still clattering away at—at best—Selectrics.

An open archway let from Frank’s living room to his personal library. The walls were completely covered with pulp magazines. Everything from Adventure to Weird Tales—he had the finest complete run of that magazine in the world—to the legendary Zeppelin Stories and everything else in between. All the science fiction magazines, aviation pulps, westerns galore, railroad stories, gangsters and detectives uncounted, jungle tales. You name it, Frank had it.

Even a copy of the legendary Civil War Stories. I’d found that in an antique shop in Sacramento, bought it for a bargain price, and gave it Frank. I was proud of that.

What was happening this afternoon? I’d dropped in on Frank, and we’d gone out for lunch at one of the many funky establishments in the twilight zone between the Castro and the Mission. Back at Frank’s house Frank settled on the couch, and I relaxed in the easy chair, and he delivered a brilliant, free-form monologue.

I’d first encountered Frank’s works when I was a college student in Florida, just about to garner my degree, pack a toothbrush and razor, and report to the United States Army. I was a dedicated science fiction fan at the time, devouring every issue of every digest or pulp. Browsing my favorite newsstand I’d spotted the new Bluebook, a venerable pulp that had gone to the larger “bedsheet” format, trying to broaden its appeal.

The cover featured a painting of a planned earth-orbiting satellite—this was a couple of years before Sputnik—but what caught my attention inside the magazine was one of those “complete in this issue” novels, The Power by Frank M. Robinson. I read it in one marathon session. It scared the daylights out of me.

I didn’t actually meet Frank for another couple of decades. By then he was living in San Francisco. Pat and I were living in Berkeley with our three children. Frank and I hit it off at once, and before long we were exchanging visits.

Frank would take BART to the East Bay. I’d pick him up at the nearest station and ferry him to our house. Sometimes we’d head out for lunch. Frank was something of a foodie and was especially fond of a particular Japanese restaurant in downtown Berkeley. After a meal we’d head for home. Frank would stretch out in the living room and take a nap while Pat and I went about our respective chores.

When Frank woke up, he and I would talk shop. Sometimes it was general industry gossip. Other times he would talk about planned projects or a work in progress, using me as a sounding board for his ideas. I always thought that his greatest virtue as a writer was the structural strength of his novels. Not surprising considering his educational background. He held a PhD in physics.

Sometimes, when I picked him up at the commuter rail station in Oakland, he would be hefting a briefcase. I knew what that meant: he was carrying a manuscript which he would leave for me to read and comment on. On one occasion I caught an error involving firearms, calling upon my own experience in the Army. That was a very small point, but I was glad to help.

Sometimes he would sketch out basic ideas for possible novels. We would discuss two or three in one session, and by the time he left he would have decided which one to pursue.

However, he phoned me one day to say that he was troubled. His longtime friend and collaborator, Tom Scortia, had written a novel solo. Scortia was in failing health at the time. He’d asked Frank to do a light polish job on the manuscript, and Frank had agreed. But once he read the book, Blowout, he realized that it needed a lot more than a light polish. It required a thorough rewrite.

After dropping him at Rockridge that day, I settled down to read Blowout. This was several years before 9/11, but airliner hijackings were a topic in the news, and there were serious questions about the longtime viability of commercial air travel. The obvious solution was transcontinental high-speed rail. But tracks could be sabotaged, and trains could be bombed. How could this threat be thwarted? The answer was a system of long-distance tunnels.

Sounds like a typical Robinson-and-Scortia technothriller. But midway through the novel, the tunnelers break into a huge sealed chamber filled with Aztec artifacts. Aztecs in the upper Midwest, thousands of years ago? What treasures and what secrets were about the be discovered? The book took a right-angle turn at this point, and the basic plot was all but lost.

Urgent conference, Lupoff and Robinson. The whole Aztec subplot, I said, wasn’t bad. In fact it was too good. It completely overshadowed the tunnel-digging thriller plot. This was a true “kill your darlings” moment, except that it was Tom Scortia’s darling that had to be sacrificed.

Frank agreed at once. In fact, I suspect that he’d already reached the same conclusion but wanted a second opinion. Mine.

As Frank grew older, his strength and health began to fail. He’d long dealt with atrial fibrillation and stopped traveling to our house, but I continued to visit him in San Francisco. During those living room sessions his free-form monologues included many reminiscences. Some were about his childhood growing up in a blended family: his mother, Frank and two siblings, and her second husband and his two sons. It was a loveless marriage of convenience: Frank’s mother could foster two more children, their stepfather could provide financial support.

Frank realized early on that he was gay. This was in an era when homosexuals were not only ostracized by “legitimate” society: they could be fired, beaten, imprisoned, even killed. Imagine being raised to loathe and despise what you are. The result was an underground subculture, a little bit (I don’t mean to be flippant) similar to sf fandom in the years before 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alan Shepard and Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong, Gene Roddenberry, and George Lucas.

Maybe that was why Frank became comfortable with me. I was the archetypal straight male—married, kids, house; I even drove a Volvo. But I was totally accepting of him. Not that I was born a saint. I too grew up in the homophobic world of the 1940s and ’50s, but eventually I had to make a decision. I’d met this man whose books I’d read and enjoyed, whom I’d met and liked, only to discover that he was a homosexual.

I think he felt the need for reassurance that his friends were really his friends—especially the straight ones. Any number of times he would phone me and say, “I need a word.”

“What kind of word?” I’d say.

“It one of those things, it’s round and metallic, shiny.”

“You mean a UFO?”

“No, no, Christ, Lupoff, not a UFO. On a car. In the middle of the tire.”

“A hubcap.”

“That’s it. That’s what I need. Good-bye.”

Pat would be there and she’d ask, “What was that about?”

And I’d say, “It was Frank. He needed a word.” But mainly, he’d needed a friend.

I could (a) cut him off completely, (b) enjoy the art but despise the artist, (c) decide that all faggots were scum but make an exception for my friend, or (d) acknowledge that I’d had a thoroughly wrong attitude and change my thinking. The choice was obvious.

It’s my long-held opinion that any fiction writer worth his salt is at least an amateur social psychologist. Remembering Frank, writing this appreciation, has impelled me to try to understand this remarkable man more deeply than ever.

Why did he have to buy the latest electronic gadget as soon as it came on the market, whether his lumbering word processor, his CD player (the first I was ever treated to a sample of), or that huge TV monitor? Why did he collect those hundreds of DVDs? Why, above all, did he devote sixty years, tens of thousands of dollars, and uncounted hours of labor accumulating that world-class pulp collection? Certainly not to read!

Collecting pulps—or anything, people collect beer cans, barbed wire, postage stamps, baseball cards, political campaign buttons—can be fun. They’re colorful, and they’re exciting. And searching for that elusive 1936 issue of South Seas Stories can make your heart beat faster. That’s the thrill of the hunt! And there’s that brilliant rush when you’re making your way through the stacks of paper in somebody’s garage sale and you actually come across it.

But I think in Frank’s case there’s more to it than that. From his deprived childhood through his decades of living the double life of a gay man in a straight world, he needed something to prove to himself that he was worthy. He had the newest word processor. He had the biggest TV monitor. He had the best pulp magazine collection in the world.

And despite all this or in addition to it, he was a remarkably modest man. A few years before his death he was selected to receive the Emperor Joshua Norton Award, a San Francisco–based literary prize. The presentation was to be a surprise, and I was elected to pick him up and get him to the bookstore where the trophy was to be presented.

Frank’s acceptance speech was brief: “I thought you were going to give this to somebody who actually deserved it.”

Which brings us back to Frank freewheeling while I listened to his stories. Some of them I heard several times over a period of years. He was honing them, adding details from recovered memories, polishing his prose. Some of them, he said, were deeply painful, and he would be reduced to tears. I didn’t know at first that he was planning an autobiography, but in time he told me as much. Some of the memories were too harrowing to relive, and he mentioned several times that he might give up the project. I urged him to continue.

“It’s not all about science fiction,” he said. “A lot of it is about being a gay man. I’m not sure you want to read that. I’m not sure that a lot of people will want to read it.”

But I urged him to push on, and I think most readers will not read just for an insider’s report on the publishing world, although the book does offer that, and it is fascinating. But the book is about many things. It’s about a man’s life, all eighty-seven-plus years of it. It’s about landing the teenage science fiction fan’s dream job, office boy for a pulp magazine publisher. It’s about his life as a sailor during the Second World War and again during the Korean conflict. It’s about working for Bill Hamling’s Rogue magazine and Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, writing the “Playboy Advisor” column in daily fear that he would be found out and fired.

It’s about enlisting in the upbeat, idealistic world of the Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love and the disillusionment and despair that followed. It’s about his entry into San Francisco politics and his friendship with Harvey Milk and his work to help Milk become the first openly gay person to be elected to a noteworthy political office.

It’s about Milk’s assassination and the aftermath and the ironic near-last line in Frank’s list of credits, playing himself in the Oscar-winning film biography of Milk.

The last time I saw Frank he was lying on his deathbed. Our mutual friend, Richard Wolinsky, had given me a ride to San Francisco to see him. Frank was semi-comatose when we arrived. Wolinsky and I sat on opposite sides of his bed, talking to him, telling stories, not sure that he could hear us.

When it was time to leave, I held his hand, and he gripped mine firmly. I bent over and kissed him good-bye. It was the first time I’d ever kissed a gay man. And now I’m crying.

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Richard Lupoff lives in Berkeley, California.