Page 190 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

read: “Hunter” by Felice Picano: The best-selling author of The Lure, The
Mesmerist, and The Eye weaves a masterful tale of deadly obsessions and
suspense.”
Proficient at using the flattery that had messed with the heads of Los
Angeles writers in particular, Embry gambled that such publication and
billing might induce the prolific Picano aka Christopher Hall aka Miss Bea
Oblivious into helping fill the on-going serial-fiction section of Drummer.
That never happened. Not with the canny Picano. But Embry’s tactic
worked with another East Coast writer, John Preston, who fell for Embry’s
blandishments, until he didn’t.

ANDREW HOLLERAN’S NEW CLOTHES:
DUDE CONDESCENDING A STAIRCASE

“Who’d a thunk it? Who’d a thunk that one day back issues of
Drummer would be displayed in glass cases at a library like this?
[The John Hay Library at Brown University]
—Eric Garber aka Andrew Holleran, an East Coast literary establish-
ment author of Dancer from the Dance, and co-founder of the Violet
Quill, snapping at Drummer in “Making Sex Public,” Christopher
Street, Issue 231, November 1995, page 3
By 2016, Drummer was included internationally in gay archives
as well as in the permanent collections of museums such as the
J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (LACMA) which displayed Drummer in a glass case
during the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, The Perfect Medium.

IS THERE A GAY LITERARY MAFIA? ARE LGBT CORPORATIONS
DEPERSONALIZING GAY LITERATURE?

Is there reason to fear for the integrity of young gay writers seeking sanc-
tuary in New York, the fortress of the publishing world? Do they change
their voices to fit in? Is that why virtually no Manhattan gay literary “stars”
break out of the received puritan paradigm of vanilla gay literature? Is that
why they don’t or can’t write erotica? Because literary agents might balk as
did James Purdy’s? Because some gay and straight readers need to be willing
to stretch to accept gay literature and its patois, even when it is bourgeois
vanilla, much less when it is overtly erotic? The New York lack of erotic
writing by major authors dims their own starlight.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-16-2017
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