Page 205 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 7 187

author, which she was not, despite any mythic revisionism of the unstop-
pable feminist fantasy that she was.
Arrangements for the first excerpts from her previously written work
were seemingly made with her publishers by Drummer contributor, John
Preston, who was her Manhattan acolyte. The publicity stunt of her insert
into Drummer was a corporate publisher’s marketing attempt to introduce
her Roquelaure/Rampling books to leatherfolk.
One might as well name Thoreau as a Drummer author because he was
quoted each issue on the masthead.
One might as well also name Maya Angelou as a Drummer author
because her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” was published across two
pages of the ill-fated Drummer 161. That issue, truth be told, was plagued
with plagiarism and copyright problems so serious that most copies were
shredded and never distributed. Nowhere did that Drummer issue note per-
mission to reprint Angelou any more than did Embry when he failed to get
permission to reprint a section from Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973) for my
horse-fetish issue of Drummer 25 (December 1978). Shaffer was not amused.
Beware the mythomania around Drummer.
For politically correct reasons of “gender” as well as “commerce,” the
two excerpts by Rice/Roquelaure happened to be published incidentally in
Drummer. Unless someone unearths documents or testimony to the con-
trary, it seems:
1. Anne Rice was never personally or professionally associated with
Drummer.
2. Anne Rice never wrote for Drummer.
3. Anne Rice’s connection to Drummer was vicarious through her col-
league, John Preston, who specialized in collecting individual authors into
anthologies which he packaged for publishers.
On October 17, 2006, John Embry told me on the phone:

Anne Rice? I never had any truck with Anne Rice. I was so
disappointed when I finally got one of her books to read. It was
Beauty’s Punishment and it was kind of interesting, but then she did
the thing they made the movie of—not Vampire. I never did like
Interview with the Vampire. The one on the island: Exit to Eden.

The closed and cultish Preston was cooking Rice for Drummer’s hungry
pages. In the 1980s plague years as faithful contributors died, Embry sought
even quicker free ways to fill those pages, and he hardly cared or noticed
what that filler was. In fact, Embry, the convenient amnesiac who “had no

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