Folsom Street Blues -- "Like Christopher Isherwood, Stewart is a camera." AWARDS: e-Lit Book Award: Erotic Non-Fiction − GOLD - e-Lit Book Award: Gay/Lesbian − SILVER - e-Lit Book Award: Autobiography/Memoir − BRONZE - e-Lit Book Award: Sexuality/Relationships − BRONZE - IPPY Award: Gay/Lesbian Non-Fiction − BRONZE - Next Generation Indie Book Award: Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender − FINALIST - San Francisco Book Festival Award: Gay − RUNNER-UP - London Book Festival Award: Wild Card - RUNNER UP - New York Book Festival Award: Bigography/Autobiography -  HONORABLE MENTION - Hollywood Book Festival Award: Wild Card - HONORABLE MENTION - New England Book Festival : Gay - HONORABLE MENTION - NLA-I Writing Award: Geoff Mains Non-Fiction Book − HONORABLE MENTION - Los Angeles Book Festival : Wild Card - HONORABLE MENTION Jim Stewart, a survivor of the Titanic 1970s, has written a wonderful memoir revealing how South of Market became hip SoMa in San Francisco. Leading a lusty life surfing the first wave of gay liberation up to HIV, he is an uninhibited writer spilling personal tales of sex, art, and friendship during that first decade of Gay Liberation after Stonewall. As carpenter, he designed and constructed the sexy interiors of Folsom Street leather bars as well as of Fey-Way Studio, the first gay art gallery in San Francisco, where as photographer he exhibited his work on the walls he built. A pioneer settler in SoMa, he was fast friends with poet-singer Camille O'Grady, the leading lady of Folsom Street leather; with Oscar-Streaker Robert Opel who was murdered in his own Fey-Way gallery; with author Jack Fritscher and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; with painter Chuck Arnett and porn mogul David Hurles; and with many other talents creating gay culture in San Francisco's influential Drummer Salon. As early as 1977, Drummer magazine published Stewart's leather photography. Folsom Street Blues continues his gift for words and images with manic, funny, and heartfelt profiles of real people who lived as if 1970s San Francisco were 1930s Berlin. Like Christopher Isherwood, Stewart is a camera. Folsom Street Blues is a picture-perfect portrait of the author as a young man among men experimenting with new identities in the sexual underground during the Titanic 1970s before the speeding first-class party, cruising on, crashed into the iceberg of HIV. Veterans of the 1970s party will applaud Stewart's humorous nostalgia. Younger readers may enjoy a safe peek into how 20th-century leatherfolk, dancing on tables and swinging from the chandeliers, helped found and form 21st-century diversity. Keep this book bedside with Edmund White's My Lives , Felice Picano's Like People in History , Jack Fritscher's Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 , Justin Spring's Secret Historian , Patti Smith's Just Kids , and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City . "Stewart's style ... provides a strong sense of community that he found south of Market, that he contributed to, and ... enjoyed to its fullest. ... It catches the heady ferment of the early years [in SoMa]. ... Its matter-of-fact and unpretentious narrative is delivered in a friendly voice. ... A powerful and essential feature of this book is the large number of Stewart's photos [that] complement what his memoir paints ... the combination provides compelling and gritty insight into the remarkable culture that erupted in that place and time" Lloyd Meeker "Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews." "[A] personal account of what it was like...after Stonewall... It is one thing to have something to say and Jim Stewart does but it is something else to know how to say it. [L]et me tell you, Jim Stewart is a master storyteller and he is all the more special because the stories he tells really happened." Reviews by Amos Lassen "Stewart's jaunty memoir of his years living in the Folsom...[is] chronicled with gusto...a splendid memory, an easy wit and a way with words. [He] photographed the butch and the beautiful. For the author's peers this is a breezy trip down memory lane; for younger readers it's a proud remembrance of things past." Richard Labonte "BookMarks" "... Stewart's book is novelistic, artfully non-chronological, and it captures its subject matter vividly. Indeed, in his foreword he pointedly assures the reader: 'Everything written here really happened.' One soon learns why this assurance is necessary..." Jim Nawrocki "The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide" "'Folsom Street Blues"...is a gritty and intimate look at sex, kink, and art...Through uncovering the truth of someone who came before us we are gifted with the unique opportunity to understand something about ourselves. This is the strength of Stewart's book. [It has]...heart. Sassafras Lowrey, "Lambda Literary Review" I couldn't believe it when "Folsom Street Blues" brought home over a dozen awards!  They include the e-Lit Book Awards for Erotic Non-Fiction