Page 468 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

be channeling the late Supervisor Harvey Milk an awful lot....One
of Milk’s old friends is tired of all the, shall we say, “got Milk?”
talk. The other day in the Castro we ran into Cleve Jones, an old
Milk comrade and founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt project,
and asked him why everybody is trying to claim Milk. He said
many members of Milk’s community died in the AIDS epidemic
of the 1980s and ’90s and took their firsthand knowledge of the
supervisor with them....a generation of gay men was pretty much
wiped out and we lost a generation of stories....[Milk] was a normal
guy in most respects,” Jones said. “He was not a genius and not a
saint.” —Heather Knight and Rachel Gordon, “Milk’s Old Friend
Tired of Claims to Legacy,” San Francisco Gate, Gay Pride Sunday,
June 24, 2012

Befriended by Anne Rice who cloaked herself as A. N. Roquelaure, and
also wrote about S&M without being a known player, Preston figured that
in the way Rice, and I, had a double career writing “literature” and “S&M
literature,” so might he. Constructing a public-relations dark image with
his vampyr eyes, sunken cheeks, and sullen personality, he cultivated in
the 1980s a commercial air of mystery to pull power to himself by editing
collections of grateful writers. Social networking was his magic. His real
literary distinction lay in his anthologies. He knew how to make people feel
grateful to him during the great hysteria of AIDS dying. He was not far
from the A-List Satanic aspects of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mapplethorpe.
Yet he was no Lestat. As if he were impersonating Rice’s characters, he tried
to be bad, dangerous, and edgy. As a showman, he fueled his own artiste
maudit cult by identifying himself with his own “Dark Lord.” The tag line
on his cover for Tales from the Dark Lord tub-thumped the word erotic twice
to build his audience: “The Master of Gay Erotic Literature Presents an
Incendiary Collection of Erotic Stories That Explore the Full Spectrum of
Gay Sexuality.”
That advertising blurb was a challenging power-grab. Iconoclast Preston
wanted to usurp what the iconic Larry Townsend was famous for all his life:
“The Master of Gay Erotic Literature.” Preston, learning that Townsend
was on the Blacklist, might have felt it was a career move to try to steal
Townsend’s literary stardom. I knew Larry Townsend for years, and I wit-
nessed Preston’s attempted coup. Townsend was not amused until Preston,
realizing he might have gone too far, rolled over, and courted him. The
dying younger author made an offer of endorsement that the older author
could not refuse. Preston penned the introduction to the new edition of

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