Page 152 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

moment when the first issue of Drummer was at the printer. He felt that
1980s Drummer, which had outgrown him, also dumped him, and, imme-
diately after he sold it, his separation anxieties re-emerged as seller’s remorse.
Actually, Embry in his vanity boasted that without him Drummer would
immediately go out of business. DeBlase tried to keep his distance and forge
ahead with his new Drummer. He was no fool. But at the point of sale, he
had unwittingly insulted Embry, where no offense was meant, when he had
asked Embry to sign a non-competition promise not to create, for five years,
any new magazine that could impact original-recipe Drummer. At least, that
is what DeBlase told me during the years he made me his consultant.
In 1998, Embry, the King of Schadenfreude, took a cheap shot at the
unfortunate DeBlase who had by then lost Drummer. He emblazoned the
front cover of his Drummer doppelganger, Manhood Rituals 2, with the
bold challenge: “With the Excitement of the First 100 Drummers by Its
Originators.”
Sometimes the full moon restores the virginity of the Gypsy’s daughter,
and sometimes it doesn’t.

ONE-HIT WONDER
Units of Measure in John Embry’s Virtual Drummer Magazines:
Embry Had One Vision
in His Magazine Cartel of Cloned Replicants

If a young reader sat down at a table spread with open copies of
any and every old magazine title and issue published by Embry, the
reader would not be able to tell one magazine from the other with-
out looking at the exact title on the covers. Layout, graphics, font,
paper, photos, drawings, writing, and content are interchangeable
from 1975-2003. Embry was a One-Hit Wonder. He purposely con-
fused his later magazines to make them all seem like special issues
of his only success, Drummer. In 1968 when Andy Warhol wrote his
conceptual novel titled simply, A, he said he wanted the reader to
throw the unbound pages in the air, pick them up, and read them
in whatever order came from the shuffle. The toss is the same with
Embry’s magazines. Each one was cloned in form, content, and style
from Drummer. Every Mach, Alternate, Manifest Reader, and Super
MR was a virtual Drummer.

“Everything that came after Drummer,” Jeanne Barney wrote to me,
“was his obvious attempt to duplicate the earlier magazine and early success.”

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