Page 486 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

Rowberry may have launched Foreskin Quarterly (1985)—with pho-
tographs I had obtained from my friend, German art-scatologist Gerhard
Pohl—as well as Uncut (1987), but both magazines were commercial appli-
cations of the sincere and passionate writing of Joe Tiffenbach and Bud
Berkeley in their Uncircumcised Society of America (USA) Newsletter and
their book Foreskin (1983). Tiffenbach, whose name was Lou Alton, was
the photographer who shot the cover of my Drummer 20 (January 1978), as
well as the photos for my article, “Arab Death,” which I bylined as “Denny
Sargent,” my protagonist in I Am Curious (Leather) in my Son of Drummer
(September 1978). Those Tiffenbach photos of a nude young man rolling
on wheels in the sand had been shot on assignment earlier in 1975 in Palm
Springs. Having paid Tiffenbach for the shoot, Embry insisted that I reuse
the three-year-old images for Drummer 20 because he wanted to squeeze his
money’s worth from the generic photos that in sunny concept and vanilla
content really had nothing specific to do with leather or with Drummer.
The “Prince of Reprints” Embry ordered me to re-write “Arab Death”
from pages he had torn out of some men’s adventure magazine from the
1950s. The source was something like Argosy, one of those mags with an
American air pilot tied spreadeagle with a busty Nazi wench poised to
torture him. In fact, many of the longer written features in Embry’s LA
Drummer, such as the “Great Sadists in History” series, especially when
signed by “Robert Payne,” were re-writes plagiarized out of 1940s and 1950s
men’s pulp-adventure magazines and history books that were popular when
he was a teenage masturbator. Some examples of Embry/Payne’s “found”
articles printed as “filler” in Drummer 14 were “The Third Degree” and
“The Foreign Legion”; and, in Drummer 15, “Devil’s Island” and “The
Greek Way.” At that time, my analysis of this theft of uninspired and stolen
stories indicated that Drummer needed all the mouth-to-mouth resuscita-
tion original writers could give to make it breathe fresh on its own as a gay
men’s adventure magazine. With that in mind, and to meet our monthly
deadlines, I began writing my own original bespoke stories and features.
Decoding Rowberry personally and professionally in his magazine and
video writing, I witnessed that Rowberry, who never met a twinkie chicken
he didn’t like, was deeply disturbed, even emotionally disturbed, by mature
hairy men and facial hair. From 1984-1996, I sported a very full, long,
and red-black Walt-Whitman beard down below my pecs. Rowberry once
demanded of me: “Why? Why? What’s it mean? What’s it for?” I responded:
“To wrap around cocks.” He never asked again. His myopia for twenty-
one-year-olds who looked fourteen, made him shortsighted as a journalist
and a reviewer of gay culture. He did not get the emerging concept and

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