Page 490 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

would have liked to have included my avant-garde concept of Man2Man as a
feature inside Drummer exactly as he had my concept of “Tough Customers.”
Had he paid me for editing Drummer, it is conceivable that my Man2Man
Quarterly would have appeared within his empire of Drummer magazines
along with Tough Customers, Mach, and The Alternate. When Anthony
DeBlase published the landmark Drummer 100 (October 1986), he intro-
duced the “Dear Sir” personal classifieds as “Hot Man-To-Man Contact for
a Cool 50-Cents Per Word.”
Let me play the American pop-culture scholar I became with my analy-
ses of gay popular culture in the 1960s, and continued to be in Drummer
which I subtitled on the masthead of Drummer 23 (July 1978) and in my
editorial: “The American Review of Gay Popular Culture.” With that, I was
planting a flag for a declaration of gay independence, an assertive vision of
the new direction and new character of a Drummer that reflected its grass-
roots readers and how we lived in the emerging gay pop culture of that first
liberated decade after Stonewall.

Editorial written May, 1978; published in Drummer 23 (July 1978):

GETTING OFF

Drummer expands to bring you the same filth,
but now disguised with socially redeeming scholarly significance...

Drummer: The American Review
of Gay Popular Culture
by Jack Fritscher

All right! So where’s Drummer get the leather balls to assume, yeah,
assume to track, report, and chronicle what’s happening in the mas-
culine world of gay men? How legit can a rag get without losing its
j/o quality? Pretty g . d. legit and pretty hard-assed. No other mag
sticks it into the gay subculture the way Drummer sticks it for you. No
other gay mag touches the same raw nerve of what goes on in a wide
cross-section of gay heads after midnight, after the lights go down
low. Drummer dares to reassure you that even with the extremes
that you fantasize about in your most secret heart of hards: you are
not alone.

GAY POP CULTURE: A REFLECTION OF YOU, NARCISSUS

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-14-2017
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