Page 407 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 16 389

CHAPTER 16

DRUMMER: FIRST VICTIM
OF THE CULTURE WAR

THE SLAVE AUCTION SPRING OF 1976

The Final Word Published in Drummer Ended with .com

• Born (Again) to Raise Hell: End-Time Christians vs.
Satanic Drummer
• The Advocate Prejudice Against Leather Culture and Gay
Masculine Identity
• Leather Contests: International Mr. Leather (IML) Begets
Mr. Drummer
• Leather Immigrant: Val Martin, First “Mr. Drummer”
• John Embry’s Lover from Spain, Mario Simon: “Evita” as
“Mrs. Drummer”
• Photographer Lionel Biron: Social Justice, Gay
Liberation, and The Advocate
• Drummer Stars: JimEd Thompson, Chris Burns, Scott
O’Hara

John Embry was incorrigible. He wouldn’t have changed if we had put a
horsehead in his bed. Nevertheless, Godfather Embry, out in the La-La-
Land of LA in 1975, should have paid smarter attention to the enemies and
allies who were out there doing what amounted to a practicum in the hateful
queer theory practiced by religious fundamentalists. Embry’s shady behav-
ior set Drummer up as one of the first victims of the culture-war uprisings
by 1970s Christian conservatives like Ed Davis, Anita Bryant, John Briggs,
Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell who created his Moral Majority mix of
church and state in 1979.
Had he gathered his political wits, Embry could have done leather cul-
ture a service by rebutting the anti-leather Richard Goldstein at the Village
Voice, and, in so doing, he might have decided to turn the seventeen-day-old
Drummer off its own suicidal course of forbidden topics in issues 2, 3, and

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