Checkmate No 20 1997-09

DRUM and DRUMMER:
Memoirs of the Beginnings
The Past, The Present, &
The Cusp of What Happens Next! (part 2)

by
JACK FRITSCHER

Editor’s note: Jack Fritscher, the founding San Francisco editor of Drummer, is the author of Some Dance to Remember, the best-selling novel about gay life in the 1970’s, and of the nonfiction memoir, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. His book of photography is American Men. He is a frequent contributor to Brush Creek Media magazines as well as Drummer.  His new book, published July 1997, is the S&M-themed Rainbow County and Other Stories.

THE GREAT L.A. SLAVE AUCTION

In 1967, eight years before the advent of Drummer, I helped found the American Popular Culture Association, so that when Gay Lib really began as a pop cult movement in 1970, I kept the journals and notes that daily tracked by dates, names, and happenings the course of the  Titanic 70’s which was the “Golden Age of Male Sexual Liberation.” When Al Shapiro, the artist A. Jay, whose feature obituary tribute I wrote for Drummer issue #107, asked me to meet with John Embry who had just fled Los Angeles to escape persecution by the LA police who, I think, hated Drummer‘s co-efficient of masculinity, because male-identified queers (who were as butch as the cops) scared the cops about their own bonding. Leathermeister Embry had been busted at his charitable fundraiser, “The Great L.A. Slave Auction,” which made him to me kind of an activist hero, despite Larry Townsend’s “take” that Embry brought the police raid down on himself through inciteful advertising.  At almost the same time, Embry had split from the original group–including Jeanne Barney–who had conceived of Drummer. Checkmate Editor, Harold Cox, once said to me, “There are only two great Drummer editors. You, and Jeanne Barney.” To check out Embry’s attitude toward Jeanne Barney as perhaps index of his feeling toward all who split with him, see Drummer #30, page 38.

In 1977, when A. Jay brought John Embry to my home, I liked Embry enough that I agreed to take on his newly orphaned mag, not just  for the $200 an issue, but for the chance to take his Los Angeles ‘zine, mix it with my experiences in Renslowian Chicago leather, add some bar-bath-and-street smarts, and turn it into a San Francisco magazine that would virtually “invent” an international  lifestyle. I was hired as an editor, but I was never a writer-for-hire. Actually, I never had an office or even a desk at Drummer which I managed in the evenings and weekends. It’s not good for artists to try to live off their art, so I kept my corporate job managing the publications department of a world-class engineering company the whole while I’d drop into Drummer after 5 PM. This allowed me the discipline both to focus on quality time with the staff of Drummer and to avoid all the politics and twittering of gay publishing. (Editor’s note: Critic John F. Karr wrote: “Veteran author, Jack Fritscher, is an anarchist of Gay sexual prose, the man who invented the South of Market prose style…as well as its magazines.” Bay Area Reporter, June 27, 1985.) Drummer and erotica have never been my writing career; they are part of my writing career.

THE DRUMMER FRATERNITY

Drummer was the center of a talent pool. Embry’s lover, Mario Simon, was a top-selling disco singer in Spain. My friend,  Robert Opel, who streaked the 1975 Academy Awards, was a writer and photographer whose work vivified Drummer until he was murdered in the first South of Market art gallery, Fey Way,  in July 1979. Fred Halsted, the LA sadist, leatherman, bar-owner, publisher, and filmmaker, who was the S&M Leather King of the West Coast, frequently wrote columns for Drummer. The ruggedly masculine Halsted by his very presence set a Renaissance standard for the new male lifestyle in leather. Halsted, in fact, was one of the first strict arbiters of masculine-identified homosexual taste. Halsted the Top usually featured his blond lover, Joey Yale, in his films. Quickly, they became the first public Master and Slave model-couple in Drummer. Halsted’s two male-identified films, L.A. Plays Itself and Sextool entered the permanent collection of the MOMA by 1979. Halsted, after the death of Joey Yale in 1988, committed suicide in 1990. The S&M film, Born to Raise Hell, directed by Roger Earl and produced by Terry LeGrand, also figured prominently in the pages of pictures in 1970’s Drummer.

Pornstar Richard Locke, who starred in many male films, was the first Daddy presented in Drummer when I proposed a policy in Drummer #22 to break the age ceiling as we had broken the masculine barrier against Bette-Davis-identified gay pop culture. That year a foreign film titled In Praise of Older Women prompted me in Drummer to begin a continuing theme “In Praise of Older Men” which developed into the Daddy-Son Categories. Two other Drummer “firsts” were the introduction of 1) the serious gay interview with a gay celebrity, and 2) serious reviews of gay artists’ work. Drummer #27 featured my interview with the First Gay Filmmaker, Wakefield Poole, whose box-office smash, Boys in the Sand, a gay phenom reviewed by the New York Times, eventually brought pornstars like Casey Donovan, Roger, Bill Harrison, Mickey Squires, J. D. Slater, Al Parker, Val Martin, and Richard Locke into Drummer‘s offices, pages, and beds. Porn superstar Chris Burns, in fact, was the lover of latter-day Drummer editor, bodybuilder-blond, Jim-Ed Thompson, who was a super-star publisher of the first gay bondage magazines, Action Male.Thompson died June 21, 1988. Chris Burns, in his last Sunset Boulevard days, making phone calls for his own grand finale, was seeking to be tortured into the mondo beyondo on screen. (What good’s a Gottedammerung without flaming drama!)

Early on, Drummer‘s serious reviews of gay artists’ work paid solid attention to the first films of Derek Jarman and Peter Berlin. Al Shapiro and I entertained the legendary Tom of Finland whom we networked through San Francisco on his first trip to the U.S. The incredible Brit Bill Ward was another international artist aligned with Drummer from the first. Ward’s erotic drawing strip “Drum” will always reflect the masculine, ideal men of leather and SM fantasy. Other artists like Harry Bush (who early on drew spanky pen-and-ink young jocks for Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial) and Luger (who was actually Colt Studios which then spun out Lou Thomas’ Target Studios whose ouvre Drummer eventually bought and publishes under the strangely veiled label “From the Drummer Archives”) arrived full-grown at Drummer. Other artists, like The Hun, actually developed from juvenalia to sophistication in the pages of Drummer. The artist, however, who most embodies Drummer‘s fetish text and secret-sauce subtext, is the reclusive American artist REX, who has drawn much for Drummer including the significant cover for Drummer #100. REX, whose name is always all caps, is an example of the perfect artist who has driven the S&M eye and leather mind of Drummer by expanding the visual and psychological form and content of male-identified art. REX, in fact, transcends any existing magazine as his work leaps beyond the edge to exclaim the pungent world of the secret erotica we all know is hidden under the code word, leathersex.

Early Drummer also featured the fiction of the “Grandfather of Gay Writing,” Sam Steward aka Phil Andros, who connected Drummer to the likes of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thornton Wilder, and leather-filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Sam was very much part of the Renslow-Chicago connection; he had taught at Chicago’s De Pauw University until he was fired when the school discovered that for many years Sam had been running–between classes–his own sleazy tattoo and sex parlor down in the Loop! As the 60’s became the 70’s, Sam moved to the Bay Area. The Leather Priest, Jim Kane, introduced us at a dinner party in 1971. In 1974, the State of Michigan Council on the Arts gave me a grant to tape audio interviews with Sam Steward who soon after was contributing many stories to Drummer. In the 80’s, every gay and lesbian writer worth their salt paid calls of homage to suck up to Sam at his small cottage in Berkeley. Sam remained a great friend of Drummer until his death at 89 on New Year’s Eve 1993 which was–by weird symbolic coincidence in male art–the exact same date that the late Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild shut its doors after nearly 50 years.  Celebrity photographers in Drummer were the likes of Crawford Barton, Arthur Tress, and my then bicoastal lover, Robert Mapplethorpe. In the world of leather, all these artists–and many others–are very prestigious names to celebrate in the earliest pages of just one very important magazine.

BEATING THE DRUM: MATURE WISDOM, YOUNG ENERGY

From the first days of San Francisco Drummer, my intent was to invite and include the wisdom of established gay minds, talent, celebrities, and icons while encouraging the energy of new talent emerging from the closets opened by gay liberation. In the 1970’s few men took the time to write, draw, or photograph, because everyone was busy orgying on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In the 90’s, gay artists sometimes seem at each other’s throats because there are so many people, male and female, who have forsaken actual sex for the virtual sex of art. Not so in the 70’s of early Drummer! At that time we had to convince potential contributors that Drummer was really an action-adventure magazine by and about masculine men, because gay lib was so new and Drummer‘s leather-male premise was so, well, unexpected, shocking even, in an age of disco bunnies and clones (and women who had yet to appear on the gay horizon). I actually worked the crowds of  bars, baths, beds, cafes, and after-hours clubs in search of talent to fill the issues (20-30)  with more than the combo of A. Jay’s art work, the reviews by Ed Franklin, the plays by George Birimisa, the fiction of John (“Robert Payne”) Embry, and and my own writing and photographs. (Magazines don’t happen in a vacuum.)

In those early formative issues Al Shapiro and I, while Embry was absent, did what we wanted to lead the reader and to recruit men into the leather masculine lifestyle. Those ten hardcore issues of Drummer single-handedly set standards for the literacy and content of gay publishing and introduced a list of all new fetishes to the gay press: cigars, rubber, prisons/ex-cons, real bodybuilding, daddies/sons, fisting, tit torture, water sports, and even “gay” sports back when all sports were “straight” before the Gay Games had ever been conceived. There are also words, actual vocabulary still in use, that were coined to appear first in Drummer: consensuality, mutuality, perversatility, homomasculinity. The sex and psychology of what we were doing was so new that to write about it one had to make up words for it. The best writers are thinkers, and that is their value, especially in a visually-driven leather culture where most of the magazines, including late-90’s Drummer, have given up their personal leather identity and devolved to little more than commercial catalogs for huge video companies.

OLD RELIABLE’S STAR RISES

In San Francisco, quite actively, I dragged my friend David Hurles’ photographs and audio tapes out of his 10th and Mission apartment across from the Doggie Diner and on to the pages of Drummer where I introduced him to the world under his  trade name “Old Reliable”! Before Drummer, no gay mag of queens would touch Old Reliable’s pix of ex-cons and street hustlers that quickly grew to be a whole new kind of gay icon. I took the pop-talk audio tapes of Old Reliable and had them transcribed by Steve MacEachern (who was famous for founding the original Catacombs fisting parlor in the cellar of his San Francisco Victorian in May, 1975). Those audio tapes, in a time when Broadway plays like Hair and A Chorus Line, were communally composed, I then turned into writing to be read in “Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley” (Drummer #22 & #23)  and “Excons: We Abuse Fags” (Drummer #24 & #25).

Old Reliable was such a hit on the page, my spouse, Mark Hemry (no relation to John Embry) and I abducted Hurles to our home and locked him in our bedroom and didn’t let him out until he had edited together the first Old Reliable video tape in 1981. Later, Old Reliable, whom I still love dearly, and for whose studio I have shot a video or two, moved from his slum flat in San Francisco to the reclusive hills above LA where his “Boulevard Boys” work has made him a world-renowned celeb revered by French film critics as well as American video voyeurs who like masculine rough trade tough as leather. Old Reliable’s profile in the late 90’s has withdrawn, perhaps because of the laws (eg. censorship) requiring models to have more pieces of photo ID than Old Reliable’s interesting underclass models would ever carry. (The Drummer-driven Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley and Other Stories was published by Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, 1984.)

SONS OF DRUMMER

For a time, I brought Old Reliable himself, David Hurles, into our Drummer office to edit Drummer‘s new sibling publication the Alternate which publisher Embry named to pique the pre-L.A. Advocate  which was then based south of San Francisco in San Mateo. In the 70’s publishing wars, Embry saw the kveenly Advocate as his main rival. (Go figure!) However, Old Reliable’s preference was not in editing magazines so much as to be featured in them. Luckily then, at Drummer at that time, when we were at the 1730 Divisadero office, there was a young office “boy,” who had done a slave/bottom turn in a couple of low-budget porno films and written a piece or two for Drummer. His name was John Rowberry. Later, because he was available and willing and knew punctuation, he became editor of the magazine no one wanted to edit, the Alternate, and, when I graduated from Drummer, December 31, 1979, he, for a time fronted as editor for publisher Embry.

By the mid-80’s Rowberry had become a star publisher himself packaging magazines like Uncut, Skin, Inches, and Studflix. Old Reliable, Rowberry, and I–all veterans of Drummer, worked together on those 80’s mags which all were somehow sons of Drummer. I wrote more than 30 stories and features for Rowberry’s magazines (co-edited with Drummer-graduate, Aaron Travis/StevenSaylor) which regularly featured hundreds of photos by Old Reliable. Tied to Old Reliable who had jumped immediately into video, Rowberry just as fast jumped early on into reviewing gay videos even though his reviews reflected his own taste for blond bimbo boys more than the more mature taste of the men whom he had never quite understood in the Drummer audience which he had abandoned. I once told him, “John, you like boys in videos so young that if sperm could act, you’d give it 4 stars.” We were all bonded like that–so similar yet so diverse–and we worked together until a year of so before Rowberry’s death in 1993.

THE CASTING COUCH

In 1979, publisher Embry handed me a manuscript that was clearly the draft of a novel, but not yet a novel. Embry insisted we had to publish it, because he had already paid for the manuscript. Prepayment was not Embry’s style, so A. Jay and I figured he had a thing for the aggressive young writer. “Drummer has a certain literary standard,” I maintained before I even met with the author, “and the only way this draft of this novel can be published is with a final re-write.” At Embry’s insistence I met with the east-coast writer at the upstairs bar across from the Cafe Flor and proceeded to tutor him for 3 afternoons in the ways of adult writing in general and Drummer writing in particular, especially when it came to leather and S&M. (Half the job of anyone’s editing Drummer is mentoring the talent.) Among other recommendations, I told the author that gay liberation meant he did not have to fuck anyone to get published and he should be proud enough to use his own name. I counseled him to stop calling himself “Jack Prescott” and to sign his work “John Preston.”

Preston got part of the message, learned some of his lessons, and, when he refused to work any further on the manuscript in progress, because Embry wanted it so,  I edited his raw manuscript to the Drummer standard. All this history reveals some of the inside of publishing Drummer: except literally who was actually fucking whom! (Ask Rick Leathers, who worked deep inside Drummer, for that tales of the City.) I was actually happy to have Prescott/Preston to edit, because Drummer needed input and he was at least putting out copy. Readers interested in the history of gay literature might find an interesting contrast and comparison between the serialized chapters in Drummer and the final printing of the novel that came to be titled Mr. Benson which Embry published and promoted as an in-house Drummer book. Long before his death, John Preston had achieved his patented Vampyr-like look which–perhaps born out of his hanging around with the Queen of the Night, Anne Rice–was not so far a cry from the petulant bad boy bottom whom I had tutored years before in the Castro. But that’s the point: everyone entered Drummer one way and exited much more experienced. Too often these days their bottomline stories are told mostly in obituaries. Preston went on to gather the energy of other writers in several anthologies.

YOU CAN CHECK IN, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE

Drummer, you can see, has never really been fiction so much as documentary of up-to-the-minute leather behavior. The cocky heart of Drummer, up to its 20th anniversary, is still a clenched fist. Drummer has always been Sex-Plus-a-Mind! The written contributions of Larry Townsend and Guy Baldwin and the graphic energy of Mikal Bales (Zeus Studios) have kept good company over the years with other Drummer expatriate talents such as evergreen writer/editor/artist Joseph Bean, mercurial writer/editor Tim Barrrus, as well as the recent incarnation of the public leather-diarist known as Mr. Marcus Hernandez or of the woman known as Ms. Pat Califia, to the earliest incarnations of the founders of Colt and Target, Jim French and Lou Thomas, whose company I had kept from 1969 onwards into the Drummer years when Colt’s French refused to let any of his images be printed in an Embry publication. In 1988, DeBlase’s Drummer combined with Bales’ Zeus Studios to produce videos with the best ever brand name, “USSM”; however, the videos, which were shot and briefly marketed, disappeared from sale never to be seen again, one presumes, due to censorship, or the 1989 earthquake which, read like a rune in the ruins, occasioned the sale of Drummer from DeBlase, citizen of San Francisco, to Martijn Bakker, citizen of Amsterdam.

Drummer is a tribal magazine whose three generations of publishers have each shaped the magazine. Embry, the first solo publisher (who, as mentioned,  had gained custody of the infant Drummer from the mag’s founding partners in LA), was introduced to me, the writer, by A. Jay, the shaved-headed artist. Actually, publisher Embry, now printing Manifest Reader, has always lived a life of no mea culpa, and I don’t blame him! When Embry sold Drummer to Anthony DeBlase and Andy Charles, Drummer caught a second new wind that reflected DeBlase’s more sophisticated approach to the leather world. When I asked Tony DeBlase, just prior to the milestone publication of Drummer #100, who Drummer‘s intended market audience was, he said, “Anyone who wants to read it.” DeBlase’s universalist approach has evolved into the third-generation publisher, Martijn Bakker’s, very 90’s deconstruction and internationalization of Drummer, which should soon, I believe, publish writing, but only good writing, in languages other than English inside the English edition. (This “Rear-View Mirror” column will soon feature the last interview actually given to me by Rob of Amsterdam as well as a major interview with Wally Wallace, the founder of the infamous Mineshaft and one of the partners in the contemporary fleshpot, New York’s The Lure. [Note: These interviews, like this piece itself, were never published in Drummer which, at the moment of its 20th anniversary, lost interest in actual leather personalities and leather history.]) Despite its titular “internationality,” the appeal of Drummer has always been its very American heart. Tom of Finland always tried to draw that heart, and finally that American heart brought him actually, finally, as an immigrant, into America where he was embraced and finally able to protect his copyright.

A DRUMMER CULTURE WORTH SAVING

Ideally–with the decade, century, and millenium all ending, the time has come to take Drummer and re-publish all its written contents as a book, in order to focus on the actual linguistic texts of leather, gender, and race. I’d give it a working title of: DRUMMER SPEAKS: A Pop-Culture History of Leather and SM of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s from the Pages of Drummer Magazine. Drummer is hot even without the photographs and drawings, and with the graphics subtracted, Drummer‘s written text, which has always had more fan mail than any photo or drawing,  might finally get into States in the United States where adult constitutional rights to art have been taken away and into countries who won’t let Drummer across their borders. I also think it’s time for Drummer the CD-ROM–even before SONY becomes the fourth-generation publisher of Drummer! The main problem Drummer will have with republishing its contents is the securing of rights from the copyright holders: the writers, the photographers, the graphic artists, or their survivors.

PARTY ON, DUDES!

Drummer is a rich territory. It’s sex, art, erotica, literature, politics, culture, and personal histories acted out as performance art. Literally, hundreds of writers, artists, photographers, editors, and staff–each in their own way celebrated contributors–have touched Drummer or have flowed through the Drummer offices. There’s a thousand stories to tell about “The Making of Drummer” and all of them are as true as the remembrance the teller remembers. (Leather history, like gay history itself, can no longer be revised or owned between two covers by anyone, because, simply, the Internet exists.) As A. Jay said on his death-bed: “If we throw a party for everyone who’s ever worked for Drummer, we’d have to hire the Cow Palace.”

FORMER ROMAN CANDLE, NOW A WICKLESS STAMP

How, in the late 90’s, the Roman-candle of leathersex, Drummer, became a wickless stamp of its former self is another chapter that I’m too much of a gentleman to write (at the moment), even though in the current issue, Drummer #204, June 1997, I contributed four pages of Palm Drive photographs plus a two-page feature article titled “Hustler Bars: Show Me the Money!” I’m not a collaborator; I’m just one of those saps who doesn’t abandon a friend or a magazine when it becomes, mmm, “self-destructive.” In its history, Drummer has been declared dead many times. So far, Drummer seems always to survive and resuscitate itself as a masculine-identified magazine that reflects real guys having real leathersex while living real lives. Right now, Drummer, like the millenium, rests on the cusp of what happens next.

© 1997 by Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. & Mark Hemry – ALL RIGHTS RESERVED July 8, 1997