Page 477 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 18 459

When I investigated emerging homomasculine queer theory in the fic-
tion of Some Dance to Remember, his feminist bias overcame his esthetic
analysis of the text he rejected as too “butch” in his review “Some Dance
to Remember: The Rise and Fall of Butch,” Bay Area Reporter, April 12,
1990. Why did Embry hire a male feminist to review books and videos
for the masculine-identified readers of his MR magazines? May masculin-
ists write for feminist publications? The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review
told me, literally, it did not know how to review my novel The Geography
of Women: A Romantic Comedy (1998) because it was a story about women
written by a man. Goodbye to Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda and Nora! So long
to Tennessee Williams’ Amanda, Blanche, Stella, Maggie, Serafina, Violet
Venable, Alexandra Del Lago, and Mrs. Stone! Gore Vidal claimed, “There
is no actress on earth who will not testify that Williams created the best
women characters in the modern theatre.” That Gay and Lesbian Review
sexism from the 1990s seems a subject for another GLBT literary panel.
Karr was a prolific journalist. So Embry paid little heed to Karr’s politics
because the disciplined Karr could meet deadlines with column inches to
fill his hungry magazines.
Surviving my thirty years with Embry, I moved on professionally, like
others on the Blacklist. I absorbed Embry’s enmity, sucked it up, got a har-
don watching him self-destruct, and let my work speak for itself.
Following Larry Townsend’s contentious, and temporary, 1980s “peace
accord” with Embry in order to get free publicity for his LT Publications in
Drummer, I sent Embry a kiss-and-make-up letter on August 25, 1989, ten
years after our breakup, and one year before his rental Karr tried to run me
down. I saw no reason to exclude Embry from my work in 1990s Drummer
and I wanted to include him in the pages of this book which was already
several years into production.

Mr. John Embry
PO Box [number deleted]
Forestville CA 95436
August 25, 1989

Dear John,

So much time has passed since we have seen each other and talked
that the statute of limitations must have run out on whatever, as they
say in Hollywood, creative differences colored our past in the highly
charged ’70s. Playing in The Rose, Bette Midler says to her audience:

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