Page 488 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

468 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
its owners, and caused the magazine to be put up for sale, and turned over
to the last owner’s mostly greenhorn-tinhorn editors.
The politically correct quake was worse.
Why is the West Coast always ahead of East Coast leather? Like
Rex, even NY-centric Mapplethorpe left Manhattan and came to San
Francisco, to my Drummer desk, to begin his West-Coast-driven “leather
period” which to this day his East Coast heirs probably wish would disap-
pear so they can sell calla lily photographs printed on dinner plates and
shower curtains.
Much that I have written in Drummer in defense of leather, edge play,
fisting, and S&M, as well as much that I have written in defense of, in
fact, Robert Mapplethorpe, was caused, as scoped out here, by crap such
as Richard Goldstein’s hysterical take on masculine-identified leather.
Goldstein’s anti-male prejudice was the East Coast twin of self-described
sissy publisher, David Goodstein, whose fear and loathing of men perme-
ated his magazine, The Advocate.
Are some gay men so “’whipped” by feminist Marxism that they fight
the fact that homomasculinity is a legitimate measure on the Kinsey scale?
What makes these urban oracles, who have a right to be surrounded
by coteries of sissies, forget this fact: the true gay-male demographic
within all races is more than ninety percent masculine identified. For
incontrovertible proof, I offer as internal evidence of self-fashioned gay
identity the millions of personal sex classifieds of magazines and papers
ranging from Drummer to The Advocate which pivot on the word mascu-
line.
Contemporaneous with Anita Bryant and the religious right, Gold-
stein and Goodstein set up the judgmental and fearful attitude that grew
to excite the United States federal government when Republican Senator
Jesse Helms denounced S&M, leather, and Mapplethorpe on the floor of
the United States Senate, and destroyed the National Endowment to the
Arts as well as federal funding to uncensored voices and visions. No one
can convince me that these anti-sex Cassandras weren’t all vindicated by
the advent of AIDS.
Drummer’s voice and vision is totem of leather culture within gay
culture within straight culture.
Drummer, from first issue to last (Drummer 214), stood like a light-
house against the dark censorious shadow cast by attitudes such as Gold-
stein’s, Goodstein’s, and Helms’ who represent legions of repression from
the Marxist left and the religious right.
The positive energy pole of West Coast Drummer, appearing at the
same time as the negative energy of East Coast Goldstein, charged up
the electrical field that shaped and censored Drummer throughout the

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