Page 184 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

inside Embry’s camp version of Drummer, changing the core magazine from
Los Angeles Drummer to the San Francisco Drummer that became an inter-
national best seller. Robert Mapplethorpe, who disliked Embry, told me that
our editorial maneuvering around Embry was the same tactic that editors
Fred Hughes and Glenn O’Brien used to maneuver their creation of “Andy
Warhol’s Interview Magazine,” minus Andy, who was as much a headache at
Interview as Embry was at Drummer where Embry was no Warhol.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN:
CAN WHAT IS WHISPERED BE WRITTEN DOWN?

Sometimes iconoclasm is a good thing.
Sometimes a memoir is a portrait
in a fun house mirror.
Sometimes it pays to investigate
where truth lies.
Sometimes it’s wise to dare
to wear one’s trousers rolled, and
to eat a peach,
because in the empty rooms
the queers come and go
speaking of Michael and Angelo.

THE BIAS BETWEEN EAST COAST AND
WEST COAST CULTURE

The Geography of Drummer
Imagine Drummer as a New York magazine?
It couldn’t make it as a Los Angeles magazine.
San Francisco was its spot.

During the first ten issues of Drummer, my friend James Purdy, author of
the S&M literary classic, Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967), sent a short
story to Jeanne Barney. Like his longtime friend, Sam Steward, the genius
Purdy, though lionized by Edith Sitwell and Gore Vidal, was always rather
the redheaded stepchild sniffed at by the East Coast literary establishment.
As with Sam Steward, I told James Purdy that Drummer might be a suit-
able way to reach his underground fan club—that is, until the day James
Purdy telephoned editor Jeanne Barney with the bad news, he said, that
his New York agent thought publication in the outre Drummer would be a

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