Page 133 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 5 115

colleague in the Drummer Salon, Mikal Bales (1939-2011), who soon after
reinvented himself as “Daddy Zeus,” founding owner and director of the
masculine Zeus Studio, whose steamy underground videos fleshed out the
kind of man-on-man whipping, bondage, and torture scenes Hollywood
action movies only dared suggest. Robert Opel’s campy, but unsuitable,
“Cycle Sluts” photo is winner of the “Worst Drummer Cover Ever” because it
missed the marching beat of Drummer. Its “drag queen camp” is 180 degrees
from readers’ personals ads seeking that keyword masculinity, emphatically
followed by a repeated separatist mantra of “no fats, no fems, no phonies.”
A personal classified in Drummer 1, page 14, threw down the gauntlet of
authentic gender identification: “No fags playing butch.”
Because Drummer was at that time the only magazine aimed at mas-
culine men, readers became justifiably anxious about any invasion by privi-
leged drag queens favored by and featured in all the other vanilla magazines
that excluded leathermen. In the “Letters to the Editor,” after the Cycle
Sluts’ gooey “thank-you” note, there was a letter complaining:

The Cycle Sluts cover picture and the associated article you used in
your latest issue, Drummer 9, disgusted me beyond words. I thought
when you started out, that this was to be a unique magazine—for
men—not for campy bar queens. I was wrong. The Cycle Sluts have
no place in my lifestyle or that of my friends. If I want to read that
kind of trash, I will subscribe to After Dark or The Advocate.... —
Bruce, Seattle (Drummer 11).

That tell-tale reader response rang true enough to be reprinted con brio
and in full in Drummer 188 (June 1995), the 20th Anniversary Issue, page
6. In 1997, twenty-one years after the dragazine of Drummer 9, Embry
dedicated the “Parting Shot” page (98) in his Manifest Reader 33 to a frontal
nude photograph of the bearded transman Loren Cameron. Embry being
Embry announced this portrait on his Contents page with his reductive
gender-insensitive line: “Loren Cameron. A bodybuilder complete with
pussy? Who says it can’t be done.” His photo caption read: “Loren Cameron,
author/photographer of Body Alchemy shows off his/her accomplished male
physique and fully female attributes.”

13. ROBERT OPEL: OSCAR STREAKER, LEATHER ICON,
PHOTOGRAPHER

Multiple photos were shot and articles written by frequent Drummer

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-14-2017
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