Page 332 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

and make us his whipping boys. Over Embry’s eleven years of “Plantation
Boss” behavior, hundreds were hired, and hundreds quit. Is it at all revela-
tory that his personal favorite movie covered multiple times in Drummer was
the plantation and slavery pot-boiler Mandingo. His favorite author was Kyle
Onstott who, mixing race, slavery, and S&M, had written both the novel
Mandingo and its sequel—titled what else?—Drum.
September 1978: Publication of Drummer 24, the famous Mapplethorpe
cover. Embry was turned on by the fresh “takes” of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
work. In an envious plagiarism, he tried to restage and shoot Mapplethorpe-
like photos to fill future issues without having to pay royalties. Jealous, he
took to a fatuous denouncing of Mapplethorpe who had, during Halloween
1977, arrived very sweetly at the Drummer office to introduce himself to me
on his enterprising trip to San Francisco. The start of his trip on “Saturday,
October 16, 1977” was documented by petite British author and resident of
the Chelsea Hotel, Victor Bokris, in his book, Beat Punks (1998). Bokris also
wrote Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography (1999). Embry was miffed
at the personal Mapplethorpe-Fritscher bicostal affair which lasted passion-
ately—nearly the whole time I edited Drummer—from October 1977 to
its sweet evaporation over health-and-hygiene issues during spring 1980.
Robert, the New Yorker, was frequently sick intestinally and I, the San
Franciscan, was not, and I had to back away to protect my health.

Footnote #1: Inside the Timeline
Mapplethorpe, the Mainstream, and Drummer

Here, inside this timeline, it is appropriate to show how influential
Drummer was, and how Drummer, properly written and properly
edited, could transcend itself with a readership far sleeker than crit-
ics might guess, and certainly smarter and more sophisticated than
scoffers thought it to be.
The zero-degrees model to illustrate this is Robert Mapplethorpe,
and how he was featured in Drummer in the years from 1978, when
I introduced him, to 1989 when I wrote his obituary..
Drummer connected me by one degree of separation to Patricia
Morrisroe as informant for her biography, Mapplethorpe (1995). My
own insider gay-verite book, in progress since 1978, Mapplethorpe:
Assault with a Deadly Camera, was published in 1994, the year
before Ms. Morrisroe’s outsider book. While doing interviews and
writing her book, she may have suffered, I alleged, a “gay panic”
attack about the rough subject matter of homomasculine culture
ranging across racism, promiscuity, drugs, S&M, and dirty sex. Or,

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