Page 346 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

for years and, under the name “Frank O’Rourke,” frequently wrote his own
Drummer fiction, including his serial “Prison Punk.” In the 1990s, while
working Embry’s mail-order at one of Embry’s Russian River properties in
Rio Nido, he was savagely attacked on a forested street by a stray dog, and,
coincidentally, soon after died.

February 23, 1979 (Friday): Writing freelance outside Drummer, I wrote
the article, “Jim Enger: On the Way Up,” for Roger Metz, owner of the
Ironman Gym in Oceanside; the article was published in Dan Lurie’s Muscle
Training Illustrated, issue 80 (December 1979). Unlike Embry, Dan Lurie
paid me the going freelance rate of fifteen bucks.

February 26, 1979 (Monday): Ending our ten-year marriage, David
Sparrow and I slept together one last time on the eve of his receiving a cash
award from a lingering court case. Money and food always made David
Sparrow amorous, and I knew how to twist his tits into an ecstasy he bot-
tomed to even when we love-hated each other and continued to fuck after
our divorce.

March 1979: Trouble in the Bubble. No Drummer issue released because
of Embry’s illness and censorship problems with the printer. The staff con-
tinued working daily to prepare upcoming issues.

March 3, 1979: The “First Anniversary” exhibit and party for Fey-Way
Studio was its first and last anniversary. The pioneer gallery was founded
and owned by Drummer writer and photographer, Robert Opel, showcas-
ing leather S&M artists and photographers, bringing egos of art and leather
personalities to a boil South of Market: Mapplethorpe, Rex, the Hun, A.
Jay, Jim Stewart, Lionel Biron, Lou Rudolph, Larry Hunt, Tom Hinde,
Robert Opel, and the un-billed artist and drug addict Chuck Arnett who,
I reported in Drummer 133 (September 1989), “introduced the needle to
Folsom Street.” Arnett’s invitation for the “Christmas Fix” party at “Fey-
Way, Midnight, December 30, 1978,” featured a drawing of a Santa inject-
ing his forearm with a hypodermic whose previous tracks spell out NOEL.
My eyewitness intuition from the 1970s is that the sharing of needles, more
than unsafe sex, was what wiped out the speed-driven A-List leather play-
ers—both the disco bunnies shooting up at Probe and Trocadero, as well as
the muscle guys injecting steroids, the most popular and secret drug used
by gays in the 1970s when, without pecs, you were dead.

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