Larry Townsend

Larry Townsend (1930 - 2008) was the pseudonymous author (né 'Bud' Bernhardt) of dozens of books including Run Little Leather Boy (1970) and The Leatherman’s Handbook (1972)

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). Around the 1950s he joined the underground movement of a then small LA leather scene where he and Montgomery Clift shared a lover.

With his degree in industrial psychology from UCLA (1957) 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, passed on July 8, 2006.