Page 180 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

the editor” in Drummer 108. Much of my writing in dozens of magazines
during the 1980s was very specifically Drummer material diverted from
Drummer and published by an array of LA and NY editors wanting to
inject a bit of the Drummer cultural mystique into their own gay magazines.
Ironically, the notoriety of my exiting Drummer identified me even more
with Drummer, and in a clean way distanced me from Embry.
Much to Embry’s chagrin, readers often weren’t sure who owned
Drummer. For more than ten years after I stopped editing Drummer, my
home phone would ring, and some reader would ask me, “When is the next
issue of Drummer coming out,” or worse, “I sent in my money and you guys
screwed up my subscription.” In the way that Larry Townsend had to tell his
confused mail-order clients that he was not Embry, so did I.

GAY SAINTS ALEISTER CROWLEY, ANDY WARHOL, KENNETH
ANGER, ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE; & THE NEW YORK GAY
LITERATI

In reviewing my anthology of Drummer writing, Corporal in Charge
of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley and Other Stories, fiction edi-
tor Steven Saylor minced no words in his review in Drummer 81
(February 1984). A true-born Texan, he was not afraid to declare that
in Corporal, “There’s enough ghettoized angst to keep the Manhattan
literati wired for months.” He exposed the polarity between East
Coast attitude and West Coast authors. His review held special inter-
est in that his essay was in a sense the first review of Drummer itself
because Corporal in Charge was the first collection in book form of
original Drummer writing.
Saylor, who went on to become a New York Times best-selling
author, proved too big for Drummer. For twenty issues (68-87), he
was Embry’s most professional fiction/department editor (1983-
85), and, like guest editor Bert Herman (issue 93), he edited only
one issue (87), and then immediately quit, writing he was “under-
paid” and “disrespected [by Embry] on a daily basis.”
—Steam magazine, 2 #1

To Embry, censorship and cost-consciousness meant that religious “blas-
phemy” was out. That was an odd line in the sand for a purposely provoca-
tive publisher who started up his magazine with necrophilia, bestiality, a
touch of pedophilia, missing only cannibalism and a couple other topics,
like blasphemy, that existed on famous Satanist Aleister Crowley’s list of

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-16-2017
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK