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

by Jack Fritscher, Mark Hemry (Editor)

This Leather Origin Story of investigative journalism is an eyewitness oral history about a soon-to-be-lost generation of a once-important subculture of gay pioneers. In our leather archetribe, Drummer helped create the very culture it reported on. Drummer was a revolutionary idea evolving in monthly motion. Drummer portrayed our desires to organize our thoughts to inform our practices to create our leather identity. In 214 issues from 1975 to 1999, Drummer was a first draft of leather history and the "magazine of record" for our BDSM species within generic LGBT history. Gay Pioneers continues the leather-heritage GPS mapping Fritscher began in his NLA-I award-winning book, Gay San Francisco . Curious how high we leatherfolk once flew? Fritscher based this book on the "black-box flight recorder" he recovered from the "take-off, cruising altitude, and crash" of Drummer . Young readers will get up to speed fast on the backstage fun and games of who did what to whom, and how Drummer shaped 20th-century leather for 21st-century leatherfolk. Grounded on evidence inside Drummer , and in eyewitness diaries, letters, and interviews, this fact-checked masterwork recalls the thrill it was for millions of readers to pick up their first issue of Drummer . For that a price was paid. Against all odds, Drummer survived 24 years of stress from cruel censorship, plague, and politics that got the Drummer staff arrested, causing Drummer to move from disaster in Los Angeles to destiny in San Francisco. Gay Pioneers is a living history of leatherfolk written in human blood tattooed on human skin.

572 pages, Paperback

Published June 20, 2017

Reviews

[Blane · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow...this book was awful! Apparently, Fritscher never heard of an "editor". Had these stories been pared down and organized in some sort of order, perhaps it might have worked as an oral history. As it is, I found myself skimming parts due to the repetition. Far from either a history of the magazine, the gay leather community, or a broader look at how the magazine "...shaped gay popular culture 1965-1999", it was more of a bitch fest from former writers, editors, photographers, and associates whom (I concluded) hated the original publisher. If anything, this book backs up my perception of the gay leather community--supposedly paragons of hypermasculinity and "fraternity"--as little more than a bunch of cliquey, bitchy queens. Jennifer North: "You know how bitchy fags can be!"

[Silvermoth · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a shame, the subject matter is really important especially for the current times but a lot of this is quite tedious with no real cohesive narrative mixed in with decades old vendettas. Every now and then an important nugget is dropped in but there’s so much waffle and rambling it gets lost.