Page 10 - An Historical Perspective of the Covers, Mastheads, Contents, and Staff of DRUMMER Magazine
P. 10
Drummer is a living history of leatherfolk
written in human blood tattooed on tribal skin.
ARCHETYPES OF OUR ARCHETRIBE
How 1970s Drummer Pioneered the Way We Are Today
by Jack Fritscher
This week a baroque-back leather cowboy from the 1970s asked me what his
complete collection of 214 issues of Drummer magazine was worth. I told him
it was priceless and recommended he donate it to a proper gay archive like the
European Leather and Fetish Foundation. From 1975 to 1999, Drummer creat-
ed the archetypes of our archetribe and helped invent the very homomasculine
leather culture we’re living today. Drummer notably saved the failing Folsom
Fair by anchoring it with its wild Mr Drummer Contest, and by inviting its
national and international subscribers to fly in for the kinky naked street orgy.
Forty years ago, good fortune got me hired leather history. This fearless politically-incor-
as founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of rect sex magazine was the leather bible that
this international juggernaut that was so epic in the Titanic 1970s, before the iceberg of
in impact it was bigger than any of us—in- AIDS, brought the emerging gender of mas-
cluding Tom of Finland and Rex and my lov- culine-identified men out to claim an identi-
er Robert Mapplethorpe—who filled its tasty ty equal alongside other genders, and to bal-
pages with hot writing, cum-creamy draw- ance dominant drag culture round Stonewall.
ings, and finger-licking photos designed to At Stonewall in 1969, gay character
give readers and government censors boners. changed. At the founding of Drummer in
1975, leather character changed. In 1976,
Erotic writing begins with one the Los Angeles police freaked out over the
stroke of the pen and ends with debut of masculine queers they couldn’t dis-
many strokes of the penis.
miss as sissies. Deploying 65 cops, one heli-
Drummer was a revolutionary idea in mo- copter, and one bus to the festive Drummer
tion. In our leather archetribe, Drummer dared slave auction fund-raiser, the LAPD arrested
portray our desires to organize our thoughts 42 staff and subscribers, causing Drummer to
to inform our practices. It was a first draft of flee disaster in LA to destiny in San Francisco.
