Drummer is an American magazine focused on leathersex, leatherwear, leather and rubber gear, S&M, bondage and discipline, and the erotic styles and techniques that grew up with gay leather culture. It launched in 1975, ceased publication in April 1999 with issue 214, and was relaunched twenty years later by new publisher Jack MacCullum with editor Mike Miksche. During the late twentieth century it was the most successful of the American leather magazines and sold overseas. Originally the book emphasized quality writing about leather life; over time it shifted toward a more photo-heavy format. The list of writers and artists who appeared in its pages is a map of gay erotic art and leather literature: Phil Andros, Chuck Arnett, Tim Barrus, Rick Castro, Domino, Donelan, Tom of Finland, Fred Halsted, David Hurles, MATT, Scott Masters, Robert Opel, Olaf Odegaard, Dom Orejudos (Etienne), Rex, Bill Schmeling, Larry Townsend, and Bill Ward, among others. For a stretch of the original run it featured comic strips starring gay secret agent Harry Chess by Al Shapiro, published under the name "A. Jay." Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe contributed a photograph for the cover of issue 24 in September 1978—a landmark crossover between leather press and fine-art photography that still gets cited whenever people talk about Mapplethorpe and SM culture in the same breath.
Founding in Los Angeles and the move to San Francisco
John H. Embry and Jeanne Barney founded Drummer in Los Angeles. Police harassment forced the operation to move to San Francisco in 1977, where Jack Fritscher became the new editor-in-chief. Fritscher became the magazine’s most frequent contributor across the roles of editor, writer, and photographer. Subsequent editors included Robert Payne and Robert W. Rowberry. Despite Fritscher’s personal dislike of Nazism, the gay National Socialist League was allowed to advertise in Drummer during the 1970s and 1980s—a historical stain the modern magazine explicitly renounces. Today the title states a zero-tolerance policy for writers, artists, or organizations associated with hate of any kind, including racism, transphobia, and misogyny. That policy update is part of how a legacy leather brand tries to carry classic SM content without carrying classic bigotry forward unchanged.
International Mr. Drummer contests and leather pride flags
The magazine arranged yearly International Mr. Drummer contests in San Francisco from 1981 until it ceased publication in 1999. In 1982 Luke Daniel won both International Mr. Drummer and International Mr. Leather—a double title win that still sits in leather contest history. On September 18, 1990, Clive Platman (Mr. Australia Drummer) presented Tony DeBlase with an Australian version of DeBlase’s leather pride flag design. That Australian version incorporated the Southern Cross from the Australian national flag into the original leather-pride geometry. The gift is a small but concrete example of how Drummer title circuits, leather symbolism, and international leather brotherhood traveled together through the 1980s and 1990s.
Leather fiction, ownership changes, and the last issue
Jack Fritscher’s short-story collection Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley (Gay Sunshine Press, 1984) was the first collection of leather fiction and the first collection of fiction drawn from Drummer. The title entry "Corporal in Charge" was the only play published by editor Winston Leyland in the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology Gay Roots: Twenty Years of Gay Sunshine – An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics & Culture (1991). The magazine was sold in 1986 to Tony DeBlase, who sold it in 1991 to Martijn Bakker, owner of RoB Amsterdam. The last regular print issue of the original run—number 214—was published in April 1999. A complete set of that run is held at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, which makes the full first life of the magazine a research object rather than only a collectors’ rumor.
Books, awards, and South of Market memory after the hiatus
During the publishing hiatus, Jack Fritscher’s eyewitness recollections and interviews of Drummer history were published in 2007 as Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965–1999. In 2008 cofounder Jeanne Barney received the Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the Pantheon of Leather Awards. A selection of Fritscher’s writing from the magazine appeared in 2008 as Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer, which won the National Leather Association International’s Geoff Mains Nonfiction Book Award in 2009. In 2014 and 2015 respectively, cofounders John H. Embry and Jeanne Barney were inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame. In 2017 Embry was honored along with other notables on bronze bootprints as part of San Francisco’s South of Market Leather History Alley—public street memory for a magazine that once defined a sexual subculture’s print voice. Those honors matter because they show how institutional leather culture keeps naming its own press history even when the original run has been dead for years.
Relaunch as quarterly print and online
Jack MacCullum, a titleholder in the D.N.A. ("Drummer North America") competitions, purchased the magazine and its associated events from Martijn Bakker in 2018 and relaunched it in October 2019 under editor Mike Miksche as a quarterly print and online publication. Jack Fritscher served as consulting editor on the first relaunch issue, linking the new run to the classic editorial voice. The current editor in chief, Darkqwolf, was appointed on 1 August 2023. Official presence includes the magazine website and related Leather Fraternity event channels. For leather and BDSM readers, Drummer remains the reference brand: the magazine that turned leathersex, bondage craft, rubber and leather gear culture, and SM fantasy into mass-distributed gay media, then survived long enough to be archived, memorialized in bronze, and rebooted for a new generation that still wants gear, discipline, and unapologetic kink on the page.
