Page 479 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 18 461

survivor who can tell the whole new generation who has come out in
the last ten years all the different versions of the way we once were
in the golden days when we were Inventing It All.
Please write or call. We live so close to each other here in the
country. We can meet for coffee or we can set up a date for the
interview, or you can say, what I hope you won’t say, thanks, but no
thanks. The point is for us survivors to get your story, who you are,
where you came from, how you invented an institution, and where
you are and are going.
Of course, best regards to Mario, who, if he likes, is most heartily
welcome to be part of the interview, because he too has been a part
of this whole scenario which has gotten bigger than any one of us.

Sincerely,
Jack Fritscher
cc. Anthony F. DeBlase

Embry, who never buried a hatchet, never responded to my 1989 letter.
Perhaps he declined because of his undying disdain for Tony DeBlase. Nine
years later in early 1998, he himself phoned me for the first time in twenty
years. He was finally a one-man band. In our leather Bloomsbury, he had
achieved Virginia Woolf’s dream: He had a room of his own, “five-hundred
pounds a year,” and a computer. He wasn’t so much a solo act as he was
abandoned by everyone “who done him wrong.” As I had brushed up on
graphic design for Drummer at UC Berkeley, he had learned PageMaker at
Santa Rosa Junior College. He proposed to trade some of my photos and
stories on disc, not for pay, but for free ad space for my Palm Drive Video. He
was designing and building pages for his new magazine venture, the “MR”
brand magazines, Manifest Reader, Manhood Rituals, and Super MR which
combined Manifest Reader and Manhood Rituals.
Neither of us gentlemen made any mention of our past other than to agree
that the 1970s had been “the Golden Age of Drummer.” When Drummer
changed owners in 1986, DeBlase had Embry sign a non-competition clause.
When the limit expired in the 1990s, Embry jumped back in business. As I
had done in the 1980s with both Man2Man and the California Action Guide,
Embry followed suit and created yet another “Virtual Drummer”: his own
Manifest Reader series.
In the third act of his life, waxing nostalgic for those classic issues of
1970s Drummer, he decided to revive those glory-days. In his 1990s resur-
rection, in Manhood Rituals 2, he editorialized on the inside front cover:

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