Page 368 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

other leathermen. I first wrote about the shock of “gay death” in my edito-
rial, “Cruising: The Most Dangerous Game in the Whole Wide World,” in
Drummer 29 (May 1979), two years before the advent of AIDS.

April 3, 1980 (Thursday): I cooked an oven supper at my home for Jim
Enger, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Mark Hemry all sitting at my white oak
kitchen table. Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo.

April 8, 1980 (Tuesday:) Supper with Robert Mapplethorpe at
Hamburger Mary’s on Folsom Street; then to the Ambush bar on Harrison
where Robert, to whom fetish was everything, instantly felt uncomfort-
able wearing his cool New York leather in a laid-back flannel-shirt bar. He
asked me to drive him to my home where he could change into one of my
shirts and jean jackets, and adjust his sex vibe, before we headed back to
the Ambush where we hung out that evening with poet Thom Gunn and
the artist Lou Rudolph who often sat in the Ambush, like Otto Dix in the
Weimar cabarets of Berlin, sketching the customers.

April 29, 1980 (Tuesday): At his home at 36 Camp Street, I met with
male-madam and film producer J. Brian, who procured hustlers for Rock
Hudson, to collaborate on his screenplay J. Brian’s Flashbacks, as well as to
write a novelization of his film for publication as a serial in three issues of
Honcho (April, May, June, 1982) and six issues of the California Action Guide
(June-December 1982).

May 27, 1980 (Tuesday): Jim Enger thanked me for letting him read an
excerpt from the manuscript in progress of Some Dance to Remember.

May 28, 1980 (Wednesday): Robert Mapplethorpe called me to please
ask Jim Enger about using Enger’s name on one of the headless torso
photographs.

June 1, 1980 (Sunday): After a year as lovers, Mark Hemry moved into
my home on 25 Street.
th

June 10, 1980 (Tuesday): I received word that my model and playmate
Leonard Sylvestri died, allegedly, of hepatitis about three weeks earlier. A
well-built man with a beard, Sylvestri was one of the San Franciscans whose
photographs I published in Drummer to ground it in a reality of local, hand-
some, muscular men. His Italian surname translated suitably to wild.

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