GAY PIONEERS
How Drummer Magazine Shaped
Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999
This Leather Origin Story of investigative journalism is an eyewitness oral history about a soon-to-be-lost generation of a once-important subculture of gay pioneers. In our leather archetribe, Drummer helped create the very culture it reported on. Drummer was a revolutionary idea evolving in monthly motion. Drummer portrayed our desires to organize our thoughts to inform our practices to create our leather identity. In 214 issues from 1975 to 1999, Drummer was a first draft of leather history and the “magazine of record” for our BDSM species within generic LGBT history. Gay Pioneers continues the leather-heritage GPS mapping Fritscher began in his NLA-I award-winning book, Gay San Francisco. Curious how high we leatherfolk once flew? Fritscher based this book on the “black-box flight recorder” he recovered from the “take-off, cruising altitude, and crash” of Drummer. Young readers will get up to speed fast on the backstage fun and games of who did what to whom, and how Drummer shaped 20th-century leather for 21st-century leatherfolk. Grounded on evidence inside Drummer, and in eyewitness diaries, letters, and interviews, this fact-checked masterwork recalls the thrill it was for millions of readers to pick up their first issue of Drummer. For that a price was paid. Against all odds, Drummer survived 24 years of stress from cruel censorship, plague, and politics that got the Drummer staff arrested, causing Drummer to move from disaster in Los Angeles to destiny in San Francisco. Gay Pioneers is a living history of leatherfolk written in human blood tattooed on human skin.
A Narrative Timeline, Analysis, and Archive of Art, Sex, Erotica, Obscenity, Homophobia, Identity Politics, the Culture War, and the Salon around Drummer Magazine. Based on internal evidence in Drummer magazine, and in journals, diaries, letters, photographs, interviews, recordings, magazines, and newspapers in the Jack Fritscher and Mark Hemry Archive.
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Review Endorsements
“Drummer was a map of leather culture, and Fritscher and his books are unabashed and uninhibited tour guides.”
—Chuck Renslow, founder, Leather Archives & Museum and International Mr. Leather (IML)
“I invite you all to join us in this extraordinary walk down memory lane.”
—Jeanne Barney, First and Founding LA Editor-in-Chief of Drummer
“What rollicking fun…to reopen old friendships and even some ancient hostilities of that golden age. To be a bystander to those vibrant talents and hear again those voices…. Can you imagine the pleasure in being able to put one’s arms around some of those people, just like you maybe should have done back then when they were still around and available?”
—John Embry, founding publisher of Drummer
“Those concerned with the preservation of GLBT history are very fortunate that Fritscher has such a remarkable memory for the people, places, and pivotal events he has witnessed. His long association with Drummer in San Francisco placed him at the center of the revolution.”
—Catherine Johnson-Roehr, The Kinsey Institute
“There is no written account of Old Guard leather. Fritscher’s detailing of the Drummer Boom is unparalleled and we need it.”
—Dave Rhodes, publisher, The Leather Journal
“Fritscher is about as informed as anyone on the history of erotic writing, its importance, and the state of erotic publishing today. According to him, religion and nipple clamps were invented for the same reason, namely that everyone likes being bottom of the domination pile.”
—Bruno Bayley, Vice Magazine
All-around leatherman Jack Fritscher chronicles our leather lifestyle. His books on people, places, events, and ideas in our world are accurate, and seethe with the fervor of our lives in those bygone days.”
—Mr. Marcus, Bay Area Reporter
“Fritscher invented the South of Market prose style and its magazines.”
—John F. Karr, Bay Area Reporter