Page 484 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

trying his best to conduct daily business, was attacked and bitten severely
under the armpit at the Russian River by a large dog that tried, he said, to
eat him. He died soon after. Or maybe he joined the disappeared. Perhaps
his name wasn’t Frank Hatfield.
During those years, only once did Embry and I physically see each
other.
In March 1996, Rick Leathers, who had begun working with Embry as
early as Drummer 56 (August 1982 ), invited Mark Hemry and me to a recep-
tion Embry was hosting upstairs at his 18 and Castro Alternate Publishing
th
office, the Wings Galleria. In the zero degrees, my friend, the Hun, who was
a frequent artist in Drummer, had discovered a protégé in “Teddy of Paris.”
In 1994, the Hun had produced an attractive run of sixteen Teddy prints
titled Commando Three. The severe leather-discipline drawings immediately
inspired Embry into debuting the magazine-format book of Teddy draw-
ings, Magnifique (1996). Two months later in May, Mark Hemry and I
visited Teddy in Paris where our two documentary videos of New Orleans
photographer, George Dureau, were inducted into the permanent collection
of the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie. Dureau’s work was featured
in “Maimed Beauty,” Drummer 93 (1986), pages 8 through 11.
At the Wings Galleria, Embry had not changed much physically, and
his temperament was jolly enough, but, for all the bonhomie, a personal gulf
yawned between us. Trading on nostalgia, we yet once again bonded profes-
sionally through the next years.
On June 20, 2000, Mark Hemry sent Embry the discs he had requested
for my original-recipe Drummer articles such as “Prison Blues,” as well as
newer pieces such as “Horsemaster,” “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home,”
and “RoughNight@Sodom.cum” (cum is correct), and a half-page ad for
PalmDriveVideo.com. Embry and I were growing old separately together,
and Drummer was our adult child who had died a year earlier in September
1999. I remember that death date specifically because Drummer and I had
shared June 20 as a birthday. In 2000, I turned sixty-one, and Embry turned
seventy-four, and Drummer, if it had survived the twentieth century, would
have turned twenty-five.
Embry, sticking strictly to my 1970s writing, republished “Cigar
Blues” (from Drummer 22, May 1978) with six of my Palm Drive Video
photographs in Manhood Rituals #3; and “Prison Blues” (from Drummer
21, March, 1978) in Super MR #6 (2000). Inside Mark Hemry’s package,
I enfolded a handwritten personal note that I tried to conceive without
irony:

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