Page 471 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

P. 471

Jack Fritscher Chapter 18 453

Books in Magazine Format Lavishly Illustrated. $9.95 Each.” His bibli-
ography of gay fiction included a hundred titles, many of them authored
by Embry as “Robert Payne” as well as by dozens of other genre writers:
Mr. Benson by John Preston, Slaves of the Empire by Aaron Travis, Captain
Morgan by Frank O’Rourke, Cort: Imperial Warrior Slave by Frank Albright,
The Brig by Mason Powell, and several volumes of Care and Training of
the Male Slave by Robert Payne. He also published magazine-format books
showcasing photographers such as Rick Castro and artists such as the old
master, Bill Ward, and the new master, Teddy of Paris.
What Embry did vilifying Jeanne Barney in Drummer 30 was an over-
the-top archetype of what kinds of subtle defamation happened to everyone
on the Blacklist that was viral and contagious. In publishing John F. Karr’s
review of Felice Picano’s Like People in History in Manifest Reader 26 (1995),
Embry revealed his West Coast bias against the so-called literary establish-
ment on the East Coast who seemed mostly too good to write for his maga-
zines from Drummer to Super MR. It wasn’t so much the bad review as it was
the snarky personal attack on Picano whom Embry sabotaged after he had
published his short story “The Deformity Lover” in Drummer 93 (August
1986). When the East Coast writers read Karr’s review, it would have been
natural for them to dismiss with extreme prejudice any writer ever involved
with Embry’s many magazines, fueling yet another round of gay civil war.

Felice Picano...has been self-consciously literary, as if he had to live
up to the reputations of his fellow members of the writing group
known as The Violet Quill. Indeed, in the shadow of Edmund
White, Andrew Holleran, and even the over-rated Robert Ferro,
Picano has been rather shrill about his participation in the group.
His 1989 memoir, Men Who Loved Me, and especially his brand
new Like People in History...are stilted with literary pretension,
clogged with commas.
Picano’s characters...are neither likeable nor anti-heroes....
Further, Picano’s gay badinage is neither new nor witty, and his
opera fanatics are rote and uninformed...the author never lets pas-
sion breathe.... (Manifest Reader 26, pages 92-93)

Finally, on this point, even while I was one among many blacklisted, it
is only honest that I be the first to blow the whistle on myself for objective,
critical reasons regarding some things I have written about Embry. In the
back-lot movie musical of Drummer, I once had motives as strong as Fred
Halsted’s or Jeanne Barney’s or Larry Townsend’s or Robert Mapplethorpe’s

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