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I cannot say, I have ever met Mr. Baker. However, during my weekly regimen of web surfing. I ran across his life story.

I'm sorry to find out, it didn't end for him well. It is sad, how society treats minorities and wrongly. Especially, with the 2008 Election, Gay issues, Abortion rights, and a litany of "blame this / blame that" controversial issues are being brought up. (Nough Said)

= Wonder if my local library has a copy of his book: Adrenaline? Nope - Looks like time to use ILL (Inter Libary Loan).

Writer

Baker's lifelong ambition was to write. Upon graduating from UCLA, he spent approximately five years writing Hollywood screenplays, a process he hated. While financially successful, he was frustrated that his work was not being produced. "I felt like a door-to-door salesman going to all these [story] pitch meetings...[filled with] rabid, hideous morons". He became discouraged and disillusioned, and turned his attention to novels. In the beginning this was just a secondary occupation, but after the release of Fuel-Injected Dreams, his second novel, he stopped screenwriting in order to solely concentrate on books. He spent the bulk of each day writing and researching, and acted out characters and scenes of his novels on videotape to perfect the dialogue.

His primary focus was gay-themed writing, though he also wrote about the entertainment industry. Mostly satirical, his writing was filled with increasingly clear anger and disdain for the Republican neo-con agenda, especially after AIDS began to take such a large toll on the gay community. A very strong voice in gay literature, Baker had admirers and detractors for his gay radical stance, both in the mainstream literary community as well as the gay community itself.

A self-described anarchist, Baker has been categorized as a writer of transgressional fiction, in that his novels are frequently populated by sociopathic, nihilistic characters who engage in taboo behaviors such as heavy drug use, incest, necrophilia and other aberrant sexual practices; and often commit acts of extreme, surrealistic violence. A man of eclectic tastes, Baker cited as literary influences writers and film directors ranging from Proust to Jim Thompson and Sam Peckinpah. He also admired the punk writer Dennis Cooper.
Adrenaline (1985)

His work is filled with pop cultural references to both film and music, as well as politics. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil and John Ford's The Searchers are mentioned prominently in more than one of his books, and Roxy Music is referenced in virtually every novel he wrote. The imagery in his novels is largely cinematic, with expressions such as "fade in/fade out", "quick cut" and "VistaVision"; and sentences such as "a montage traces the next fifteen years" and "If the last reel of Cheryl's life had been a CinemaScope Technicolor movie...".[9] With driven narratives, his books have the feel of a movie set down on paper.

His first book, Adrenaline, was published under the pseudonym James Dillinger. A story of two gay fugitive lovers on the run, it presaged the satire and drug fueled violence so prominent in his later books. Here Baker began developing the themes that dominated his following works: anarchy; angry and somewhat paranoid gay men; the dark underside of Los Angeles, juxtaposed with its sunny outward image; the hypocrisy of organized religion; anonymous sex and its implications in the age of AIDS; and homophobia and the oppression of gays in a Republican dominated America. Its plot device of underdog characters forced into flight due to circumstances beyond their control was one Baker explored in all of his subsequent work. The modest success of this novel encouraged him to devote himself to what have become his best known works, Boy Wonder and Fuel-Injected Dreams (a novel revolving around a character loosely based on record producer Phil Spector).

James Robert Baker: Wikipedia: 1946 -- 1997

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