Page 66 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

“I...went around the house [meaning Drummer], seeking out any-
thing with a RUSH, RAM, THUNDERBOLT, LOCKER ROOM
HARDWARE, DOUBLE EAGLE, CLIMAX, QUICKSILVER,
HEAD, or CRYPT TONIGHT [his caps] label and tossed them
into the garbage. Room odorizers indeed!”

With the popper companies boycotting the issue, Drummer 98 had no
ads either inside the front cover or on the back cover which instead promoted
Embry’s mail-order video company. The inside back cover was an antidote-
to-poppers ad for VitaMen and Immunitab vitamins.
At the height of the AIDS epidemic, “Death Rush” was the last piece
Embry wrote for Drummer. Thirty days later, in his first issue of Drummer
(Drummer 99, August 1986), DeBlase was so fiercely angry at this attack
and, by extension, at all of Embry’s skullduggery that he reprinted in his
own first “Drummer Forum: The Popper Wars Continue” an article by Dr.
Bruce Voeller to rebut Embry with Voeller’s feature noting that while pop-
pers may have health risks, the studies were not scientific, and anti-popper
crusaders were often too politically motivated to discuss the issue. Professor
Voeller was the founder of the National Gay Task Force and the Mariposa
Foundation and was the man who coined the phrase “acquired immune
deficiency syndrome.” DeBlase’s laissez faire attitude of choice around drugs
was not too different from what I learned at San Francisco General when
my longtime friend Tony Tavarossi, one of the founding pioneers of Folsom
Street culture, was dying of some mysterious ailment in ICU in 1981. I asked
his doctor, “What’s the matter with him?” “We don’t know,” she said in that
summer when no one had heard of AIDS. She added, “We’ve never seen a
patient so distressed.” Tony was on a ventilator. I asked, “Could poppers
have caused this?” She looked up and said, “Poppers are an insult to the
lungs, but, no, poppers did not cause this.”
The several times when I could have bought the Drummer business,
I did not, because I knew as an insider, there was nothing for sale but the
Drummer name, and a lot of ongoing debt.
Embry’s fake embarrassment at Bakker’s Drummer was nothing more
than a sniffy attack of the “vapors,” trying to remind everyone of his one-
time connection to Drummer.
So confused is the timeline of leather history, and so bad were the inter-
necine vendettas that a blogger wrote in his inflated obituary for Embry,
“The young [italics added] John Embry founded Drummer.” In truth, on the
day that the first issue of Drummer was published, John Embry was forty-
five years old, and not at all part of the youth revolution of the 1960s and

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