Drummer Magazine: The Leather Press and the Raid That Moved It

Every subculture that lasts eventually acquires a trade paper. Drummer was that for the American leather world for a quarter of a century: the place where the contests were reported, the fiction was published, the photographers got their first covers and the arguments about what any of it was for were conducted at length in the letters pages.

Los Angeles, 1975

John Embry founded Drummer in Los Angeles in June 1975. Jeanne Barney was its first editor, which is worth stating plainly because the magazine’s later reputation is so exclusively male that its founding editorship is routinely forgotten.

It arrived into a world that already had print but did not have a periodical of this kind. Larry Townsend’s Leatherman’s Handbook had appeared in 1972 and described practice for practitioners, and the fetish magazines of the previous generation, described in the era essay for 1946 to 1969, had been mail-order objects with irregular schedules. Drummer was a monthly with newsstand distribution, a masthead and a staff.

The raid

On 10 April 1976 the Los Angeles police raided a fundraising event at the Mark IV health club. Drummer had sponsored it. It was a mock slave auction in aid of a gay community services centre, and the police treated it as a trafficking ring: helicopters overhead, buses to carry people away, television crews present. Around four hundred people were detained. Forty-two were arrested, Embry among them.

What happened to the charges is not agreed between the sources, and this page will not pick one version. What is agreed is the consequence. The continuing conflict with the Los Angeles police made the city untenable for the magazine, and Embry moved Drummer to San Francisco in 1977. Jack Fritscher became editor in chief there in March 1977 and held the post until December 1979.

The move was consequential beyond the magazine. San Francisco’s leather district south of Market was in its fastest period of growth, and installing the leather world’s main publication in the middle of it concentrated the culture’s editorial power and its geography in the same few streets for the next two decades.

Three owners

Embry sold the magazine in 1986 to Desmodus Inc, a company run by Tony DeBlase, born in 1942, who had unveiled the design described in the history of the leather flag at the Chicago contest three years later and who co-founded the Leather Archives and Museum in 1991. That is a rare combination in this history: the man who owned the community’s magazine also gave it its symbol and then built the institution that keeps its records.

In 1991 DeBlase sold Drummer to Martijn Bakker, who ran the leather firm RoB in Amsterdam. The title’s ownership left the United States, and the magazine spent its final decade under European control. DeBlase died in 2000.

What was in it

Fiction, photography, reportage, personal advertisements and an enormous volume of correspondence. A Robert Mapplethorpe photograph ran on the cover in 1978, several years before the arguments about his work reached Congress. Illustrators whose work had circulated only in private collections got printed pages and payment.

The magazine also generated its own institutions. A Mr Drummer contest ran from 1980, and an international version was held annually in San Francisco from 1981 until the magazine stopped, running alongside and in competition with the Chicago event described in International Mr Leather. A magazine that reports on contests and then runs its own is not neutral about them, and Drummer’s editorial line on the title circuit has to be read with that in mind.

The end of the run

The original run closed with issue 214 in 1999. The reasons were the ordinary ones for a print magazine at that date, compounded by the specific ones for this one: the readership had been cut through by AIDS across the preceding fifteen years, and the classified pages, which are what paid for magazines of this kind, were being emptied out by the online listings described in the era essay for 1990 to 2009.

The title has since been revived by people with no corporate connection to the original. What cannot be revived is the function. For twenty-four years there was one place where this culture wrote itself down monthly, with an editor, a schedule and an archive, and the full timeline has nothing comparable in the decades since.