James Fugaté published the novel Quatrefoil and other works under the pseudonym James Barr, an alias he also used in his work as an activist in the homophile movement of the 1950s.

Fugaté was born on February 13, 1922 in an oilfield boomtown in either Texas or Oklahoma. His mother died of childbed fever; he never knew his father.

Fugaté's illegitimate birth haunted him as a child, but his adoptive parents, who had money from wheat and oil in Kansas, gave him a good education. His best-known work, the novel Quatrefoil (1950), is based on his experience in the U.S. Navy during World War II, but a central character is patterned after a fraternity brother with whom Fugaté had sex as a university student. (He appears to have been a student either