Page 335 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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Jack Fritscher Chapter 13 317

In the same Manifest Reader 16, Karr seemed to hew to Embry’s
Blacklist agenda in his review of the 1992 Lammy Award Winner, Gay
Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine, An Anthology of Gay History,
Sex, Politics & Culture, edited by Winston Leyland. Karr correctly
mentioned some contributors such as Jean Genet, the Malcolms
Boyd and McDonald, Walt Whitman, and Yukio Mishima. However,
journalist Karr failed to anchor the local-color “hook” of his review
in the glories of Embry’s salad days as the publisher of Drummer
insofar as the only gay drama included in Gay Roots was also the
only selection that was published originally in Drummer: Corporal in
Charge of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley. As editor-in-chief, I had
written and published that erotic play in Drummer 21 and Drummer
22. Corporal in Charge was, as well, the title of one of my antholo-
gies of my fiction that had appeared originally in Drummer. In fact,
Corporal in Charge and Other Stories was the first book collection
of Drummer writing.
If Karr had connected Drummer to the Lambda Literary Award
winner Gay Roots, Embry could have basked in the credit of hav-
ing been the publisher who debuted that drama made canonical by
inclusion in Gay Roots. In the Grudge Match that was his publishing
life in San Francisco, Embry never really understood the esthetic,
intellectual, and spiritual gestalt and power of Drummer which he
thought of as a little more than a campy leather magazine using sex
pictures to sell dildos through his main business: mail-order.
The whole of Drummer was greater than the sum of its parts.
Or, in Kurt Koffka’s phrase, “The whole is other than the sum of its
parts.” That “whole,” which readers loved, eluded Embry, but was
understood by Drummer columnists such as Guy Baldwin and Larry
Townsend, editors Tim Barrus and Joseph W. Bean, and publisher
Anthony DeBlase.

HOW THE DRUMMER SALON REPRODUCED

November 1977: In the erotic mosh pit of the 1977 CMC Carnival, I met
bodybuilder Dan Dufort from LA. In Drummer (May 1978), on pages 8 and
14, I published two of my photos of Dufort for “Cigar Blues.”
On August 25, 1978, Dufort played matchmaker at his home at 7560
Willoughby, Los Angeles. He introduced me to his friend, the blond LA
bodybuilder, Jim Enger, who, like Mapplethorpe, had asked specifically to
meet the editor of Drummer. During the torrid thirty-one-month Enger-
Fritscher affair, the professional instantly became personal. And the per-
sonal became public. In gay popular culture, the coupling of the famous

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