Page 41 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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Jack Fritscher Chapter 1 23

1979). All that autumn we played office tug-of-war negotiating con-
tents, credit lines, and cash until we came to loggerheads.
8. Although in Drummer 31 Embry published two of my bylined
articles, “Mr. International Leather” and “Do-ers Profile: Tony Plewik,”
he deleted my name twice in that issue: as editor-in-chief, and, most
important to me, as photographer of the twenty-some centerfold
photos of Val Martin and Bob Hyslop which I shot alone on Sunday,
May 20, 1979. He also deleted my credit line for my final edit and
serialization of the draft of John Preston’s novel Mr. Benson.
9. By Drummer 32 and 33, I was disappearing until I was
“disappeared.” However in some instances, Embry published my
unsigned work as he had Jeanne Barney’s after she exited. Knowing
Embry’s tactics, I signed a couple of my pieces internally, one in
Drummer 32 (October 1979) by using my birth day and month in
the opening paragraph: “A Confidential Drummer Dossier: 20 June
1979,” page 19. His “cleansing” plus his effort to “backfill” 31,
32, and 33 delayed Drummer 33, the Christmas issue, until late
January 1980.
10. After six years on Embry’s Blacklist, I was invited to return
as a private paid consultant by new publisher Anthony F. DeBlase in
Drummer 100 (October 1986). I continued contributing for a total
run of 65 issues, and was listed on the masthead, till the end of
Drummer, as both “contributing writer” and “photographer” along
with my Palm Drive Video company named as “contributor,” also to
the end of Drummer.
11. As noted, during twenty-four years under all three owner-
publishers, I was the most frequent contributor of editing, writing,
and photography to Drummer, and thus intimate enough eyewitness
to be keeper of the institutional memory of Drummer.

The last issue was Drummer 214 (April 1999). The business closed offi-
cially on Folsom Fair weekend, September 30, 1999. Happily, in the mid-
1990s, while I continued contributing to Drummer, Embry and I reconciled
in a Mexican stand-off when he asked to publish my writing in his new MR
brand magazines, Manifest Reader, Manhood Rituals, and Super MR.
On the one hand, I had to admire Embry’s brazenness in subject mat-
ter and bravado against censorship in 1975. But realistically, his brass balls
meant the infant Drummer could barely survive, and certainly not in LA.
As founding San Francisco editor-in-chief, I was given my head to
remodel Los Angeles Drummer, to re-box, and re-brand the product with—
and here was the challenge—heat, guts, and aggressive masculinity, but in
a new erotic way that was legal in most places. My desire was to reflect the

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