Page 34 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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16 Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

In March 1977, John Embry hired me as editor-in-chief to assist his
move from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and to write the Drummer story
inside the magazine.
Drummer was a first draft of leather history.
This memoir of Drummer is a second.
This is a story of some talented artists and some unsympathetic persons,
with some discomfiting eyewitness testimony about the pressures of art and
commerce on the moral actions of writers and publishers during the first
decade of gay liberation after the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. Drummer
was to me what Chawton village was to Jane Austen who also wrote about
“a world in small” with characters reflecting the human condition.

“I never foresaw the impact that Drummer would have.
It was a big surprise to me....I’m amazed.”
—John Embry to Robert Davolt, 2003

John Embry was not a pure bully only because nobody’s perfect.
This is a backstage story born of a whisper, anchored in evidence, and
told by many insiders interested in the truths rather than the legends about
Drummer.
It is a cautionary tale about esthetic, psychological and financial abuse,
as well as betrayal in the gay community.
It is a representative history, universal in its specifics, of the 1% of pub-
lishers exploiting the 99% of writers, artists, and photographers. An internet
search for “bad publishers” yields 74,800,000 results in 0.23 seconds.
In our transparent age of social communication, nothing is secret
anymore.
This book was ninety percent written when its present-tense immediacy
changed the morning John Embry died in his sleep on September 16, 2010.
John Embry (1926-2010), born a Methodist in Winslow, Arizona, moved
to Los Angeles to study art, was drafted into the U.S. Army (1949), and sold
advertising in Hawaii and LA before his involvement with H.E.L.P., the
Homophile Effort for Legal Protection that rescued gay men entrapped by
the Los Angeles Police Department. The slick life in LA suited his busi-
ness style perfectly. In 1971, his fledgling mail-order business, the “Leather
Fraternity,” selling poppers and leather wristbands, needed a small-format
brochure whose sales pitch he cleverly insinuated within his editorial and
advertising coverage of bars and restaurants such as the Glass Onion, the
Sewers of Paris, the Bitter End West, and the Bla Bla Café in Studio City.
In December, he debuted his first mini-mag “trial balloon” and titled it

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