One of the cruellest aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is the toll that it has taken on our best and brightest creative talent. The late John Preston is one such outstanding example. Vancouver's Arsenal Pulp has taken over the task of the late Gay Men's Press (UK) in publishing modern lesbian and gay classics that somehow fell out of print. I admit to reading the first edition of Franny over a quarter century ago. I was startled that it was John Preston who had created this nuanced portrayal of a gutsy, no-nonsense working-class US East Coast drag queen, every bit as tough and resilient as her butcher counterparts in Preston's leather literature masterpieces, like I Once Had A Master and Mr.Benson. I shouldn't have been, though. Preston was an old-school, anti-assimilationist gay liberationist, who might have savoured the sling, but also respected and honoured diversity within the lesbian and gay communities. Given the seventies butch shift amongst US gay male communities, he was dismayed to see marginalisation and exclusion of drag queens, and wrote this book as an aid to historical memory. Franny was the result, with her trusty Chicago grrlfriend, African-American Isadora. The two of them go back further than either would admit, and as I'm a gentleman, I shall draw a discrete silence over matters chronological. Franny lost her first lover, Jay, to drug abuse and suicide, and vowed that would never happen again. Her circle of Provincetown, Massachuesetts friends include two pioneering gay businessmen, a closeted professor, an artist, a leatherman and a princess, heiress apparent to Franny's tiara. When that hateful epidemic took John Preston from us, he was working on a darker sequel, Franny, Isadora and the Angels. Thankfully, Michael Lowenthal has edited the surviving fragments into a sequence of events set in the nineties, when Franny and Isadora are running a hospice for PLWAs, and angry as hell at federal government negligence and prudery. The diva duo beg, steal and borrow quality fittings for their hospice, do some plain talking to negative gay men in denial, plant flowers as symbols of hope, and Franny cries in isolation when she loses her boys (like the beautiful Kris)...and some girls, too. In the most moving chapter of the abandoned sequel, there is a beautiful description of walls full of photographs of lost gay men...and Haitian babies, smuggled into the United States...and some female sex workers as well. Their lives are recorded here, and their memories are honoured. John Preston was never able to make it down here. However, Franny is a tribute to early gay male communities in all their complexity and diversity. Read it, and remember who and what we have lost. And for the last section, have a box of tissues handy. Core: John Preston: Franny Queen of Provincetown: (Little Sisters Classics Four):Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press: 2005: (Earlier Editions: Boston: Alyson: 1983, 1995). Craig Young - 16th November 2006