Page 495 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 18 477

it with Embry? It is worth some scholar’s essay in queer studies to opine why,
like Tom of Finland, the iconic Colt Studio went missing for years from
Drummer? What a perfect twenty-four-year marriage of homomasculinity
and leather that could have been. Perhaps Colt was too sunny and too LA,
and Drummer too dungeon-dark and too San Francisco, to be a match the
way Lou Thomas’ sweaty Target Studio in New York, spun out of the origi-
nal Colt Studio, was just right for a dozen Drummer covers and centerfolds.
In later and less outlaw incarnations, Colt, like the Tom of Finland
Foundation, launched a clothing line of leather fashions. Imagine if back
in the day, mail-order retailer Embry, who sold Drummer t-shirts, had
designed his own label of Drummer jeans, jackets, and boots, suitable, of
course, for the fashion-week runway at the Mr. Drummer Contest and at
the International Mr. Leather Contest. A man need only sniff his armpit to
figure how a Drummer cologne in the 1970s might have been distinct from
the scent introduced by the Tom of Finland Foundation in 2008: “Etat
Libre d’Orange, ‘Tom of Finland,’ Eau de Parfum Spray, 50ml, $90, free
shipping.” While Embry had advertised his mail-order amyl nitrite poppers
as potent “aromas” and fragrant “room odorizers” enhancing wild sex, Tom
of Finland separated its Parfum from the “stank” of sex with the assurance
that it was “...not a pornographic scent. Nor is it shocking.”
My longtime associate, Robert Mainardi, editor of the handsome
Gmunder book, Jim French: The Creator of Colt Studio (2011), mentioned
to me the possibility that French perhaps refused to allow Colt photos
in Drummer because French, taking a page from David Goodstein’s The
Advocate, did not want his noble Olympian photographs sharing a page
with ignoble dildo ads. Such ostracism is a part of a possible answer because
French’s Colt photos and display ads appeared in dozens of other gay maga-
zines and papers, all rivals of Embry when he was his most contentious in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, including The Advocate, Blueboy, Honcho,
Mandate, Numbers, and Stallion. They all featured erotic toy ads of one
kind or another, so was there some personality conflict, or creative differ-
ence, that flared up between the tempestuous French and the tempestuous
Embry shortly after French moved Colt Studio to LA’s San Fernando Valley
in 1974? French’s former New York partner in Colt, Lou Thomas was happy
to have his Target Studio photos published on the covers and centerfolds
of Drummer in return for the free ads Embry gave in trade. In 1989, when
Thomas died, however, he bequeathed his 1970s Target Studio photos not
to Drummer, but to his pioneer inspiration, Chuck Renslow, founding pho-
tographer of 1950s Kris Studio and of the Leather Archives & Museum in
Chicago.

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