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Copyright Jack Fritscher, Ph. Section 1: Rex Inventing Rex. Section 5: Rex, Religion, and Rimbaud. Section 6: Collaborating with Rex on Page and Screen. Section Rex at the Blue Muse Cafe. Section Exit Pursued by a Bear. Section Rex Has Left the Building. Art is a harsh mistress. Art asks everything of the artist.

Art keeps the artist alive until all that is left of the artist is the art. Beginning in the s, Rex helped create our gay culture that thrives on homoerotica because life enhanced by the renewable energy of Eros is the best panacea for gay men wounded by homophobia.

He was a product of his own will. His work was his life. An archival memoir. A personal eulogy in which renegade Rex speaks for himself revealing a new autobiographical visibility to a midcentury founder of the gay gaze. With the passing of this self-generating genius, the curtain can go up on the dramatic adventure of his high-brow and low-down life.

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How strange. How sad to be 85 and waking Rex, 80, the last of the red-hot pioneers. As editor-in-chief of Drummer from toI was privileged by the centrality of Drummer to review and publish and socialize with these trailblazers. How exciting it was in that first decade after Stonewall when these men arrived at my desk and unzipped their brilliant portfolios that, in fact, helped create Drummer and the very leather culture they celebrated.

It may as well have been called Rex Neverland because Rex, whose self-defining late-in-life portfolio was his Peter Pan series, was a Lost Boy. He claimed he ran away from home to the streets as soon as he could, first at age eight, and finally at sixteen. He was a socially distant mystery wrapped in a leather jacket.

What I write about him is memory struck from our mutual lives after we met in Rex pissed beer on his kinky boots. But history seeks facts. When word circulated that after he finally rejected the United States, he had suffered and died alone in the last of his many self-imposed exiles far away in poverty and obscurity in Amsterdam around April 1, During one of our long conversations when Rex asked me to wait until he died to write about him with permission to quote him, it was as if he wanted the surety of at least one designated mourner who had observed, interviewed, and published him from the start of his long career.