Page 363 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 13 345

reflect readers’ actual lives was my basic concept that changed Drummer
from Embry’s static LA “Stand and Model (S&M)” rag into a dynamic
reader-reflexive jerk-off magazine where the wild sex that men were actu-
ally inflicting on each other started in the head and worked its way down
in hot column inches. Instead, that sacred scene of sexual purification and
discipline through bondage and whipping at the Barracks fit appropriately
into one of the historical reportage scenarios in Some Dance to Remember,
Reel 2, Scene 11.

November 20, 1979 (Tuesday): Jim Enger and I attended the victory
dinner for Dianne Feinstein who a week earlier was elected mayor of San
Francisco on her own merits having become mayor by a bullet a year earlier.
th
The Sunday before, I had stood on the northwest corner of 18 and Castro,
in front of the Star Pharmacy, holding up a big blue “Feinstein for Mayor”
poster, because not all gays liked her.

November 28, 1979 (Wednesday): Drummer art director Al Shapiro
(A. Jay) and I designed the letterhead and masthead for the new magazine
I intended to publish with Mark Hemry, Man2Man Quarterly. A. Jay, who
was also ankling his way fast out of Drummer because of money and copy-
right issues about his cartoon strips, was listed on the Man2Man masthead
beginning with the first issue which featured a gray impressionist photo-
graph of Jim Enger on the cover.

December 1979: Special Extra Issue, Drummer Rides Again. Having
edited the entirety of this special issue, I watched the tempest-tossed Embry
gut it. In order not to list me as editor, he went against all journalism prin-
ciples and dropped everyone’s masthead credits, just as he had in the first
issues of Drummer. In one line buried at the bottom of the credits page,
he named “Robert Payne” as editor. In addition, cutting and pasting, he
changed our long-planned features and fiction and substituted whatever
was in the Drummer “archives.” Ultimately, my contributions surviving in
the 64-page issue were one piece of writing and seventeen photographs, plus
the production work behind the entire issue. The article was “Bound and
Gagged: Zeus Studios”; and my “Sparrow Photography” images were shot
at Embry’s “Quarters,” his failed attempt to start a commercial playroom in
a basement South of Market to rival the 21 Street Catacombs. I also edited
st
and produced the two graphic features Embry included about the LA artist
Cavelo and the San Francisco photographer Rink.

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