Page 148 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

John Knoebel, and Kenneth Pitchford who were also the publishers of
Double-F. It raised more red flags than a bullfight because, earlier, in 1968,
two months after the hit Broadway premiere of the dissident sexualities in
The Boys in the Band, radical lesbian separatist Valerie Solanas had published
her SCUM Manifesto for her “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and had then
shot two famous gay men, Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya, two days before
Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, and twelve months before
Stonewall.
“Masculinist” Police Chief Ed Davis, self-defined as the protector of
red-blooded American masculinity, was no more a fan of gay identities pro-
claimed by Dansky and the Gay Liberation Front than he was of macho
“leather-cult” bars or, worse, the “menacing” gay-identity publications, The
Advocate or Drummer, founded in “his” Los Angeles in 1969 and 1975. Both
agitated Davis’ Gay Panic Disorder.
That Effeminist Manifesto, censoring masculinity, did not need an anti-
Fascist film like Salo to expose its aggressive Fort Sumter fireworks at the
startup of the post-Stonewall civil war over gender that was so outrageously
biased against all men, straight and gay, that it awakened a genuine gay-male
need for “self defense” that called out for the necessary invention of the
kind of practical “masculine manifesto” that Drummer effectively became
despite Embry’s first issues promoting gay Nazis (Drummer 1), leather
weddings (Drummer 7) and “inflicting homosexuality” on straight men
(Drummer 12).
To lampoon The Scum Manifesto and The Effeminist Manifesto outside
of Drummer, I responded fictively to manifestos proliferating everywhere
when the protagonist of my novel, Some Dance to Remember, wrote a spi-
raling “Masculinist Manifesto” that was the character’s brisk opinion, not
mine, inside the storyline.
Of the radical Effeminists’ “quintessential Thirteen Principles,” two
of their statutes, revealing their anti-BDSM and anti-male disdain, were
“Sado-Masculinity: Role Playing and Objectification” and “Masculinism”
which they did not understand as a reciprocal term with “Feminism,” the
way the word mother cannot be understood without the reciprocal term of
child. Did the men who were the Effeminists realize that they had internal-
ized the aggressive hatred of males that radical lesbian feminism was cham-
pioning to the ruin of GLBT harmony in the civil war that turned the joys
of 1970s gay liberation into the struggles of 1980s gay politics?
Long lives can be blessed with change. By 2013, Steven Dansky re-
configured his position as a gay pioneer by producing, directing, and
shooting his brilliant video series, Outspoken: Oral Histories from LGBTQ

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