Page 499 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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Jack Fritscher Chapter 18 481

beloved dead, Al Shapiro, who was the founding San Francisco art director
of Drummer, as well as the creator of his own monthly cartoon-strip satire,
Harry Chess, which he had begun in the 1960s in Queen’s Quarterly and
continued in the 1970s in Drummer. Besides the vetting of the essay by asso-
ciate editor JimEd Thompson, my rhetorical style had its satire enhanced
by the virtuoso art director, Jameo Saunders, who designed the comic-strip
layout with so much brilliant whimsy on seven pages that it looked as if the
recently deceased Drummer art director Al Shapiro himself had come back
from the dead for a laugh.
In short, DeBlase, having bought Drummer from Embry only a year
before, delighted in publishing the feature obituary on A. Jay as a tonal
rebuttal to the kind of jealous gossip Embry was spreading about Deblase
and the new Drummer. From personal experience, Deblase was an eyewit-
ness of how Embry treated himself and others, and Deblase, with Drummer
as his platform, felt no fear in being one of the first leathermen to come out
of the closet of leather history and dare condemn the contrary Embry in
print. Drummer had long been Embry’s smart bomb, and DeBlase hoisted
him on his own petard.

8. A GRUDGE AGAINST DRUMMER ITSELF:
EMBRY’S SELLER’S REMORSE

In the “Grudges Never End Department,” John Embry never missed a
chance to praise Drummer and to bury Drummer.
In Super MR #7 (January 2001), he published two notices. The first was
a five-page editorial concerning his recent health which recalled the crisis
of his cancer that had so impacted my iteration of 1970s Drummer. The
second notice, like a Mardi Gras call-and-response song, published inside
the echo chamber of his Super MR, was Embry responding to an “anony-
mous” “Letter to the Editor” which he had also written. In it, he ranted as
if Dutchman Martijn Bakker, the third publisher of Drummer, had some-
how done something wrong in keeping up with the twenty-first century by
selling twentieth-century Drummer to American leather businessman Mike
Zuhl who produced leather shows like his DNA: Drummer North America
Contest, and had announced plans for building an online Drummer.
In his page five editorial, Embry wrote:

A funny thing happened to me on my way to the International Mr.
Drummer Contest in Florida. All dressed up in cowskin [to him
leather was “camp”], armed with carry-on cases, heading to the

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