Page 153 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 6 135

Chapter 6

DUTCH TREAT
WHO’S DRIVING DRUMMER?

• Post-Homophobic Stress Disorder (PHSD) and
Reparations to Gay Folk
• The McCarren Act (1950) Legalizing USA Censorship and
American Concentration Camps Has Never Been Repealed
• Drummer: “The American Review of Gay Popular
Culture” and Other Tag Lines
• Wickie Stamps, the Second Female editor of Drummer
• Robert Davolt: The Last Editor of Drummer
• Embry’s Unsustainable Drummer: The Cancer of Two
Lovers, an Office Full of Fistfuckers, and One Colostomy
• The Drummer Personal Ads Were the “Facebook” of
Their Time

“Sometimes it almost seems as if the universe was designed
by the Marquis de Sade.”
—Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana

Following almost a year of ailments, John Embry had cancer surgery March
16, 1979. If illness can be caused psychosomatically, or even if it is simply
symbolic, was the cancer eating Embry’s guts during the Summer-Fall of
1978 and the Winter-Spring of 1979 caused by the LAPD? By that I mean to
indict American homophobia as a direct cause of cradle-to-grave gay mental
anxiety, physical illness, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The psychoso-
matic template around Embry’s personal disease foreshadowed the intersec-
tion of government denial and medical neglect of the physical suffering and
societal tensions around AIDS which was a homophobe’s dream disease.
In the free-love 1970s, we were young and callow enough to meet up
in the crowded waiting room of the San Francisco Health Department and
joke, like Stephen Sondheim’s “Gee, Officer Krupke,” about penicillin and
our social diseases which somehow mystically bonded us. In the uptight
1980s, the joke was on us when homophobic AIDS hysteria reminded us

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