Page 259 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 9 241

On August 22, 1968, leather priest Jim Kane indicated the internal
workings of how “The Questionnaire” was a leather folk document built by
many, just like Drummer itself would be. He wrote to me:

Jack, boy— ...I just finished my contributions to the sixth and final
(for the present) edition of that Questionnaire you may have seen
at Ed’s [Ed Tarlton, leatherman, Chicago]. An ambivalent friend of
mine [a slave], late of LA [where he got his draft from Townsend]
and now in Houston, is doing most of the work. Let me know if
you’re interested, and I’ll try to send along a copy in a few weeks.
—Cheers, Lord Jim

On September 23, 1968, Jim Kane wrote:

Midnight, Monday. Jack, boy— ...the other author [one of many
claimants] of the Questionnaire was in for four days last week.
Found a lone pine standing in the center of a small grove up the
hidden valley. Nice scene.... —Lord Jim

On February 2, 1971, with my Popular Witchcraft book at the printers,
Jim Kane complained about his edit of “The Questionnaire” being ripped
off by a gay mail-order company in LA:

DearJackandave [sic; David Sparrow]— ...I’ve got a grudge against
the Inter-House Introduction Service in LA [a forerunner of
Embry’s “Leather Fraternity” hook-up scheme] because they swiped
and degraded the Questionnaire form. —Jim

The chorus of authorial claimants was a group grope in the zero degrees
of leather incest. If future Drummer columnist, Larry Townsend, did not
compose the first edition of “The Questionnaire,” he certainly knew its
quintessential value for his reader-reflexive book, as I did for Drummer.
Obsessed in 1970 with mass-market mail-order, Embry was keenly
aware that Townsend was selling his own leather S&M books which he
wrote and published as LT Publishing. Embry’s twin, “Robert Payne,” was
also penning fiction to sell via mail-order. What he needed was to invent
a magazine to wrap as alluring disguise around his mail-order brochure.
Embry and Townsend, both physically huge opera queens, hated each other
with the grand passion of frenemy divas who can kill with an air kiss. Larry
Townsend told me on October 10, 2006:

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