Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award 2008
Jeanne Barney
(1938-2019)
by Jack Fritscher
Founding San Francisco
Drummer Editor in Chief
www.DrummerArchives.com
Jeanne Chesley Barney, the Queen of Leather, is certainly Leather Culture’s Founding Mother in the way her namesake Jeanne D’Arc is the Patron Saint in the Pantheon of France. She was born in 1938. SHE REFUSES TO SAY, BUT I FOUND IT on 25 APRIL 2018) She turns 80 in 2018. She is known variously as: Jeanne C. Barney aka: Jeanne Chesley, Jeanne W. Barney, J Chesley, Jeanne C. Mastin who has lived in Los Angeles, CA, Montrose, CA, and La Crescenta, CA.
Maybe because gay men do not have women in our lives, we often create divas out of women whom in our magical thinking we credit almost automatically as allies with superpowers because it’s a grateful trope of the male mystique to have a woman in your corner. In the 1970s need to cast the role, leathermen have assumed that Jeanne Barney, a straight woman who could wrap gay men like Larry Townsend and John Embry around her finger, was a goddess who created Drummer which, while she was present 1976-1976 for issues 3 to 11, she did not. The divorced Barney who was not a success with straight men knew how to flatter and play straight and gay men to survive as a woman in Los Angeles.
In fact, the mainly Scots-Irish Jeanne Chesley (not Chelsey) Barney, the founding editor in chief of Drummer magazine, is the longtime Leather Eyewitness Pioneer who is one of the main keepers of our Leather Heritage cultural and institutional memory, as well as of the behind-the-scenes legends of who did what to whom and why in the emerging 1970s LA leather crowd of erotic writers and political gay liberationists.
Everybody has a crush on Jeanne. Everybody emails her, or telephones her, for facts on the timeline of leather. In her lifetime, she has answered personally every letter she has ever received.
The daughter of an artist mother and granddaughter of silent-screen star grandparents, Jeanne Barney is to the leather salon around Drummer what Virginia Woolf was to Bloomsbury or Gertrude Stein was to Bilignin. (Her grandmother was Mabel Forrest and her paternal grandfather : he was married to film star Virginia Vance aka Dahlia Roberta Pears.he was the silent film star Bryant Washburn: according to the LA Directory – 1932, he appeared in 350+ films from 1911-1947 including many classics like early 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz. In the leather world, she has the gravitational pull of the moon.
After Harry Hay, pioneer founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries, died at age ninety, a gay publisher gifted Jeanne in 2006 with a precious set of the pearls Harry Hay frequently wore. A thankful editor, in admiring homage for her intellect and common sense, gave her a large Calder lithograph.
Jeanne Barney’s life is a drop-dead Who’s Who of BDSM leather writers, artists, and photographers—nearly all of whom she published in Drummer, thus furthering their early careers.
Some of the them are:
1) LA leather top and filmmaker Fred Halsted whose best friend in life she was from 1972 to his suicide;
2) writer-photographer Robert Opel, her “Renaissance Man,” who famously streaked the 1974 Oscars, and filled her infant Drummer with his words and photos, and was murdered soon after as a result of Dan White’s assassination of Harvey Milk;
3) the Grandfather of Modern Gay Writing, Sam Steward aka Phil Andros, the friend of Gertrude and Alice who wrote that Barney was the best editor he ever had;
4) Larry Townsend, author of The Leatherman’s Handbook, whom she dubbed the “Dr. Spock of Leather Sex”;
5) artists Tom of Finland, Etienne, Sean, Bud, and Rex;
6) film-makers Roger Earl and Terry LeGrand whose Born to Raise Hell movie she featured in Drummer;
7) Latin pornstar and Drummer cover man Val Martin, the first Mr. Drummer; and
8) Folsom Street artist Chuck Arnett founder of The Tool Box who in 1975 escorted the straight Jeanne Barney to the roof of the Drummer office and drew an astounding full-length iconic portrait of the tiny 98-pound “La Barney” encased in her dominatrix leather with legs up to here and gorgeous long hair down to there tucked up under her leather cap.
Leatherfolk might well remember that after the NYPD raid at Stonewall in 1969, history repeated itself seven years later when the LAPD raided the Drummer Slave Auction at the Mark IV Bath on April 10, 1976. In the Fascist state of Los Angeles run by homophobic Police Chief Ed Davis, the plan was to destroy leather culture by destroying the ten-month-old Drummer magazine which was dangerous because it reported on the very behavior it created and enabled each issue.
That raid that night changed everything in the world of leather.
When the LAPD Brown Shirts with guns and helicopters and TV news crews arrested Jeanne Barney, the only female, with 39 leathermen, a smart-ass cop asked her, “Are you a real woman?” To which the glamorous Jeanne Barney gowned in black velvet snapped, “Of course, I’m a real woman. If I were a drag queen, I’d have bigger tits.”
The fearless Barney, who in the 1960s with the Peace and Freedom Party burned draft cards in the street, was the only Drummer person arrested who stood up publically to be PR liaison for the leather community trashed by the straight media led by the hateful Village Voice and the gay media led by the odious Advocate who both editorialized that leather people were an embarrassment to gay liberation.
In and out of court for a year, Drummer’s frightened staff had been constantly harassed and tailed by the LAPD who bugged their phones in the run-up to the raid. Nevertheless, Drummer struggled forward steered by Jeanne Barney until high anxiety drove Drummer out of LA to its reincarnation in San Francisco where she could not move because of family responsibilities.
Jeanne Barney was editor in chief of Los Angeles Drummer for 11 full issues over 21 revolutionary months in the Titanic 1970s, from June 1975 to December 1976. She is a critic of leather-history revisionism who does not like the whitewashes of wishful thinkers claiming that Anne Rice wrote for Drummer or that Steven Saylor was the editor of Drummer when Rice did not, and Saylor was not.
Leather Patriarch Harold Cox, publisher of Checkmate Incorporating DungeonMaster, says, “Jeanne Barney was one of the two great editors at Drummer.” In fact, Jeanne Barney was one of only two people ever titled as “editor in chief” of Drummer. Everyone else was listed simply as “editor.”
Against all odds, Jeanne Barney tried to keep Drummer honest in its mail-order and subscription business and in its editorial philosophy. She dared hold up a leather crucifix to keep cash-thirsty vampires from sucking Drummer dry. “The publisher wanted a cash cow/stroke book; I wanted a literary stroke book because I thought people into leather were not without an intellectual dimension.”
The Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, said in 2007: “There were many heterosexuals who helped us in the beginning, but Jeanne Barney was the first to help in Los Angeles. I tell everybody that. I’m so grateful.” She was also the first and only woman to frequent the nasty leather bath house Manspace, and was the only woman allowed to attend Full Moon Nights at Larry’s Bar.
How did a little girl in five-inch heels from Sierra Madre, California, become the Queen of Drummer? Essentially, Jeanne Barney is a writer who is a thinker which means she can do almost anything. Her literary influences were Graham Greene, Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Somerset Maugham whose The Razor’s Edge is the book that most changed her life.
In her thirties, she was pioneer participant and eyewitness at the 1960s and 1970s birth of the GLBT press, and was pals with Dick Mitch and Bill Rau before they changed their names to Dick Michaels and Bill Rand and bought The Pride Newsletter which they changed into the original-recipe The Advocate. Michaels and Rand hired journalist Jeanne as a freelance reporter and columnist at the same time they hired their first two other women who were not writers, Tyke Brown and Bo Siewert, who bound their chests to wear men’s clothing.
As a 1950s high-school teen-queen, she sported Spaulding white bucks with eraser-pink soles and circular skirts with lots of crinoline petticoats, while nursing a passion for Frank Sinatra. She sharpened her style writing a gossip column for the Sierra Madre News, and graduated to writing advertising when she moved to Chicago to finish at the University of Chicago. She became a sought-after copywriter in Chicago, then LA, then San Francisco where she wrote for radio station KSAY. Working as a PR writer, she commuted from Europe to Manhattan and to Hollywood thinking that “advertising could be a force for good in society”—she has always loved words and puns and humor.
In the not-yet-ironic 1960s, she received her Security Clearance to write freelance for Stars & Stripes, the daily newspaper for the US military, and for the “Armed Forces Radio and TV Service.” Naturally, she lost that clearance when she started writing for Michaels and Rand’s Advocate where she debuted her column “Smoke from Jeanne’s Lamp” which she moved to Drummer when the humorless investment banker David Goodstein bought The Advocate.
She was also editor of Dateline: The NewsMagazine of Gay America (1976) and was the Hawks’ H.E.L.P.Inc. Leather Awards Humanitarian of the Year (1976). Given a “Sophie’s Choice” in 1975, when the publisher of NewsWest told her she couldn’t be editor of two competing magazines, she chose Drummer.
With social skills and intellect, she has performed water ballets with the sharks of gay publishing and gay politics. She survived their egos and, she says, the greedy corporatizing that has destroyed the once-free GLBTculture that now charges $250 bucks to meet a politician. Her literary ideal for her version of Drummer was The Evergreen Review which explains why so many think pieces and leather plays were published in Drummer.
Despite her public life, Jeanne Barney is an intensely private person, the mother of a grown daughter, an unrepentant smoker, a friend of Bill W. since 1984, and a passionate animal-rights activist who lives in her home dubbed “Wit’s End” from which she scoots around LA in her hot-yellow convertible “Solstice,” often lunching at Canter’s Jewish Deli where she sprinkled her father’s ashes so he could spend eternity at one of his favorite places in the world. Back in the heyday of wine and roses and leather, one of her lovers was the pro-baseball hero Mickey McDermott, a drinking buddy of Beat Movement father Jack Kerouac.
When asked how often she has been married, she says, “More than twice.” When asked how many cats she has, she says, “More than two.” When asked about her birthday, she warns, “Never fuck around with a quadruple Virgo.” Her moon is in Taurus and she’s a size zero at J. Peterman. Her rescue dog is a Chinese Crested named “Seussie” for Doctor Seuss. And she is secretly, and dangerously, working on her memoirs! Cherchez la femme!
Since the millennium, she has been one of the main advisors finessing a major new book about leather heritage because she wants the last 30 years of the twentieth century to be remembered accurately as the “First Golden Age of Leather.”
Of herself she recently joked, “I’m still running with scissors and accepting candy from strangers. Just don’t call me ‘Gee-Anne.’ And when I pass, I want my obituary to shout out, ‘She succumbed after winning a long struggle with life.’” © 2008 Jack Fritscher.
Editor’s Note: Jack Fritscher is the leather historian who was the founding San Francisco editor in chief of Drummer and is the author of Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (2008).