Book Review : Patrick Cowley - Mechanical Fantasy Box

Patrick Cowley – Mechanical Fantasy Box (Dark Entries Press 9781942884545)

Not merely the progenitor of the amyl nitrate pulse of Hi-NRG: the high octane synthetic disco that soundtracked cruising spots and backrooms from the Castro to the East Village to Soho (long before the fiercely gay and sleekly minimal electro sound was domesticated into the teen pop of Stock Aitken and Waterman); Patrick Cowley - teenage synth pioneer, soundtrack producer for such under-the-counter gems as 'Afternooners' and 'Muscle Up', and eventually producer of sublime anthems to queer ecstasy by Sylvester, Paul Parker and perhaps most famously his mind bending 20 minute psychedelic excursion on Donna Summer's ecstatic paean to the erotic sublime 'I Feel Love' - was also, as we discover thanks to the archival efforts of Dark Entries press, the leading documentarist of fast flings, group fucks, stolen glances and silent meetings in the backrooms of the leather bars, saunas and gay discos of The Castro in the halcyon era before the devastation of AIDS which would take his life criminally early depriving the world not only of perhaps disco's greatest auteur (sorry Arthur Russell and Giorgio Moroder). One of the most compelling diarists of the sometimes dark, often gleeful and frequently tender ecstasies of San Francisco's underground gay backroom and bathhouse scene, every diary entry is a hymn to the sublime joy of anonymous sex, the possibility and threat of love and the ever present pulse of desire; the all encompassing hunger to erase the soul in bodily pleasure, perhaps broken by a smile, a kiss, a stolen glance. Nothing else in the world but leather and metal, spunk, a cock, a mouth, an ass.

Lavishly illustrated with gloriously filthy illustrations by graphic artist Gwennael Rattke, lost flyers for hook up spots like the Man Hole alongside black and white photos of Patrick in his youth, evolving from long haired hippy synth nerd to boyish twink to moustachioed clone. You'll know already if this volume is for you. Within the hypnotic repetitions of his nightly encounters and adventures Patrick builds a compelling and tender picture of an underground city within the city mapped by desire, recounted in explicit glory and with a joy that spurts off the page. We may never see such times again and this is everybody's loss.