Frank M. Robinson's (1926-2014) posthumous memoir, Not So Good a Gay Man, offers an incisive, fascinating and candid look at the award-winning sci-fi novelist's rocky writing career and life as a closeted gay man. His writing career got off to a sputtering start, interrupted by two stints in the navy, before he sold his first story to Astounding magazine. His first novel, The Power, was published in 1956--but it would be nearly two decades before he wrote his second. For eight years, he edited and wrote for Rogue and Cavalier, two men's magazines and their porn book imprints. He finally started making money when Playboy hired him to write an anonymous monthly advice column.
Robinson found financial security when he moved to San Francisco and sold the screen rights to his (co-authored) second novel to director Irwin Allen, for $400,000 and a percentage of the film's profits. The Towering Inferno was a massive hit, and Robinson's publishing career soared. At the same time, he befriended Harvey Milk, dove into gay politics and started writing Milk's campaign speeches. Robinson gives powerful and haunting eyewitness accounts of the Summer of Love (and its abrupt end), the assassination of Milk, and living in one of the epicenters at the start of the AIDS pandemic.
Robinson's colorful encounters with Robert Heinlein, Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce, William Shatner, Francis Ford Coppola, James Franco and Sean Penn are fresh and entertaining. His memoir offers an enlightening view of gay history, the shame that keeps people closeted and their struggle to escape. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant