Page 58 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

monthly order for San Francisco Drummer. Labonté’s amusing eyewitness
email sent December 21, 2006, paints a sweet picture of the ADL startup
which coincided with a moment in time, that I remember fondly, when I
had edited more than half of the existing issues of Drummer.

I think our magazine supplier (a Venice Beach independent, not one
of the Larry Flynt or Mafia companies [who published so many gay
magazines]) started us with 5 copies of Drummer the first couple of
weeks. At the same time, we were dropping [our cash-drawer] quar-
ters into The Advocate vending machines in front of the YMCA in
Glendale and the old Bodybuilders Gym in Silver Lake and liberat-
ing five or six copies from each box, because The Advocate was one
mag our supplier couldn’t supply. Within a few weeks, our draw for
Drummer went from 5 to 10 to 25 and finally to 50 for each new
issue, with fill-ins ordered in as required until the next issue. I soon
learned to keep as many back issues in stock as our supplier could
provide (often returns from other outlets), so that customers from
out of town could buy three or four months’ worth of Drummer
at a time.

In the zero degrees of separation, Richard Labonté and A Different Light
helped Drummer succeed in its significant 1979 growth spurt. Labonté’s
statement reveals how periodical literature grew in the 1970s before small gay
book publishers arose in the 1980s. Drummer had fled LA and had become
a San Francisco magazine whose reintroduction to LA was greatly goosed
because Labonté in Silver Lake exhibited hard copies at A Different Light
where browsers could sample the redesigned Drummer before becoming
subscribers. The British actor and leather personality, Peter Bromilow, who
emceed leather events at LA bars and starred in many big-budget films includ-
ing Camelot, recalled that Los Angeles leather queens, as he called them, were
amazed at the change made in Drummer by the move to San Francisco.

DRUMMER RESTORATION SUPPER: WHAT CAME AFTER

Having purchased Drummer from John Embry on August 22, 1986, new
Drummer publisher Anthony F. DeBlase and his lover, the psychiatrist
Andrew Charles, president of their Desmodus, Inc. corporation, ending the
Blacklist, personally invited me to return to the landmark issue 100 of the
Embry-free Drummer. In fact, DeBlase, cued and funded by Charles, quietly
hired me as a private personal advisor for the next three years because they

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