James Robert Baker was born in Long Beach in 1946. He grew up in the turmoil that was Southern California in the 60’s and explored his sexuality in the underground gay teen bars in Los Angeles. Baker graduated from UCLA and won the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award while attending. The Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award is given annually and is a completive writing contest open to all University of California students with a first prize of $15,000. Previous winners include Francis Ford Coppola and Colin Higgins. Judges have included Denzel Washington, Dustin Hoffman, and David Lynch.
Baker began his career as a screen writer and decided after a successful five years to devote his efforts to writing predominantly gay-themed fiction novels. Bakers first novel was published in 1985 called Adrenaline and was published under his pseudonym, James Dillinger. Baker went on to write a number of novels including: Fuel-Injected Dreams, Boy Wonder, Tim and Pete, and Right Wing.
A lot of Bakers writings reflect his hate of the Republican agenda and can be traced back to his upbringing in a Republican conservative home. Baker committed suicide in 1997 leaving behind his lifelong partner Ron Robertson.
After Bakers death in 1997 his books took on cult status and some of his early books fetch a large price at specialty book stores. Robertson has been able to get two more of Bakers books published: Testosterone and Anarchy. Testosterone was made into a film and had limited success.
Critics of Baker referred to him as “The Last Angry Gay Man”.
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