Page 11 - An Historical Perspective of the Covers, Mastheads, Contents, and Staff of DRUMMER Magazine
P. 11
Drummer features and fiction, written 1970s, and with a pass-along rate of at
to cause masturbation, pioneered, popular- least a “plus-one reader” in addition to each
ized, and validated daddies, bears, muscles, subscriber, approximately 80,000 people
scruff, fetish sex (leather, boots, cigars, pups), handled each monthly issue of Drummer
and the BDSM alphabet soup of TT, CBT, for a 24-year total nearing twenty million
VA, WS, and FF. Drummer prepared the people. The mobbed Folsom Fair in San
way for you to be OK with the perversatil- Francisco hosts 100,000 leather guests ev-
ity you enjoy today. Drummer was the au- ery September. In gay book publishing,
tobiography of us all, or at least a lot of us, 5,000 copies sold is considered a best seller.
written and drawn and photographed by Drummer, pioneering the serialization
many of us to entertain the rest of us. Ed- of erotic manuscripts that could have been
iting monthly Drummer daily in real time books, helped invent modern gay publishing
was for me a wild existential ride in gay pop as we know it. First came the magazines in the
culture when readers demanded authenticity, 1970s, and then the book publishers them-
truth, and leadership in reporting the emer- selves in the 1980s. More eyes have likely read
gence of BDSM identity, rights, and rites. one issue of Drummer than have read any
In 1979, by more good fortune in the snake one book by any deeply established GLBT
pit of gay publishing, I had somehow edit- author on the top hundred list of best-sell-
ed half of the Drummer issues in existence. ers in the gay literary canon, including John
A stack of 214 issues of Drummer is a Rechy, Edmund White, and Larry Kramer.
coffee-table sculpture 3.5 feet tall weigh- Drummer was an erotic leatherman’s hand-
ing 120 pounds. Laid flat, top-to-bottom, book and guide. For thirty years, among the
Drummer stretches 64 yards: two-thirds millions of leatherfolk in North America and
the length of a football field. At a rough 90 Europe, there was hardly a player alive who
pages per issue, Drummer comprised a total had not heard of or read Drummer. Years
20,000 pages of advocacy journalism cre- after the internet killed Drummer, readers
ated by hundreds of writers, artists, photog- continue to report that as teenagers they had
raphers, and designers, including even more managed to find Drummer, even in Bum-
thousands of hot sex-ad profiles written by fuck, Florida, and that the assertive primer
dirty-minded subscribers seeking hook- that was Drummer had mentored, shaped,
ups. (Drummer was the Grindr of its day.) and emboldened their gender and kink iden-
tities. There was political empowerment of
It took a village to fill Drummer, homomasculine gender identity in erotic rep-
and it took Drummer to inspire resentation. So much so that the Tom of Fin-
the 1977/78 pop-tart creation land Foundation, headed by Durk Dehner,
of the Village People.
recently declared that “Drummer, ground-
A group photo of every dude who helped breaking for its time, set precedence for all
create Drummer would rival the cover homomasculine representation to come.”
of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Masturbation is magical thinking. So, ini-
With 42,000 copies every issue in the tially, what we did to make Drummer pulsate
hard was add realism and availability to the
