Page 470 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

only one surviving and archived original chapter hand-typed by Preston: the
last chapter of Mr. Benson.
Back in the day, it was thought that to control Preston as a former
Advocate employee and as an East Coast legman and reporter for West Coast
Drummer, Embry “Higgins” teased more work out of his “Eliza” by holding
Mr. Benson hostage, delaying its publication as an actual trade paperback
book for more than thirty-six months to keep Preston dancing to his tune
while Embry blamed the delay on printers. Embry may have thought he was
playing sadist to Preston’s playing masochist. In human terms, he seemed
he was just being cruel to Preston, with his unnecessarily protracted tease
delaying publication of that book version of Mr. Benson for those nearly
four years (1983). Embry cited censorship problems with the printer, but, if
those claims about the printer were true, those delays were caused by his, and
Preston’s, absolute insistence on explicit illustrations and not by Preston’s
tame text.
Lou Weingarden (1943-1989), the owner of Stompers in Greenwich
Village, told Robert Mapplethorpe and me that Preston himself, fighting
with Lou’s lover Bill Burke, caused another delay when Burke aka the artist
Brick took his enmity out on the tempestuous Preston and withdrew the
drawings he had made specifically for Mr. Benson. Founded at the end of the
1970s, Stompers was a boot-fetish emporium and gay art gallery. Like Robert
Opel’s Fey-Way Gallery around the Drummer Salon in San Francisco, it was
also a hive of talented Manhattan personalities and extrapolated gossip.
In the real world, as opposed to the Drummer publishing microcosm,
author Preston would have demanded that Embry’s magazine illustrations,
which were not necessary for a book, be dropped as were the drawings
yanked by Brick. But during this first decade after Stonewall, gay literature
was the domain of magazine publishers. Preston had no existing gay book
publishers to turn to until the mid to late 1980s. Nor did I, till signed by
Gay Sunshine Press who in 1983 bought my novel, I Am Curious (Leather)
aka Leather Blues, as well as my short fiction for my leather anthology
Corporal in Charge and Other Stories which was the first book collection
of Drummer fiction. That caused Embry to add Gay Sunshine publisher,
Winston Leyland, to his Blacklist.
Within leather-heritage literature, John H. Embry should be remem-
bered as a prolific publisher of homomasculine S&M books, but not in the
small “trade paperback” size. Having written his The Care and Training of
the Male Slave in the late 1960s, Embry excelled in the 1970s “gay book
genre” of large-format “magazine-size books” sold at magazine prices. He
advertised his “Alternate Book Series” to his mail-order list as “Complete

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