Page 547 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer 527

Delivery, advertising poster for the San Francisco production of the play by C. D. Arnold
which was published originally in Drummer 57 (1982). Poster publicity photograph (not
shown) by Drummer salonista Mark I. Chester.

Tommy, the early 1970s rock opera that was the mega-hit at San Francisco’s Lone Moun-
tain College, taught Castro Street and Folsom Street the new style of being a masculine-
identified homosexual whose quintessential core identity was as valid as that of the then
dominant and dominating identity of drag queens, androphobic sissies, and the politically
correct controlling almost all of the gay press except for Drummer. Tommy publicity kit.
(continued from previous page)
In the gorgeously incestuous DNA of the Drummer Salon, Claude Duvall through
his Noh Oratorio Society commissioned Inquiries of Hope: Ten Poems of Kirby Congdon,
the first musical piece mourning AIDS (1984), by composer Louis Weingarden who also
founded Stompers Gallery on 4th Street in New York which featured the first exhibits of
Mapplethorpe and Tom of Finland. Louis Weingarden, an intimate part of the Fritscher-
Drummer salon, was peer to Lewis Friedman, the legendary founding impresario of the
Manhattan cabaret, Reno Sweeney, where Mapplethorpe and Fritscher went on dates, as
they did to Stompers, to see and be seen. Lou Weingarden died of AIDS in Manhattan
in 1989. Fringe Drummer salonista Lew Friedman, HIV positive, exited New York and
opened his Sweet Life Café north of San Francisco in Santa Rosa, and died nearby in the
Russian River village of Cazadero in 1992 close to his neighbors Drummer editor Jack
Fritscher and Drummer publisher John Embry.
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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