Page 488 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

printed as a book review column in Drummer 41 (September 1980), page
67. Musgrave is so smug about airing his own superiority to the books he
chose to review that he unwittingly deconstructed Rowberry’s editing skills
and judgement. First: None of the three books fit the interests of Drummer
readers and should not have been reviewed at all. Second: If the books were
as bad as Musgrave said, there was no reason to review them other than to
let Musgrave and Rowberry vent their inner kveens. Their tea-for-two salon
around Drummer was way different from my international salon around
Drummer. Years later, a photograph shot by Musgrave was dug up from the
archives to illustrate Guy Baldwin’s “Ties That Bind” in Drummer 131 (July
1989), page 13.
Before Embry and I, in our third act, matured into “working together”
again—at arm’s length, the following 1979 “Notice,” repeated here from an
earlier chapter, but with additional annotations, is typical of how Embry
waxed his moustache and twirled his cape as he pinned a “Scarlet Letter” on
Jeanne Barney who claimed in 2006 that Embry still owed her thousands
of dollars, plus interest.
What was Embry’s mystique? His ability at fascination? In spite of
everything, Barney remained on-again-off-again friends with Embry for
thirty-five years until he died in 2010. Like Embry, Larry Townsend ran
equally hot and cold, from estranged to ambiguous, with his frenemies from
1970 to his death in 2008, when he was on the outs with both Embry and
Barney. I myself was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by Embry from
1977 to years beyond his passing.
If this shrill “Notice,” a kind of slut-shaming of Jeanne Barney, was
how Embry spoke in public, imagine what rage he roared in his unguarded
voice to his staff and to his contributors, in person and in private letters
and emails. Quoted exactly, the Blacklist vendetta that follows was Embry’s
anti-Barney rant. As editor-in-chief, I told him I did not want his personal
harangue in my issue, Drummer 30, page 38, which was nineteen issues and
three years after Jeanne Barney quit Embry. What is the length of a grudge?

NOTICE: Mrs. Jeanne Chelsey Barney, aka “Barney” and “J.
Barney” [Note his hissing high dudgeon about her aliases as
opposed to his. And his paternalistic dismissal of her as a heterosex-
ual “Mrs.”] is representing herself as the owner of the LEATHER
FRATERNITY and is operating out of a mail drop box in La
Crescenta, California. [As if a PO Box is somehow proof of crime
in a magazine full of postal box addresses.] She has solicited mem-
berships in this “Fraternity,” promising subscriptions to Drummer

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