Drummer Magazine: Gay Leather, SM, and the Print Record

Drummer is an erotic magazine about gay leather culture, S&M, bondage and discipline, and rubber and leather gear. It followed leathersex as a style and a set of techniques that grew up with gay leather communities. John H. Embry and Jeanne Barney founded it in Los Angeles in 1975. Early on it cared about the writing. Over time the layout shifted toward photographs. Police harassment pushed the operation to San Francisco in 1977, and Jack Fritscher became editor-in-chief. He went on to be the magazine’s central contributor, as editor, writer, and photographer. In the late twentieth century Drummer was the most successful American leather magazine, sold at home and overseas.

The artists on the pages

The writers and artists in Drummer map a lot of gay erotic art and leather literature. The names include Tom of Finland, Phil Andros, Chuck Arnett, Tim Barrus, Rick Castro, Domino, Donelan, Fred Halsted, David Hurles, MATT, Scott Masters, Robert Opel, Olaf Odegaard, Dom Orejudos (Etienne), Rex, Bill Schmeling, Larry Townsend, and Bill Ward. For a stretch the magazine ran a comic about the gay secret agent Harry Chess, drawn by Al Shapiro under the name A. Jay. Robert Mapplethorpe supplied the cover photograph for issue 24, September 1978. That cover is still the crossover people cite when leather press and fine-art photography, or Mapplethorpe and SM, come up together.

The ads the magazine later renounced

Jack Fritscher personally hated Nazism. Even so, during the 1970s and 1980s the gay National Socialist League was allowed to advertise in Drummer. That remains a stain. The last regular issue of the original run was number 214, in April 1999. The relaunched magazine explicitly renounces that old prejudice. It states a zero-tolerance policy toward writers, artists, or organizations tied to hate of any kind, including racism, transphobia, and misogyny. The point of the update is to keep classic S&M in the book without carrying the old bigotry forward unchanged.

Titles and the leather pride flag

From 1981 until it stopped publishing in 1999, Drummer held the annual International Mr. Drummer contest in San Francisco. In 1982 Luke Daniel won both International Mr. Drummer and International Mr. Leather, a double title that is still part of leather contest history. The symbols traveled with the titles. On September 18, 1990, Clive Platman (Mr. Australia Drummer) gave Tony DeBlase, who designed the original, an Australian version of the leather pride flag. That version set the Southern Cross from the Australian flag into the original leather-pride geometry. The gift is a small picture of how, through the 1980s and 1990s, Drummer’s title circuit, leather symbols, and international leather brotherhood moved together.

Fiction, sales, and the archive

Jack Fritscher’s short-story collection Corporal in Charge of Taking Care of Captain O’Malley, published by Gay Sunshine Press in 1984, was the first collection of leather fiction and the first collection of fiction drawn from Drummer. The title piece, “Corporal in Charge,” was included by editor Winston Leyland in Gay Roots, the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology. In 1986 the magazine was sold to Tony DeBlase. In 1991 DeBlase sold it to Martijn Bakker, owner of RoB Amsterdam. The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago holds a complete set of that run, so the magazine’s first life can be researched instead of remaining a collectors’ rumor.

The years off the newsstand, and the relaunch

During the hiatus, Fritscher’s eyewitness recollections and interviews of Drummer history were published in 2007 as Gay Pioneers. In 2008 cofounder Jeanne Barney received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Pantheon of Leather Awards. A selection of Fritscher’s writing from the magazine appeared the same year as Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer, and the next year it won the National Leather Association International’s Geoff Mains Nonfiction Book Award. In 2014 and 2015 the two cofounders were inducted, one after the other, into the Leather Hall of Fame. In 2017 Embry was honored with others as bronze bootprints on San Francisco’s South of Market Leather History Alley, street memory for a magazine that once set the print voice of a sexual subculture.

In 2018 Jack MacCullum, a titleholder in the D.N.A. (Drummer North America) contests, bought the magazine and its related events from Martijn Bakker. In October 2019 it relaunched as a quarterly in print and online, with Mike Miksche as editor. Jack Fritscher was consulting editor on the first issue, tying the new run to the older editorial voice. Darkqwolf became editor-in-chief on August 1, 2023. For leather and BDSM readers Drummer is still the reference brand: the magazine that turned leathersex, bondage craft, rubber and leather gear, and S&M fantasy into widely distributed gay media, then lasted long enough to be archived, cast in bronze, and started again for readers who still want gear, discipline, and kink on the page without an apology attached.