Page 366 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

within seven months, gay activists Milk and Opel could be shot to death,
was the gay press the next target of some bullet or ballot? Or could we
expect yet another raid on our Drummer office by the SFPD who on May
21, 1979, charged down Castro Street, pounding the pavement with their
billy clubs, pumping themselves up before invading the Elephant Walk
th
Bar, at the ground-zero “rainbow corner” of 18 and Castro, where they
blocked the doors and beat the patrons crawling under tables and scram-
bling for safety into the small toilet crammed with nearly twenty terrified
gay men and lesbians, all of an age old enough to remember primal fears of
pre-Stonewall violence being resurrected as they were being attacked in the
new culture war spearheaded by onward-marching Christian soldiers led by
Anita Bryant.
Once again sex and death combined. It was open season on gays. It was
suddenly the wrong autumn for Embry to come barging in on the offensive
after his spring and summer absence dealing with his own cancer.

December 31, 1979: After a Sisyphean two years and ten months (March
1977 to December 1979), I resigned officially as founding San Francisco
editor-in-chief of Drummer, and continued on for years in my day job as
manager of my staff of a dozen writers at Kaiser Engineers, Inc.

February 9, 1980 (Saturday): Five weeks after exiting Drummer, I
was hired for two jobs by straight publisher Michael Redman. He asked
me to write “lesbian-themed” fiction for the straight male readers of his
San Francisco Pleasure Guide, and to be the founding editor of his new
gay tabloid venture, the California Action Guide, whose first monthly issue
appeared July, 1982, featuring the debut of a dozen feature articles I had
written originally for, but never published in, Embry’s Drummer. My “les-
bian” fiction, played for fun, followed the tradition of pop-culture camp in
Andy Warhol’s underground films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Russ Meyer’s
movie of Roger Ebert’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and Wakefield
Poole’s The Bible which I featured on the cover of Drummer 27 (February
1979). Ebert, the international film critic, was an ardent devotee of Meyer’s
raunchy comedies, and he gave—at that time in our new sex revolution—
a certain cachet to the pop art of “sexploitation writing” as practiced in
Warhol’s Interview, Drummer, and in my San Francisco Pleasure Guide sto-
ries with my titillating news stand titles like: “Nurses Who Play Doctor,”
“Fit to Be Tied,” “Goddess Worship Love Temples,” and “Pussy Pussy Bang
Bang.” As penance, I later wrote a proper, and well-reviewed, lesbian literary
novel, The Geography of Women: A Romantic Comedy.

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