Introduction by Jack Fritscher
ARCHETYPES OF OUR ARCHETRIBE
How 1970s “Drummer” Pioneered the Way We Are Today
“Drummer” is a living history of leatherfolk
written in human blood tattooed on tribal skin…
ARCHETYPES OF OUR ARCHETRIBE
How 1970s “Drummer” Pioneered the Way We Are Today
by Jack Fritscher
This week a baroque-back leather cowboy from the 1970s asked me what his complete collection of 214 issues of “Drummer” magazine was worth. I told him it was priceless and recommended he donate it to a proper gay archive like the European Leather and Fetish Foundation. From 1975 to 1999, “Drummer” created the archetypes of our archetribe and helped invent the very homomasculine leather culture we’re living today. “Drummer” notably saved the failing Folsom Fair by anchoring it with its wild Mr Drummer Contest, and by inviting its national and international subscribers to fly in for the kinky naked street orgy.
Forty years ago, good fortune got me hired as founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of this international juggernaut that was so epic in impact it was bigger than any of us—including Tom of Finland and Rex and my lover Robert Mapplethorpe—who filled its tasty pages with hot writing, cum-creamy drawings, and finger-licking photos designed to give readers and government censors boners.
Erotic writing begins with one stroke of the pen and ends with many strokes of the penis.
“Drummer” was a revolutionary idea in motion. In our leather archetribe, “Drummer” dared portray our desires to organize our thoughts to inform our practices. It was a first draft of leather history. This fearless politically-incorrect sex magazine was the leather bible that in the Titanic 1970s, before the iceberg of AIDS, brought the emerging gender of masculine-identified men out to claim an identity equal alongside other genders, and to balance dominant drag culture round Stonewall.
At Stonewall in 1969, gay character changed. At the founding of Drummer in 1975, leather character changed. In 1976, the Los Angeles police freaked out over the debut of masculine queers they couldn’t dismiss as sissies. Deploying 65 cops, one helicopter, and one bus to the festive “Drummer” slave auction fund-raiser, the LAPD arrested 42 staff and subscribers, causing “Drummer” to flee disaster in LA to destiny in San Francisco.
“Drummer” features and fiction, written to cause masturbation, pioneered, popularized, and validated daddies, bears, muscles, scruff, fetish sex (leather, boots, cigars, pups), and the BDSM alphabet soup of TT, CBT, VA, WS, and FF. “Drummer” prepared the way for you to be OK with the perversatility you enjoy today. “Drummer” was the autobiography of us all, or at least a lot of us, written and drawn and photographed by many of us to entertain the rest of us. Editing monthly “Drummer” daily in real time was for me a wild existential ride in gay pop culture when readers demanded authenticity, truth, and leadership in reporting the emergence of BDSM identity, rights, and rites. In 1979, by more good fortune in the snake pit of gay publishing, I had somehow edited half of the “Drummer” issues in existence.
A stack of 214 issues of “Drummer” is a coffee-table sculpture 3.5 feet tall weighing 120 pounds. Laid flat, top-to-bottom, “Drummer” stretches 64 yards: two-thirds the length of a football field. At a rough 90 pages per issue, “Drummer” comprised a total 20,000 pages of advocacy journalism created by hundreds of writers, artists, photographers, and designers, including even more thousands of hot sex-ad profiles written by dirty-minded subscribers seeking hookups. (“Drummer” was the Grindr of its day.)
It took a village to fill “Drummer,” and it took “Drummer” to inspire the 1977/78 pop-tart creation of the Village People. A group photo of every dude who helped create “Drummer” would rival the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
With 42,000 copies every issue in the 1970s, and with a pass-along rate of at least a “plus-one reader” in addition to each subscriber, approximately 80,000 people handled each monthly issue of “Drummer” for a 24-year total nearing twenty million people. The mobbed Folsom Fair in San Francisco hosts 100,000 leather guests every September. In gay book publishing, 5,000 copies sold is considered a best seller.
“Drummer,” pioneering the serialization of erotic manuscripts that could have been books, helped invent modern gay publishing as we know it. First came the magazines in the 1970s, and then the book publishers themselves in the 1980s. More eyes have likely read one issue of “Drummer” than have read any one book by any deeply established GLBT author on the top hundred list of best-sellers in the gay literary canon, including John Rechy, Edmund White, and Larry Kramer.
“Drummer” was an erotic leatherman’s handbook and guide. For thirty years, among the millions of leatherfolk in North America and Europe, there was hardly a player alive who had not heard of or read “Drummer.” Years after the internet killed “Drummer,” readers continue to report that as teenagers they had managed to find “Drummer,” even in Bumfuck, Florida, and that the assertive primer that was “Drummer” had mentored, shaped, and emboldened their gender and kink identities. There was political empowerment of homomasculine gender identity in erotic representation. So much so that the Tom of Finland Foundation, headed by Durk Dehner, recently declared that “‘Drummer,’ groundbreaking for its time, set precedence for all homomasculine representation to come.”
Masturbation is magical thinking. So, initially, what we did to make “Drummer” pulsate hard was add realism and availability to the Spank Bank fantasies of one-handed readers who wanted a virile and virilizing magazine that made the frontiers of newly liberated sex seem possible, accessible, and boundless.
“Drummer” was a reader-reflexive magazine whose stories and photos featured actual leather players you could meet rather than porn-studio modelles you could never touch. What readers wanted they found—in the homomasculine media image of themselves as newly minted leathermen and tough customers come alive in the cinema verite stories and the reality-show photos and drawings reflecting what gay males really did at night.
Neither courting nor condemning the legitimacy of effeminacy in the gay civil war around gender, “Drummer” changed the straight homophobic stereotype dismissing queers as “sissies” into the Platonic Ideal of the masculine-identified new gay man. That archetype of the new label “Leatherman” went viral in international popular culture, fashion, and films like “Cruising.”
The liberal beauty of “Drummer” was its social permissiveness anchored in marching to one’s own drummer. Self-reliance was the “Drummer” philosophy. “Drummer” was descriptive, not prescriptive, about leather behavior. Descriptive “Drummer” was non-judgmental in simply reporting how grassroots leather lives were actually lived without commandments. Even though the “Drummer” editorial voice was a “Top” seducing subscribers who mostly liked to read from a deliciously overpowered “bottom” point of view, “Drummer” was no domineering Dutch uncle demanding, “Thou Shalt” or “Thou Shalt Not.” Drummer never prescribed that there was a politically correct way to live leather because while there may be rules around sex, nobody’s sure what they are.
“Drummer” was never Old Guard or New Guard. “Drummer” was always Avant Garde.
Because of its passionate readers, “Drummer” survived 24 years of stress from bad business management, censorship, politics, plague, and trauma, including that one early plot twist of bad luck becoming good luck, when the LAPD busted the infant “Drummer” when it was only ten months old. But that’s another story.
“Drummer” is a living history of leatherfolk written in human blood tattooed on tribal skin.
By the way, I can’t blame that baroque-cowboy wanting to sell his collection of “Drummer.” In 2017, a single issue of early “Drummer” lists on the internet at $99.95! Who knew! © 2017 Jack Fritscher.com