Page 211 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 8 193

CHAPTER 8

THE MAFIA:
STRAIGHT AND GAY AND MAYBE NOT

• Editor-in-Chief Tunes Up Drummer Issues 19-33,
1977-1980
• From “Old Guard Leather” to the “New Gender of
Homomasculinity”
• Sashes to Ashes: The Mr. Drummer Contest and HIV
• Verite Style: Making Drummer Reflect Self-Identifying
Homomasculine Readers
• Embry’s Grudges Become His Blacklist That Poisons the
Lineage of Leather Descent
• Eyewitnesses Robert Davolt, Rick Leathers, Steven Saylor
• The Mafia: “Guido Lust,” Tony Tavarossi, and the
Invention of the Leather Bar

TV-Gay Thumbnail. The Ritz: The Mafia gets tangled up with Manhattan
denizens of a gay bathhouse (Think: “Continental Baths plus Bette Midler”)
in Terrence McNally’s hit Broadway sex farce (1975) and cult movie (1977).

Embry never “got” me.
I never “got” him.
He was petulant.
I was impetuous.
We were totally unrequited.
We were destined for each other.
Drummer editor Joseph Bean wrote in his Drummer history essay
“Nobody Did It Better,” published first by the Leather Archives & Museum
in its Leather Times #1 (2007), that in 1977 I had pulled Embry’s fat out of
the fire in the drama that was Drummer, and to Embry’s chagrin, everyone
knew it. In a decade where everybody was balling everybody, particularly in
the leather culture around Drummer at venues on Folsom Street, between

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