Page 429 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 17 411

CHAPTER 17

WHEN QUEERS COLLIDE
HOW GAY CIVIL WARS KILLED
OUR STONEWALL MOMENT

• Leather Historians: Critical Thinking and Fact-Checking
Drummer, the First Draft of Leather History
• Independent Authors and Corporate Gay Publishers
• Wild Tim Barrus: From Editor of Drummer Magazine to
Author at Esquire Magazine
• MGM Star Ann Miller, Publisher Elizabeth Gershman,
and the Kennedy Family
• Edmund White and Larry Kramer Thrown Out of the
Key West Writers Conference
• Embry Shames Jeanne Barney, the Founding Los Angeles
Editor-in-Chief of Drummer
• Mach Magazine: Mach Is Short for Machiavelli

Suddenly in the 1970s we were in the brave new world of corporate gay
publishing. That peculiar kind of indentured servitude is not why young
authors get into writing, but the age-old business model was there, a kind
of necessary evil, constricting the free spirit of being gay, and exploiting the
passion of writers burning to be published.
Immediately after Stonewall, gay liberation became a commodity
coopted and commercialized by corporate businesses intent on selling our
voices, our art, and our identity as product from Drummer and The Advocate
to the startup in the mid-1980s of gay book publishers who were no more
saintly than straight publishers.
A gay book publisher is a member of the 1% who buys the work of
authors who are the 99% to whom he or she pays only 7-10% of the cover
price. A gay magazine publisher, buying rights, pays far less than any mini-
mum wage.
All writers from Joe Anonymous to Edmund White to Larry Townsend,
and publishers from Winston Leyland to Sasha Alyson to David Goodstein

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-14-2017
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