Jeanne Barney: Author

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (index PDF)
Gay Pioneers (index PDF)
The Life and Times of Larry Townsend
Chapter 14: Jeanne Barney
Chapter 15: Larry’s Leather Wife
Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award

Jeanne Barney — Short Biography

Jeanne Barney (1938-2018), working as an advice columnist for “The Advocate” from 1969 to 1974, was a twice-divorced straight woman bent on finding freelance employment in gay male publishing when publisher John Embry hired her in 1975 as the founding editor of the short-lived Los Angeles version of the men’s leather magazine, “Drummer,” which she edited for eleven issues before quitting in high dudgeon because Embry owed her $13,000 in back pay. She also resented that Embry had not listed her name or title on the masthead of the first three issues.

LA “Drummer” was one year old in 1976 when Embry blacklisted his frenemy Barney who as “persona non grata” had no lingering influence at all on the following 203 monthly issues of the San Francisco version of “Drummer” which made the men’s adventure magazine an international classic of its kind. In fact, she herself, embittered, said she wanted nothing ever to do again with “Drummer” even before Embry trashed her virulently in “Drummer” 30, June 1979.

In the months Barney was editor, she and Embry, trying to retrofit 1960s provocations into 1970s culture, published articles on “forbidden” topics of race, minors, animals, and LA politics that incited LAPD Police Chief Ed Davis to “bug” the “Drummer” office and then raid the “Drummer Slave Auction” which caused “Drummer” to flee the disaster of censorship in LA to its destiny in the sanctuary of San Francisco. Barney who owned her own home, and never held another job, supported herself and her sporty yellow convertible by selling leather goods and erotic books via mail-order out of her WeHo home. She held gay court at the French Market restaurant and at Canter’s Deli where she spread her father’s ashes under his favorite booth and gnoshed with her activist friends Stuart Timmons and Harry Hay who on his death bequeathed her the famous string of pearls he wore as his signature emblem. Her longtime friend, San Francisco artist Chuck Arnett, whom “Drummer” dubbed our “Lautrec in Leather,” painted her in 1974.

Historically, Barney is of most interest because of her fraught forty-year friendship on the LA scene with iconic leather writer Larry Townsend, author of “The Leatherman’s Handbook.” As the two erstwhile “Friends of Bill W” dueled their way through their days of wine and roses, she played the role of “Townsend’s Leather Wife” that enhanced her myth in a politically-correct age wishing to magnify women in gay men’s publishing as if Jeanne were Jeanne d’Arc. Much writing about Barney is politically-correct boilerplate improvised by strangers acting on agenda, rumors, and wishful thinking, and not on her actual history, because she adamantly kept herself an enigma…When reporting on the Slave Auction debacle, the “Philadelphia Gay News” identified her as “a housewife from La Crescenta.” She was more than that, and more than her eighteen months at “Drummer.”

It was through their mutual friend Townsend that Jeanne Barney, the founding Los Angeles editor, met Jack Fritscher, the founding San Francisco editor, who during the many years of their personal friendship observed and interviewed Jeanne, the tempest-tossed daughter of circus performers, documenting at her behest (from recorded calls and emails) her personal and social history in three of his leather-history books: “Gay San Francisco: Drummer Magazine,” “Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Created Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999,” and “The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend.”

Endorsing Fritscher’s way with her and her experience in “Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer,” she wrote: “For those of us who were there inventing ‘Drummer’ three decades ago, Fritscher serves up a thoroughly researched and well-written account of a particular era in gay history, reporting on what may well have been ‘The Golden Age of Leather’ and of ‘Drummer’ . . . ‘Gay San Francisco’ is an historical resource for those who want to know How Things Used to Be, as well as a nostalgic look back for those of us who were ourselves participants. I invite you all to join us in this extraordinary walk down memory lane.”

Jack Fritscher’s 2022 interview with Jeanne’s long-estranged daughter exists in his archives — unpublished as a courtesy to Jeanne until 2035. The Barney Archives are at Yale.

© 2025 Jack Fritscher