Frederic Allen Sawyer, Jr., was born on January 1, 1957, the middle of three children adopted by Dianne and Frederic Allen Sawyer, Sr., and grew up in Moraga, a prosperous suburb of San Francisco. Sawyer dropped out of San Francisco State University’s Drama Department in the late 1970s to work full-time as the manager of the Castro Theatre, a 1920s movie palace that had recently begun programming classic Hollywood repertory. Sawyer often dropped in to watch the double bills, postponing his managerial duties until late into the night. While working there he met Vito Russo and contributed to the revised edition of Russo’s pioneering The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies.

In 1981 Sawyer parlayed his now-vast knowledge of Hollywood’s golden age into A Fine Romance, a musical revue of Jerome Kern songs, which was the inaugural show of the Valencia Rose and ran for nearly a year. Sawyer also briefly performed stand-up comedy at the club, which had quickly become an unofficial community center as well as an important venue for emerging performers including Whoopi Goldberg, Marga Gomez, and Lea DeLaria.

John F. Karr, theater critic of the San Francisco gay weekly Bay Area Reporter, impressed with Sawyer’s handling of the Kern material, invited him to collaborate on a chamber musical piece of John O’Hara poems set to original music. Titled Talking to the Sun, it shared a double bill with Gertrude Stein and Al Carmine’s In Circles, both directed by Sawyer and Karr at the Theatre Rhinoceros. The success of this collaboration led to a series of centennial concerts for composers and lyricists Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Ira Gershwin, which played at the Plush Room and the Great American Music Hall.

The team guided new musicals at Theatre Rhinoceros. Dirty Dreams of a Clean Cut Kid, with poems by Henry Mach set to music by Paul Katz, dealt with the thoughts and fears of gay men in a public health clinic waiting room anticipating the results of their HIV tests. Some Men Do offered an exploration of gay subtext in the theater songs of Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, and others. Sawyer and Karr also developed and directed solo shows for many of San Francisco’s drag performers such as Paul Anelli (aka Miss Androgynous) and the “Incomparable Bambi Lake.” Their reputation as directors of drag led to their hiring by the ArtFull Circle Theatre company, recently transplanted from Chicago. With an original score by Mark Sargent, Jungle Red was an unauthorized musical version of the MGM film of Claire Booth Luce’s The Women. Sawyer rewrote the direct transcription of the film script into a more theatrically viable book without losing the snap and panache of the MGM original.

Without Karr, Sawyer continued to work with the ArtFull Circle. He and Paul Anelli adapted the ArtFull Circle’s play Christmas with the Crawfords, a Grand Guignol version of Joan Crawford’s legendary 1944 Christmas Eve radio broadcast. Working from an idea by Richard Winchester and a script by Mark Sargent and Wayne Buidens, Sawyer and Anelli imbued their new script with references and interpolations from the full canon of Crawford’s work as well as from other Hollywood camp staples. Christmas with the Crawfords went on to become the company’s most successful production, revived annually in San Francisco and performed in Los Angeles and off-Broadway.

Sawyer wrote the books to the subsequent ArtFull Circle musicals Way Out West, borrowing from the films of Mae West, and Women’s Prison Christmas, which combined plots from the films Women’s Prison, Caged, I Want to Live, and other films. Both shows had original scores by Mark Sargent. Sawyer also adapted the RKO film version of Edna Ferber’s Stage Door into Those Damn Calla Lilies.

Sawyer’s ArtFull Circle scripts succeed whether performed by women or men in drag; gender is rarely the joke. But sometimes gender casting was used for effect. For example, in Jungle Red, the real women played all the shop girls, servants, and menials, while the drag queens played the privileged protagonists. The all-female cast of Women’s Prison Christmas was decked out in the wigs and outrageous costumes usually reserved for drag queens.

As with many drag theaters, adaptation and downright plagiarism were done without securing any rights. The popularity of ArtFull Circle’s productions brought attention resulting in several cease-and-desist notices from the Ted Turner organization, which owned the copyrights on most of the source material. And a dispute over royalties for out-of-town productions of Christmas with the Crawfords caused Sawyer to sever his relationship with the ArtFull Circle and his name to be removed as author, although a significant portion of his contribution remains in the currently performed versions of the play.

Sawyer was now working as the general manager for the San Francisco Actors Theater, a ninety-nine-seat venue connected with the Jean Shelton Acting School. For the company, Sawyer codirected Joe Pintauro’s Raft of the Medusa and directed Reassurance, an adaptation of three Allen Gurganus short stories.

Sawyer consciously sought to differentiate himself from the ArtFull Circle and establish his own identity as a writer/director of camp plays. One of his ideas was to employ the techniques of San Francisco’s respected Word for Word company who staged literary short stories verbatim. The result was Hot Pants Homo, a stage version of one of the soft-core porno novels from his growing collection of 1960s gay and lesbian pulp paperbacks.