Page 512 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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

they toss it on his funeral pyre. “Robert Payne” has spent his entire
life wallowing in self-pity. And when Mario died, all business sense
went with him. Embry’s net worth is only about [amount omitted
by JF] (mostly in shabby real estate). Mario’s relatives [he alleged]
came from Spain and ripped John off for most of the money Mario
had stashed away. When Frank Hatfield died [after being mauled
by a dog], John grabbed what little Frank had. The whole Embry
bio is tacky and pointless.

Embry wasn’t the biggest prick in gay publishing.
All professions are the same.
Katharine Hepburn, who played her part in Some Dance to Remember
(Reel 6, Scene 3), said about acting: “Most people in this profession are pigs.”
Cue the villains and violins.
One survives publishing the way one survives the circular firing squad
of gay culture: sheer discipline.
My heart was tender in those days before I was hardened by Embry and
the cruelty of the gay world which is no more cruel than other worlds; yet
it was the gay world that was most cruel to me when my heart was tender.
But, like Joseph and Judy and Jeannette in the ruins, I was never
defeated, and if I were, I’d never admit it.
All my writing is the story of that.
In my writing, most of the characters in my stories end as couples.
So do Embry and I couple: although antithetically.
I must confess that I enjoy a tad of Schadenfreude that in the pitched
battle which Embry waged so jealously against David Goodstein, Goodstein
won.
Embry must have cringed when on page 89 in Drummer 145 (December
1990), The Advocate paid for a full-page display ad with an order blank to
subscribe to “The Advocate...the most influential gay and lesbian publication
in the world!”
Drummer ended bankrupt.
PlanetOut.com announced purchase of The Advocate for $31.1 million
dollars in November 2005.
So much for laughing all the way to the bank.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-14-2017
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK