Page 116 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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98 Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

larger than Drummer. He refused to be defined by Drummer. He was sim-
ply, and perfectly, the marquee identity of “Larry Townsend, author of The
Leatherman’s Handbook.” Although he was part of the wider Drummer Salon,
Townsend always worked from outside Drummer as a guest “contributing
editor” whose fiction and advice columns—which he also wrote freelance
for a variety of publications—were printed in Drummer.
His “Leather Notebook” column ran from Drummer 38 (1980) through
Drummer 156 (1992) when Dutch publisher Martijn Bakker bought
Drummer. Typically, magazine editors, eager for his famous byline, wel-
comed Townsend who shuffled the deck of his writing and dealt it out stra-
tegically to publicize his new books. In the landmark Drummer 100 which
published Townsend’s story “Board of Inquiry,” his “Leather Notebook”
Q&A column appeared “in trade” for his full-page mail-order ad, page 93.
Famous for mining leather and S&M themes, Townsend liked Drummer
hosting occasional excerpts from his fiction as well as from his “Ask Larry”
column which was also published in other magazines. As an author in a kind
of early gay syndication, he finally acquiesced to write monthly columns as
synergistic promotions for his yearly books. His self-referential column in
Drummer was in effect “advertising in trade” for his mail-order business
through which he sold his independent L. T. Publication titles from 1972
to 2008. With the startup of his publishing company in 1970, Townsend
was one of the first founders of a gay small business, and Embry scrambled to
emulate him with his Alternate Publishing. Through Drummer, Townsend
found value writing for several magazines with a masculine-identified demo-
graphic. With Drummer dead for the nine years since 1999, I remember in
2008 when he went apoplectic on the telephone because his long-running
column in Honcho was suddenly cancelled; he died six weeks later, July 29,
2008.
In short, although Townsend and Embry despised each other like kar-
mic star-crossed lovers to the day they died, Townsend liked the mail-order
publicity in Drummer, and Embry needed the endorsement of Townsend’s
marquee name. It was a Hollywood marriage made in hell, and eyewitness
Jeanne Barney was its eyewitness bridesmaid.
Jeanne Barney wrote to me on September 8, 2006:

I rather imagine that John envied Larry’s reputation as The Last
Word in Leather. I know for sure that Larry was (and still is) really
bothered by Embry’s dishonesty, the reason that he declined when
approached to kick in with Drummer in the beginning. [Some men
on the mailing list confused “Embry” and “Payne” and “Townsend”

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