Page 462 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

with camp, gossip, recipes, and ads for toupees, gay paperhanging, and the
self-satirizing BlaBla Café. Those topics were already covered by the then
infant Advocate whose advertising Embry coveted in an age when gay busi-
nesses, forbidden to advertise in the telephone Yellow Pages, turned to the
gay press.
Eager to dig up an existing gay sales base, political or sexual, with its
own members’ mailing list, Embry approached the founding president of
the Hollywood Hills Democratic Club, Larry Townsend, and his struggling
“Homophile Effort for Legal Protection” organization, of which Townsend
was also president. H.E.L.P. provided assistance to gays entrapped by the
LAPD who would soon entrap Embry.
Townsend was editor of the twelve-page H.E.L.P. Newsletter and he,
speaking as a novelist, told me how he always hated the burden of publishing
a new issue every thirty days. Sensing an opportunity, Embry swore fealty to
Townsend and his two organizations. He offered to assist H.E.L.P. publish
its newsletter which he, as the new editor, quickly combined with what he
had called in his first “proto Drummer” editorial “our brave little Drummer.”
Even though he published the Townsend short story, “The Loner,” in a badly
pasted layout in the first issue of his “proto Drummer,” his next moves con-
stituted a hostile takeover of H.E.L.P.
Townsend’s H.E.L.P. Newsletter became Embry’s H.E.L.P./Drummer
which in June 1975, dumping H.E.L.P., became large-format Drummer
with its own “Issue One.” A legend was born. The games began.

4. AGAINST HIS FOUNDING PEERS AT DRUMMER

At the beginning, Drummer was a Petri dish of creative, intellectual, and
financial cultures. At the LAPD police station after the Slave Auction,
Embry admitted in Super MR #5 (2000), page 37, that he openly walked
up to the man who owned the Stud bar and kissed him in some gesture of
leather fraternity even though “the Stud’s owner and I had been to court over
an advertising bill and, when I won, he had ceased to speak to me.” Was it a
Judas kiss to endanger or embarrass the man in front of “twenty uniformed
police” dripping with the homophobia of the raid? The ingrate Embry stirred
up the deadly nightshade of his Blacklist when in Drummer (June 1979)
he attacked the most important woman who had ever helped him, Jeanne
Barney who, four years earlier, while still working for The Advocate, had
come to hold his hand and to edit the first issues of Drummer (1-11).
As eyewitness editor-in-chief, I was embarrassed when Embry drew up
his “bill of divorcement” from Barney. His attack was thrust on my full

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