Page 189 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 7 171

Even Elizabeth Gershman balked at first. In 1985, when I queried her
at Knights Press in Stamford, Connecticut, she rejected the manuscript on
February 3, 1986: “It is a bit more erotic than I like to do....You must make
a fortune writing about sex, because you do it very well.” Two years later in
1988 when former Drummer editor Tim Barrus was hired by Gershman,
he educated her about the esthetics of gay writing and handed her the very
same manuscript which she then re-read. On February 14, 1989, she wrote
to me: “I’d fucking kill to publish Some Dance to Remember.”
My own West Coast Drummer editorial policy of dealing inclusively
with authors coming out of closets anywhere indicated I would have wel-
comed any of those gay East Coast writers into the pages of Drummer—the
way I gladly published Mapplethorpe—if only they had approached San
Francisco gay culture the way so many other New Yorkers were shrewd
enough to do. Harvey Milk went west to Castro Street to do what he could
have never done on Christopher Street. Mapplethorpe flew directly to me
at Drummer so I could, in his words, “nationalize his Manhattan reputa-
tion.” Wakefield Poole left Manhattan to shoot films in his studio on the
Panhandle of Golden Gate Park where I interviewed him for Drummer in my
feature “Dirty Poole” and gave sexy coverage of his movie stills inside and on
the cover of Drummer 27 (February 1979). New York entrepreneur Michael
Maletta, the mega-party producer, transplanted himself to the Castro and
connected his startup, the San Francisco Creative Power Foundation, to
the creative power of Drummer publicity while creating “Night Flight”
and “Stars,” the parties from whose resultant frisson the White Party was
invented. These “gypsies, tramps, and thieves,” all migrated east-to-west in
what San Franciscans dubbed the “Manhattanization of San Francisco.”
Manhattanization had as much to do with invasive East Coast cultural
“attitudes” as it did with the shock of new high rises changing the City’s
traditional skyline from horizontal to vertical.
After I exited Drummer on December 31, 1979, Felice Picano’s “Hunter”
was published in Drummer 39 (August 1980). John Embry, wanting to
widen sales to East Coast readers, generously promoted Picano with “name
above the title” status. He heralded the short story in the cover copy as
“Felice Picano’s ‘Hunter.’” That seemingly autobiographical story, based on
an “author’s” summer-seminar experience at an East Coast literary colony,
was, for all its genre merits as a mystery, not a particularly Drummer story
because the sex was vanilla; there was no S&M in psychology or ritual;
and two women characters—one suicidal—intruded into the sanctuary of
male space that subscribers demanded of stories in Drummer. Inside on
the Drummer masthead, the billing, plugging Picano’s literary pedigree,

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