Page 51 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 1 33

Simon. The first Mr. Drummer was the Colombian/Argentinian immigrant
Vallot Martinelli aka Drummer signature model Val Martin, the star of Born
to Raise Hell, who was featured on the cover of five issues: 2, 3, 8, 30, 60,
and centerfold, 31.
Drummer 1 and 6 featured the Blacks of Mandingo. Drummer 17:
Japanese artist Goh Mishima. Drummer 21, 23: ex-con rednecks. Drummer
41, 65, 164: Swedish leather. Special 1978 issue, Son of Drummer: “Chico
Is the Man.” Drummer 93: erotic disability, “Maimed Beauty,” with pho-
tos by George Dureau and Mark I. Chester. Drummer 103: Indians.
Drummer 105: Scotsman in Leather. Drummer 118: An Indian Trucker’s
Revenge. Drummer 127: Vietnamese story, “Shadow Soldiers.” Drummer
131: Black uncut soldier. Drummer 137: Un Señor Tambor, “Mr. Northeast
Drummer,” Anthony Citro. Drummer 155: Mexican “Attitude of Jose Del
Norte.” Drummer 174: cover and lead feature, African-American Graylin
Thornton, “International Mr. Drummer 1993.” The cover of Drummer 177
produced by associate editor Patrick Califia featured Asian leather hunk
Ken Chang for the Jim Wigler photo feature, “Men of the Mystical East: A
Whole New Image of Asian Masculinity.”
Drummer was in good gay literary company. The always racially pro-
gressive Tennessee Williams made a sex fetish of an African-American in
“Desire and the Black Masseur”; and, in A Streetcar Named Desire, he created
an enduring archetypal blue-collar sex fetish in what his script called the
“Polack,” Stanley Kowalski, archetypally acted by Marlon Brando (1951)
who continued to play the Kowalski character in the first Hollywood biker
movie so formative to the style of leather popular culture, The Wild One
(1953).
For eyewitness notes on racial diversity and on Drummer whose text and
photographs were keenly and positively aware of the erotic appeal of race,
turn to the “Timeline Bibliography” in this book.
Drummer’s patron saint, Henry David Thoreau, famously spent a night
in jail.
John Henry Embry never mentioned Thoreau’s stretch as any consola-
tion for his own six-hour night in the poky after the Slave Auction.
After Thoreau left jail, he wrote Civil Disobedience.
After Embry left jail, he wrote a rant in Drummer 6 (June 1976, page
12) titled “Drummer Goes to a ‘Slave Auction’...And So Do 65 LA Police
Officers.” Even this flaming did not cool his distemper. He was already
toying with fleeing fascism in LA to freedom in San Francisco. He wrote
on page 14: “People in San Francisco say you have to be a masochist to live
in Los Angeles.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-16-2017
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