Page 104 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

84 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.

“The first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
“The worst thing homosexuality can do is rob you of your iden-
tity by becoming your identity.”
— Jack Fritscher

I was a witness to my time.
As a pioneer participant, I was there.
As a collector, I stored the evidence.
As an author, I wrote within that time.
As a trained scholar, I am an analyst of that time.
As a humanist, I never drank the Kool-Aid of the politically correct
dogmatists whose views and diktats were always at odds with the lives of
most gay people.
As a survivor, I am sharing — which is what survivors do.
As I near seventy years of age, this is one last chance to tell this untold
story of the part I played in the euphoria. I must disclose that when I
was five years old my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Deitwig, wrote on my
report card during the war in 1944: “Jackie is a very verbal little boy with
a tendency to tattle.” Is that revelation naked enough?
This is Rashomon. This is The Alexandria Quartet. And it is autobi-
ography. Is it also an autobiography of Drummer?
This is my experience. This lion in winter does not intend to beard
any other lions in winter. The closer eyewitness pioneers get to the end
the more we remember of the beginning.
I must thank the first publisher of Drummer, John Embry, who hired
me as editor in chief, because without him I would have been less moti-
vated to give my deposition in this eyewitness testimony were it not for
his “visions and revisions and tricky takes and mistakes” about who did
what to whom in the streaming history of Drummer.
Embry wrote about himself in Manifest Reader 33: “Like any survi-
vor, I have gotten to the stage where I can tell you that being one isn’t
nearly everything it’s cracked up to be.”
For years, Embry has been writing an autobiographical book titled,
Epilogue. I hope that this, my version of leather history at Drummer, might
be interpolated with Embry’s in order to keep balance on the tightrope
of memory. I recommend his Epilogue memoir which has not yet been
published except in part in very provocative fragments in Drummer 2

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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