Page 72 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

P. 72

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

Drummer issues about how he had trounced the “inept” Cole at NewsWest
and Dateline. He even coopted the title Dateline into the Drummer column
“Dateline.” Continuously jealous of Goodstein, Embry slammed him and
his controversial “Advocate Experience” by publishing a scathing feature,
written to order by frequent contributor to The Advocate, Dan Gengle, titled
“The Thing That Ate The Advocate,” in Alternate 9 (May 1979). Embry had
by then poached as many “left-leaning” Advocate staff as possible, including,
early on, Jeanne Barney and Aristede Laurent, and, later, Advocate editor
John Preston and transman columnist Patrick/Pat Califia.
Embry, who denied he depended on the kindness of strangers, reached
to the virgin-birth that Mark Zuckerberg later wanted at Facebook. Playing
rock-paper-scissors, Embry was the only person ever to suggest himself as
the sole creator of Drummer. Sometimes in the convenient shorthand of
leather history timelines, people not familiar with the Drummer Origin
Story name him as the founder of Drummer. In truth, he was the principal
of the founders in the village that created Drummer. He was also the man
most responsible for nearly all of the unnecessary drama and bad luck that
always threatened the destruction of Drummer even after he sold the maga-
zine to the second publisher of Drummer, Anthony DeBlase whose own
point of view invented, after 1986, yet another version of Drummer, beyond
our original Drummer, in order to cope with AIDS and political correctness.
In the way that George Washington, the “Founding Father of Our
Country,” depended on the six other Founding Fathers, Embry, the founder
of Drummer, depended morally on the two other Founding Fathers and one
Founding Mother.

“The past is never dead; in fact, it’s not even past.”
—Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77