Page 269 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 10 251

CHAPTER 10

THE DRUMMER CURSE:
WHY I NEVER BOUGHT DRUMMER

• The Drummer Curse of Debt, Disease, and Death:
What Happened to People Who Owned Drummer
• Leather Heritage: Blacklist Lies Revise Drummer History
• 3 Roberts: Mapplethorpe, Opel, and Davolt
• John W. Rowberry: Son of Embry, Bane of Barney
• Franken-Drummer: Embry Tries to Reanimate the Past in
His New Monster of a Magazine: Super MR
• Drummer Purpose: Normalizing the Leather Fringe of
Gay Culture
• Cash and Copyright: Brush Creek Media and Bear
Magazine
• Cynthia Slater and Frank Sammut: The Catacombs
Wedding

In 1978, the ninth of our ten years as lovers, David Sparrow loved me enough
to give me this advice about Drummer: “Why buy what you already ‘own’?”
As the domestic spouse I had married, with leather priest Jim Kane officiat-
ing, on the rooftop of 2 Charlton Street in New York, he knew intimately
my experiences as editor-in-chief. When I hired him as the freelance and
official house-photographer for Drummer, he became his own eyewitness
inside Drummer.
Considering my fifty-year career in gay writing, people have asked
me a hundred times why I never bought Drummer. What was there to
buy? Its one-word name was all Drummer had to sell. That, and an insa-
tiable deadline that had to be fed every thirty days or the magazine would
starve and die. Everything else existed upstairs over a vacant lot. Despite
Embry’s dodgy masthead claims, I reckoned there were no legally regis-
tered trademarks for sale, no filing cabinets spilling over with a backlog
of good stories and photos and drawings panting to be published, no legal
paperwork identifying what publishing rights, and republishing rights, had
been bought from contributors who were mostly pseudonymous and lost

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