Page 552 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

532 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
magazines must be responsive monthly to new currents in culture; and
magazine writing goes deeper than weekly gay papers.
In Drummer 99, page 5, and in Drummer 100, publisher Anthony
DeBlase wrote that I was driving Drummer with a purpose: to celebrate
and empower the most deeply closeted gay men, the masculine ones no
one had ever considered might be lovers of other men. Patrick Califia, in
one of his books, mentioned that “Fritscher is a prophet of homomascu-
linity.” Like the zealous Patrick, I am sometimes apostolic about forging
new identities and making them available.
I meant this cover lead feature to stir up even more the awakening
jock consciousness among gay men who in American pop culture had
been historically denied the “jockstrap role” and instead assigned the
“victim-magnet role of the sissy.”
Without any mention of campy cheerleaders, I interviewed, wrote,
and produced this reflection of the “Gay Sports” movement as a key
metaphor of emerging male-gender identity in Drummer where internal
evidence shows that the keyword printed most frequently, particularly in
the self-describing personals, is masculine (including masculinity).
In March of 1977, I coined the new word homomasculinity to clarify
a newly visible “way of being” for men.
[Edited in October 5, 2007: For more on the use of language in
Drummer, see the “Eyewitness Drummer” article: “Homomasculinity:
Framing Keywords of Queer Popular Culture in Drummer Magazine”
from the Queer Keywords Conference, “The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars
for Queer Research,” University College Dublin, Ireland, April 15, 2005.]
I may have invented the empowering word, but I did not invent the
empowerment of homomasculinity itself which has long burned in the
hearts of many homosexual men.
Like Adam in the Garden of Eden with his task of naming every-
thing, queer pioneers immediately after Stonewall had much to name
within the sex culture that till then dared not speak its name. Through the
years, some men in the leather culture and in the bear culture, have taken
my queer-theory word to heart. Long used in the alternative sex world,
the word homomasculine went fully into the gaystream in The Advocate,
August 20, 2002, on page 55, in the article “Daring to Be Bears” by Larry
Flick, senior talent editor of Billboard magazine. On August 1, 2003, the
conservative talking head Andrew Sullivan came out on Salon.com as a
bear, one of the largest identity movements in homomasculinity. This
linguistic evolution is a response to real life in which time and hormones
change men’s bodies through the maturation of the male secondary sex
characteristics that identify men as a gender.

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