Page 456 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

defined me in one of his articles as “an apostle of homomasculinity,” I should
acknowledge that at that time I took my populist cue for tub-thumping mas-
culinity in my issues of Drummer because the evolution of men identifying
as masculine was part of the roots of Drummer itself. Historically, Drummer
writers Toby Bailey and Bernie Prock, proclaimed the triumphant debut
of the new masculinity of leather culture in their Drummer column, “The
Leather Journal,” in which they collected the best concepts of their previ-
ous columns in Drummer 6 (May 1976): “Masculinity and Masochism,”
“The Masculine Fetishist,” “Men Who Go to Leather Bars,” “Clothes and
the Leatherman,” and “Ageism.” As Joseph W. Bean noted in his history,
International Mr. Leather: 25 Years of Champions (2004), I summed up
this new breed of gay masculinity by coining the word homomasculinity in
Drummer 31 (September 1979), pages 22-24.
Embry’s on-going feud with Goodstein encouraged Drummer colum-
nists to take gratuitous Blacklist swipes at anyone in anyway associated
with The Advocate. One of his reviewers, Ed Menerth aka Ed Franklin aka
Scott Masters, gratuitously trashed photographer Crawford Barton’s exqui-
site coffee-table book, Beautiful Men (Drummer 12, page 15; and Drummer
13, page 30), because my pal Barton’s publisher was Liberation Publications,
the umbrella over Goodstein’s Advocate empire which also bought Sasha
Alyson’s Alyson Publications. The hurt to 1970s Drummer was that the
stellar San Francisco photographer, Barton, whom I thought a lovely man,
subtracted himself from helping Embry’s Drummer in San Francisco,
even as Barton, whom I interviewed on tape, helped me create my book,
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.
Ed Menerth was the LA reviewer who, disgusted at being an unpaid
Embry apparatchik, finally untied the bondage of his puppet strings and
exited the pages of Drummer. I was an eyewitness because Ed Menerth, who
was a vocal coach, called me at least once a month crying me a river to get
Embry to pay up or he would withhold his review columns as well as his
serialized stories written as “Scott Masters.”
Jeanne Barney told me that Menerth, “the prolific writer was always
paid during my tenure as editor-in-chief, more often than not out of my
own pocket.”
Frustrated with no pay and no return of his manuscripts, he soon quit
Drummer cold. In an end run around Embry, Ed Menerth, as his own eye-
witness, wrote to me, not at Drummer, but at my home address on January
21, 1979. That date is important because it gave me a model for my own exit
for the same reasons at the end of 1979. Menerth said:

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