Page 480 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

But talk about de javu [sic]! Our Drummer business manager
Jerry Lasley [who arrived and disappeared in the 1980s through
the revolving door that was Drummer] has reappeared to again do
what he did so well....It would have been something to have had
Marge [aka Marj as the lady signed her name], our lady typesetter
pounding out the copy, cigarette hanging out of her smiling mouth.
And A. Jay, our art director, and Jeannie [sic] Barney and/or John
Rowberry editing. We even received a photographic offering from
former editor Jack Fritscher of what he claims Robert Payne should
look like. Out of that long ago, there were writers and artists and
photographers whose contributions made magic.

The cover-quality photo I had sent him was of my Palm Drive Video
model, Chris Duffy aka Bull Stanton. My little joke was that after all these
years a photograph of the fictional “Robert Payne” ought to have aged a bit
into a guy at least thirty-something and hot. Making no mention of The
Portrait of Dorian Gray, I offered a sexy pseudonymous face to fit the pseud-
onymous “Robert Payne” to whom the unimaginative Embry had never
tried over thirty years to give a signature “face” that identifies a brand. As it
happened, Embry fell for the photo of Chris Duffy, but not to front “Robert
Payne.”
In Manhood Rituals 3 (1999), page 2, he wrote:

We have been pouring though the first 100 issues of Drummer,
not so much to lift, or re-live, but to check what to seek out, what
worked and what to avoid duplicating. It is not a simple task but
one pleasantly filled with powerful memories of other times and
people and circumstances.
We even looked up our third issue of Drummer which might
have been no great shakes by today’s publishing standards but, con-
sidering there was no one else doing it, issue #3 wasn’t so bad.

Embry’s claim-jumping ego and his revisionist history, declaring “no
one else was doing it,” conveniently denied all the pioneer magazines that
existed around the startup of Drummer twenty-five years earlier in 1975.
Drummer was no immaculate conception born in a vacuum. Drummer
had gay pop-culture roots. In truth, Clark Polak’s Drum (1964-1967) had
been “doing it” with a circulation of 10,000; Queen’s Quarterly (1969-c.
1980) was “doing it”; Blueboy (1974-2007) was “doing it”; so was After
Dark (1968-1982). Their publishing standards in form and content were

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