Page 70 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

[to] drag and female impersonation.” Pulling his wizard’s curtain back, he
confirmed his naivete that at the beginning in LA he had “little, if any, idea
what it [Drummer] should look like.”
So, like a designer baby whose four parents decide “what it should
look like,” the Drummer that readers nationwide first responded to in
June 1975, and came to love internationally by 1979, was gestated by a
Jedi Council of four mitochondrial people: founding Los Angeles publisher
John Embry, founding Los Angeles editor-in-chief Jeanne Barney, founding
San Francisco editor-in-chief Jack Fritscher, and founding San Francisco
art director Al Shapiro aka the artist A. Jay who had been hired in 1977 by
Embry who was seeking publishing roots and design magic in A. Jay himself
because Shapiro had been the art director of the original Drum magazine
and Queen’s Quarterly in the 1960s.
Embry acknowledged this evolution, from nothing to something, when
he wrote ingenuously in Manifest Reader 26 (1995): “Drummer’s first issue
had 48 pages, a cover price of $2.50, and was made up of whatever.”
Made up of whatever?
“Later [after moving to San Francisco] we were [he was] amazed at how
much there was available to us.”
Embry, in actuality, paired Barney and Fritscher with equal billing, cred-
iting each as editor-in-chief, the only two Drummer editors distinguished
with that title, although he did bend history in Manifest Reader 26 when
he lied, despite absolutely no evidence at all on any masthead in Drummer,
that “John Rowberry, after Jack Fritscher’s exit, went on to become editor-
in-chief.” He depended on both Barney and me for the magazine’s survival
during the founding process made convulsive by three formative events: the
arrest of Embry and Barney by the LAPD at the Drummer Slave Auction
(April 1976); and the character-changing relocation of Drummer from LA to
San Francisco (March 1977) when Embry, still on two years’ parole, left only
after the court gave permission; and, finally, Embry’s nearly year-long absence
from the Drummer office because of his long bout with cancer. (1978-1979).
He wrote in his Super Manifest Reader (2000), that his Los Angeles
“Drummer was so limited in its subject matter....Moving from Los Angeles
to San Francisco was like,” in a comparison he made repeatedly like an angry
man obsessed, “leaving East Berlin.” He had earlier confirmed the fact of
the magazine’s evolution between two cities in his column in Drummer 26
(January 1978) published while I was his editor having accomplished the
previous eight issues: “Drummer has had a number of renovations [geo-
graphically and editorially] in these three years, most of them, we assume,
being in the right direction.”

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