Page 64 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

thousands of Palm Drive videos were sold by DeBlase at Drummer,
by Beardog Hoffman at Bear magazine’s Brush Creek Media, and
by John Embry’s Wings and Alternate distributing through Super
MR mail-order.]
Sincerely,
Tony DeBlase

In September, 1992, when Martijn Bakker, residing in Amsterdam,
purchased Drummer, he globalized the name of the uniquely American
Drummer into International Drummer. Not understanding American gay
pop culture and Drummer’s place within the psychology of leatherfolk,
Bakker destroyed its homomasculine American mythology, and foolishly
replaced its “personal contents” with “corporate contents” interchangeable
with other newer glossy mags in cahoots with video companies pushing
their corporate photographs as soulless centerfolds. Even as Bakker intended
to produce an online version of Drummer, the site never functionally hap-
pened. He closed Drummer forever. He added high-profile insult to injury
when he worsened the indignity by shuttering Drummer during the highest
American Leather Festival of the year, Folsom Fair weekend, September 30,
1999.
San Francisco leather-heritage historian, Mister Marcus wrote in his
online column, “Leather Bazaar,” May 26, 2005, at www.mamasfamily.
org/MisterMarcus: “Martijn Bakker, the Dutchman...was the sole killer of
Drummer and all it stood for.” However, Bakker was hardly the sole “killer”;
he had competition from villainous accomplices, including John Embry
and Robert Davolt, the last editor of Drummer, who both reviled Bakker
publicly. Did Bakker hate Embry and Davolt? Whereas Embry and DeBlase
fought privately, this threesome fought publicly in a passionate blood feud
that broke out into print. Bakker relished that he had scored internationally
when he purchased Drummer which was the Holy Grail Embry had sold to
DeBlase in the biggest mistake of both their publishing lives. Bakker, in a
neck-snapping duel, fought back, for instance, in a Press Release announc-
ing that the new Dutch International Drummer was in fine shape for the
year 2000, and that

a well-known American publisher [Embry] moons wistfully over
the Drummer era as if it were past and shows up only in old copies of
former issues. Gentlemen, it is not so. Anyone who actually believes
Drummer is dead, is simply not paying attention.”

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