Page 380 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

sex. It was this same dirty sea change that had caused me earlier to break
off sex with my bicoastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe who was into dirty
Manhattan sex typified by the Mineshaft. Never a puritan, I loved both
Mapplethorpe and the Mineshaft. Nevertheless I knew I had to be a hygiene
freak from the day I came out of the closet. So while art in magazines may
play at being dirty, in real life, edgy sleaze is a whole other issue.
I wrote nearly every word in Man2Man as I had done with much of the
text in the issues of Drummer which I edited. Truth be told, I wrote fifty
percent of the first sex classifieds in M2M because each to me was like an
exciting dirty little sex poem. I wanted each classified ad to be the same
experience as going into one different movie booth after another at a dirty
book store. Once the readers picked up on the rhetorical tone and style I was
showing them by example, they found permission to push open their own
versions of lust which is what I wanted when I first seeded the classifieds.
However, I had no intention of unleashing every lurid fantasy in a classified
format that suggested that these little entries were real. I meant them as
jerk-off fantasies no one need try. I figured if they masturbated to risky sex
acts at home, it would acquit their urges to go out and do them with others.
The Id is mightier than the Superego. It was odd how fast simple sex in gay
liberation turned dirty. Other magazines took notice.
In Touch for Men, titillating its own readers with the cheap thrills it
could not resist in our Man2Man, pretended LA “shock” at San Francisco
sex, and reviewed M2M in the August 1981 In Touch #58 that also published
my short story about David Hurles, “B-Movie on Castro Street.”

* * * *

PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE
Man2Man Magazine
Vivid, Interactive Mag for Readers by Jack Fritscher

by John Calendo,
In Touch for Men #58, August 1981

What a nice world it would be if people did as these two do [referencing a
1960s photo of two British lads kitted up in rubber and necking with mud].
What they’re doing exactly is, of course, up for grabs. You know, putting out
a gay magazine is tough. You have to keep abreast of all the latest develop-
ments in gay sex. But even we have trouble following the many twists and
turns coming out of San Francisco.

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