Page 362 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

forces might we draw in for the second decade of post-Stonewall libera-
tion? Always auditioning new people for possible articles for Drummer, I
took professional time to have supper with an apparently rich man who
alleged his name was “Dick Biezevelt” at the Café du Nord on Market Street.
“Biezevelt” was an idealistic fifty-something gentleman who, dismayed by
the new gay hippie leather culture, wanted to institute a kind of Old School
gentleman’s military culture based on the stiff Prussian model predating
Nazism that would train young gay men on Castro and Folsom to behave
like proper gentlemen. Having seen Embry’s ads for Nazis, men with such
right-wing “esthetics” often courted me because I was editor of the mega-
phone that was Drummer. “Biezevelt” gave me an envelope full of copious
notes about psychological discipline and physical training. However, I was
soon to exit Drummer, and did not write an article about him and his uni-
form fantasies around hazing young men into being polite to older gents.
The newly liberated 1970s was very much a world of closets and mir-
rors and alias sex identities. In fact-checking the past to connect the dots
of who was actually who, I searched for the man known to me as “Dick
Biezevelt” of Marin. I found he may possibly have been a doppelganger for
Nicolass “Nick” Biezeveld, the Marin inventor (1926-1997). This aka “Nick
Bieseveld,” forced to live in drag as a teenage girl in the Haag in order to
escape being drafted into Hitler’s army in Nazi-occupied Holland, came to
America and in 1962 invented the first call-screening device for telephones.
“Nick’s” online obituary mentioned specifically that his experience during
wartime caused him to “have a special place in his heart for the Marines
that would last his entire life.” If “Dick Biezevelt” was not “Nick Biezeveld,”
apologies to them both, but I know how gay identities peel themselves to
amazing transparencies. Coincidence or not, GLBT history is all the better
for adding in “drag” inventor, Nicolaas Biezeveld, who, living with a taste
for USMC discipline, most likely read Drummer.

November 12, 1979 (Friday Night): At the Barracks Baths, I met
with leather-players Peter Fiske, Dan Folkers, and a man named “Mike.”
Illustrating how I experienced real night games and bath sex, and then
wrote the S&M athletics up as erotic New Journalism “reality report-
ing” for Drummer, I took the very Drummer-like ritual of that Barracks
night, and whipped it up into a “true experiences” article for Drummer,
even though Embry continued to refuse payment for grass-roots report-
age he himself could never ever have written because he never went out to
play night sports. My ability to experience what the readers were actually
experiencing and then to report that sexual reality back in Drummer to

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