Page 483 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

P. 483

Jack Fritscher Chapter 18 465

Embry lost synergy. A Chris Duffy color cover would have
bumped up sales of his magazine as well as my video, Sunset Bull,
being sold by his own mail-order company, Alternate and Wings
Distributing.

Distance, rather than dinner and dancing, defined Embry and me.
Through his attitude-free employees, my pals, Rick Leathers and Frank
Hatfield, he made a couple more overtures about writing and video. Frank
Hatfield aka the Drummer author, Frank O’Rourke, was also his own mail-
order company as Hatfield House producing and selling S&M audiotapes,
and as XYZ Enterprises selling video from a Guerneville P. O. Box at the
Russian River.
Frank Hatfield told me that he had worked internationally as a diplo-
mat-spy. It was as if he wanted me to take him for a double-agent reporting
to both Embry and me. He colorfully claimed he was a convicted gay bank
robber, “an international bank robber,” whom I interviewed on tape. He
told me he was connected to the Mafia and had celebrated New Year’s Eve
with Meyer Lansky in Havana the night before Castro took over Cuba on
January 1, 1959. One-upping every prison fantasy in San Francisco, he had
done time, he said, at San Quentin before becoming advertising director,
beginning in Drummer 54 (June 1982).
When Embry sold Drummer, Hatfield moved north of the Golden Gate
Bridge with him. On the split-personalities masthead of Manifest Reader,
featuring John H. Embry as publisher and Robert Payne as editor, Hatfield
was listed as “Associate Editor Frank O’Rourke” and as “Frank Hatfield,
Distribution.” He was also manager of Embry’s Wings Distributing and
Alternate mail order, running the book-and-video business out of Canyon
One Road under the redwoods in Rio Nido, one village east of Guerneville,
where he lived in a house owned by Embry who was his landlord. Alternate
Publishing had a P. O. Box one village to the south in Forestville. Their
mass-mailer of brochures and magazines was located one more village to the
south in Sebastopol. The “Buffalo Enterprises” bulk-mailing service Embry
chose happened to be the mailer, and a friend, I had used since 1985 for my
Palm Drive Video brochures. I hoped this zero degrees of separation was not
a cosmic force field dooming us to be locked together as old souls forever.
Frank Hatfield facilitated Wings’ distribution of the features I was
directing for my Palm Drive Video. He sold hundreds of my videocassettes
for Embry. Soon enough, payments due fell in arrears exactly as had the
payment of salaries and fees due at Drummer. In no causal order, Hatfield

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