Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Tor Books, 2017; $26.95 hc; 319 pages
I met Frank M. Robinson once. In 1979, he was a guest at Windycon, Chicago’s largest sf convention. I was a senior at Beloit College, from which Robinson had graduated in 1950. I went with other members of the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association to the con, and at one point we surrounded him and told him how proud we were that he was an alumnus.
He was quite pleased that students at Beloit remembered him, and he came across as someone who was fundamentally decent and kind.
Frank M. Robinson did many things in his long and productive career. He was an author whose first sale was to Astounding when he was a senior at Beloit in 1950 and who continued selling fiction for the next 60 years. He was a dedicated pulp collector who used his collection as the basis for several coffee-table books including Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, which won a Hugo in 2000. He was managing editor of Rogue (one of Playboy’s foremost competitors) for two years and editor for five; when he was in charge, Rogue had columns by Alfred Bester, Mack Reynolds, and Robert Bloch and featured short stories by Harlan Ellison, Wilson Tucker, and Frederik Pohl. Finally, Robinson was a gay activist who was speechwriter to San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and who was named by Milk as one of the four people he hoped would succeed him (Milk was assassinated in 1978).
As noted in the title, the primary purpose of Robinson’s autobiography is to describe life as a gay man in the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote the book as a very long letter to a gay friend, Bob Angell, in order “so you would know what was really like to be a gay man before and after Stonewall.”
Robinson was born in Chicago in 1926. He started reading sf in 1937. “I usually stayed up in my bedroom reading science fiction magazines while my brothers played baseball in the empty street (few people had cars in those days).” Robinson kept all his magazines and kept adding to his collection for the rest of his life.
As a teenager, he got a job in the mailroom of Ziff-Davis, publisher at the time of Amazing, Fantastic, and several mystery pulps. He also added to his magazine collection, as the mailroom had bound copies of the first two years of Amazing, stamped with the name of Hugo Gernsback’s brother, Sydney. “Nobody ever looked at the volumes; nobody had in years.” So Robinson snuck the volumes out in his overcoat, and they remained a cornerstone of his collection.
In 1943, Robinson was drafted, and he spent two years in the Navy preparing for the invasion of Japan. He arrived in Japan after the atom bomb fell and never saw combat. Robinson then went to Beloit College, which he could afford on his G.I. Bill funds, and he was close enough to Chicago that he could ship his laundry home on a Friday and have it shipped back by the middle of the week.
After he was graduated, Robinson was recalled to military service and spent two more years in the Navy. Then he got a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern and began his career in magazines, beginning with Science Digest (where he succeeded Fritz Leiber) and then with various men’s magazines. He published 32 short stories in the 1950s and his first novel, The Power, which was turned into a film that had so little to do with Robinson’s novel that when Robinson met George Pal, who produced the film, years later, Pal said, “Mr. Robinson, how can you ever forgive me?”
Robinson went from being the editor of Rogue to an editor at Playboy where he wrote “The Playboy Advisor” and helped produce Playboy’s series of lengthy interviews. One of these, a conversation between Arthur C. Clarke and Zen philosopher Alan Watts, was unsuccessful because Clarke and Watts “hated each other on sight and didn’t bother to hide it.”
Robinson’s own 1969 interview with Robert A. Heinlein went off quite well. Robinson interviewed Heinlein for three days; dinner every night was a formal affair with fine wine. Heinlein talked about space travel and the excitement he felt when astronauts landed on the moon. “I’d waited fifty years” for the moon landing, Heinlein said. “Half a century of being treated like a madman for believing what has been perfectly evident since the days of Newton.”
One condition of the interview was that Heinlein would not talk about his own fiction. But the month before the issue appeared, a report in the San Francisco Examiner claimed that Charles Manson was inspired to become a pimp/gang leader/cult leader because he read Stranger in a Strange Land. The report was untrue; investigators learned that Manson was illiterate. But Heinlein refused to talk about Manson, and the interview was killed. A fragment of the interview was published in Oui in 1972, but the only publication of the unabridged interview is in the Virginia Edition of Heinlein’s collected works.
Robinson left Playboy in 1973 and began to write novels, three with Thomas N. Scortia and one with John Levin. The first of these, The Glass Inferno, was one of the two novels that was the basis for the film The Towering Inferno. That novel made his fortune—and bought him the time he needed to be a gay activist.
The major theme of Not So Good a Gay Man is Robinson recalling for future generations what it was like to be gay in a time when same-sex relationships were illegal in many states. The life he describes is one of furtively looking for partners and paying off cops to avoid being arrested for the victimless “crime” of consensual sex in a private home.
When Robinson moved to San Francisco to work on The Glass Inferno in the mid-1970s, he recalls trying to find a diner that would serve good bacon and eggs. His search led him to walk past a camera shop. He walked into the shop and met the owner, Harvey Milk. Milk and Robinson started chatting, and, when Milk learned Robinson was a writer, he asked if Robinson would write speeches for his campaign to be a supervisor in San Francisco, a position that in other cities would be a member of the city council. Robinson agreed. “At heart I was a gay politician, junior grade,” Robinson wrote, “and holed up in an apartment thinking of novel ways to fry people was already starting to wear thin.”
Robinson’s description of working with Milk in his successful 1977 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (making him the most successful gay politician in the U.S. at the time) is vivid and a valuable first-hand contribution to gay history. Robinson describes working with Milk until his assassination in November 1978 by a former supervisor.
Thirty years later, Robinson was a technical advisor and had a small role in the 2008 film Milk. Sean Penn’s performance, Robinson recalled, was “Harvey to a T. A few inches too short, an octave lower—but Harvey Milk in the flesh.”
Because Not So Good a Gay Man is posthumous, the editors say, “we chose to retain, as much as possible, the truth of Robinson’s own writing.” But the book should have been better fact-checked. Robinson says that Frederik Pohl’s story “Day Million,” which he bought for Rogue, was a Hugo winner; it wasn’t nominated. He says that “President Ronald Reagan” opposed Proposition 6, a failed 1978 measure that would have barred gays from teaching in California public schools; Reagan was not in office at the time the measure failed.
In addition, we get very little sense of what drove Robinson as a fiction writer. He discusses life as a competent professional, but you don’t know what his artistic goals as a writer were.
Frank M. Robinson made important contributions to sf both as writer and editor. Not So Good a Gay Man reminds us of Robinson’s significance as a person.
Martin Morse Wooster lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Frank Robinson, 1949.
Photo by Bob Miller for the Beloit College News Service, courtesy of the Beloit College Archives.
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