Frank M. Robinson at 100: A Life in the Future

Writer, editor, collector, activist, and one of the quiet architects of an extraordinary American century

Frank M. Robinson would have been one hundred years old today.

Born in Chicago on August 9, 1926, Frank had one of those lives that’s hard to summarize. He was a science-fiction writer, journalist, editor, collector, historian of popular culture, gay-rights activist, and close friend and speechwriter to Harvey Milk.

Writer and Editor

Frank served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and the Korean War, studied physics at Beloit College, and later earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He began publishing science fiction in 1950 with “The Maze” in Astounding Science Fiction.

His career quickly spread beyond science fiction. He worked for magazines including Science Digest, Rogue, Cavalier, and Playboy, including a stint writing the Playboy Advisor column, while writing fiction, journalism, thrillers, popular history, and political material.

His 1956 novel The Power became a film in 1968. In 1974, Frank and Thomas N. Scortia published The Glass Inferno, which, together with Richard Martin Stern’s The Tower, became the basis for the genre-defining hit disaster movie, The Towering Inferno (1974). Many years later, Frank’s The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991) won a Lambda Literary Award.

Another Kind of Future

Frank was gay during a period when openness could carry serious legal, professional, and personal consequences. Before moving to San Francisco, Frank was involved with the Chicago Gay Alliance. In 1971 he conceived Chicago Gay Pride, an early tabloid newspaper connected with Chicago’s emerging gay-rights movement. He financed it, laid it out, and typed its contents. The following year he created The Paper, covering Pride and other cultural and political activity in Chicago’s gay community.

Finding the Words for Hope

After moving to San Francisco, Frank became one of Harvey Milk’s close friends, political advisers, and speechwriters. Among the speeches he helped shape was Milk’s celebrated “Hope Speech”.

Frank helped Milk bring his own voice and convictions to written speeches. Frank understood rhythm, argument, and how to move an audience from fear toward possibility. Milk trusted him deeply. Anticipating the possibility of assassination, Milk recorded a political will naming Frank among the people who could carry his political work forward.

On November 27, 1978, Dan White murdered Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Frank became an executor of Milk’s estate and later wrote the foreword to An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings. In Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film Milk, Frank appeared briefly as himself.

The Keeper of the Pulps

Frank had another lifelong passion: pulp magazines.

He became one of the country’s leading collectors of high-grade pulps, assembling a collection that was legendary among collectors. In 2000 he received the Lamont Award for lifetime achievement in the pulp community. (Read more: Remembering Frank M. Robinson’s Legendary Pulp Collection – Black Gate)

Frank loved and nurtured his collection and spread that love and nurturing to fellow enthusiasts. Jason and I visited Frank often in his home in San Francisco, a grand painted lady in the Castro atop a hill looking over the city. William F. Nolan was with us during one of those visits, and at some point Frank put the three of us to work in the kitchen. Around the center island, he gave us a hands-on lesson in repairing, restoring, and preserving dust jackets and pulp-magazine covers. It’s one of my favorite memories: Frank bent over fragile old pieces of paper, tape, scissors, glue, and sheets of mylar showing us what to do and, just as importantly, what not to do.

Frank shared that passion through books, including Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines, Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History, and The Incredible Pulps: A Gallery of Fiction Magazine Art.

Looking back, the collector, writer, and activist aren’t so separate. Frank had a strong instinct for things that might disappear. Old magazines. The history of science fiction. The record of gay life. Harvey Milk’s words.

He kept things. And sometimes, at a kitchen island in San Francisco, he taught the rest of us how to keep them too.

Still Looking Outward

Shortly before his death in 2014, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Frank a Special Honoree. Too ill to attend the Nebula Awards ceremony, he prepared remarks to be read in his absence.

In them, he remembered Arthur C. Clarke asking him what a fish could never imagine. The answer was fire. Clarke’s point was that reality may contain things outside the limits of human conception. Frank took that idea back to science fiction and to the writers whose job, in part, is to push against those limits. Near the end of his remarks, he admitted he was crying as he wrote them.

Frank died in San Francisco on June 30, 2014, at age eighty-seven. His memoir, Not So Good a Gay Man, was published posthumously in 2017.

Frank at One Hundred

If there is a thread through Frank’s life, I think it has something to do with imagination and the stubborn refusal to let worthwhile things disappear. And it’s a passion that many of us share with Frank.

Science fiction gave him one way to look toward what might come next. Political work gave him another. Collecting made him responsible for pieces of the past that might otherwise have been lost.

Thinking about that fish and the fire, Frank spent much of his life reaching toward things not yet fully visible, while carefully holding on to things other people might have thrown away.

Those of us fortunate enough to know him also remember the man beneath all those accomplishments. Frank was a big, lovable curmudgeon, a gruff teddy bear. I picture him at that kitchen island, patiently showing us how to save a battered pulp cover, or sitting on his couch recounting stories for our Charles Beaumont documentary [Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man (2010),] or enjoying a hot cup of tea while sifting through old clippings and photos. To Frank these things mattered.

I miss him very much.

Frank M. Robinson should not be forgotten.