Gary was an airline pilot so “to work” meant a long drive down to the airport in Philadelphia. My sister moved Duane’s flannel shirts hanging in the closet to one side to make way for her clothes and did the same with Duane’s jeans, socks, and jockstraps in the drawers.
One day after work I went with her back to Gary’s house. She told me to stay there until she picked Gary up at the airport and then we could go see a movie. I decided to take a nap. Duane’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs and the door was open. As I mounted the stairs I saw at eye level stacks of magazines neatly arranged under the antique four-poster bed. On hands and knees I dug them out.
The magazines were something called “Drummer” but they didn’t seem to have anything to do with Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, John Bonham, or Charlie Watts. Over the next two hours (traffic was heavy) I pored through them and that afternoon, in a way, I came to life.
When puberty hit I became aware that I was gay – this presented no particular struggle for me. I knew gay men. I occasionally saw gay men on television, such as Archie Bunker’s professional football player friend. The priest at the Episcopal church where I had been baptized and confirmed was gay, not overtly but he would take vacations to Italy with his friend Kenneth. In due course I shared this information with my sister. She had been a full-fledged hippie, leaving home and moving into a commune after our mother died. A dear friend of hers, Kevin, also gay, would become a mentor and friend to me.
But there was a challenge that I faced.
It all started with Josie and the Pussycats. Each episode of the cartoon’s first season followed the same formula: Josie and the gang were somewhere in the world to play a “gig” and they would tangle with a sort of James Bond villain bent on world domination. In an episode that I remember very clearly, the plane taking them to said gig had to make an emergency landing. The plane’s pilot, handsome and muscular, walks to a house in the jungle he noticed to get help. The house belongs to the bad guy, who has built a ray gun that makes evolution run backwards. (Back at the plane, Josie, Valerie, Melanie, Alan, Alex and Alexandra encounter a Tyrannosaurus Rex.) The handsome, muscular pilot is captured and locked in a cage. The bad guy turns the ray on him and the handsome, muscular pilot is transformed into a hulking, mindless, subservient gorilla.
I was riveted.
For weeks afterwards I would re-enact the scene, imagining myself peering through the bars of a cage, asking in a quavering voice the way the pilot had, “Wha… what are you going to do to me?”
There was also Spider-Man temporarily defeated by Doctor Octopus, Captain America subdued by some enemy I can’t remember, Michael Douglas handcuffed and blindfolded on an episode of The Streets of San Francisco, the Duke Brothers, Bo and Luke, always seemed to be getting tied up… countless vignettes of powerful men made helpless and compliant. Puberty brought the realization that I was sexually attracted to men. However, I had no idea how things would play out sexually between two men. But my desire was that it would run along the lines of bondage and domination. This alarmed me. This I did not want. This I feared. Why had I been visited with these dark desires? What would my future adult life hold? What kind of lonely monster would I grow up to be?
And then came that stack of Drummer magazines.
Immediately I realized that far from being “the only one,” there were so many gay men out there like me that they—we—published our own magazine. Indeed, in the back were listings of bars and organizations all over the world. And the handsome, muscular men I saw in the photographs and illustrations in the magazine seemed to be having a good time. Along with the brutality—nipples clamped, balls stretched, butts beaten—there was intimacy and fulfillment.
The articles and works of fiction I read gave me a new lexicon: Master, slave, boy, Sir, bondage, flogging, and, most importantly, leatherman. Leather was the secret handshake. Boots, vests, chaps, motorcycle jackets… these were all ways of signaling who we are and what we are after so that even in a crowd, our fellow leathermen could find us.
Boots. I knew where I could get boots.
At the next opportunity I took the train down to Philadelphia and went to I. Goldberg’s, a military surplus store. I bought for myself a pair of German army combat boots, heavy and clunky. My next acquisition was a Schott Perfecto MC jacket, purchased from my college roommate. These did not work as well as I hoped. It was the ‘80s and I was young and so it read as punk rock rather than gay sexual outlaw. But I knew what to look out for.
I grew up near New Hope, Pennsylvania. At that time, along the towpath of the canal that ran through town parallel to the Delaware River, gay men would cruise for sex at night. One night, wearing my boots and MC jacket, strolling along the canal, I saw him. He was in full leather, right out of the pages of Drummer. I would not let this opportunity pass me by so I steeled up my courage and approached. At first, he seemed uninterested. We stood there in the dark, smoking cigarettes. Then, suddenly, he was very interested. He asked if I would come home with him. Of course I would.
I followed him to his house outside of Buckingham in the family Buick. Would he leash and collar me? Would he spray his piss in my upturned face? Would he tie me down and drip hot candle wax on my dick? No, those adventures would have to wait. He brought out a can of Crisco, spread a towel on the bed, got on his back with his legs in the air and talked me through fisting him. Until that night I did not imagine that taking a fist up your ass was possible let alone desirable. I was astonished, repelled, frightened. His dick exploded and I withdrew. He was giggling. He was euphoric. I was still a little freaked out by what had just gone down. After clean-up, we sat and smoked.
As I raised my cigarette to my mouth he said, “That!”
“That’s what caught my attention,” he explained. Down on the towpath, he noticed that although I had large hands, they could be compacted to a not very large diameter. Mine, it turned out, was the first fist he had ever been able to take.
That encounter gave me a lot to think about. I was completely unprepared for pledging the fisting fraternity. And yet, our time together had an innocence and a playfulness. We were just two men enjoying ourselves, exploring the possibilities presented by these meat cages we call our bodies.
I did not learn about fisting from Drummer, but it did prepare me for that night and for so many nights with so many men to follow. As compared to the lives of our great-great-grandfathers, our lives are so safe, so comfortable, so free from hardship. There are no wolves in the wood. There are no highwaymen lurking on the roadsides. There are no invaders coming over the hill. This is good certainly, but our lives are also for the most part absent opportunities to prove our strength and courage in the face of adversity, to take charge in a meaningful way as when another man trusts you with his life. The best we can do is ride a rollercoaster, watch a scary movie, or zip-line through the rain forest on vacation in Costa Rica.
But wait… there is Leather.
During my twenties, every Saturday night I would make my way to a leather bar. My first bar was the Bike Stop, found because it was listed in the back pages of Drummer. Every Saturday night was an adventure. I would meet a man and we would go to his apartment or to my apartment. Once there, the possibilities were seemingly limitless: bondage, piss, ass-belting, weights suspended from nutsacks… Once, on a business trip to Cleveland, I found my way to the Leather Stallion (thanks again, Drummer!). I went home with a man who immobilized me with Ace bandages (his particular fetish). He lay on the bed next to mummified me and whispered in my ear: Nobody knows where you are, do they? He smiled as the implication of his words hit home.
Spoiler: My body was not fished out of the Cuyahoga River. Rather, he stroked my dick until I shot a huge load. And then he did it again. And again. And again. The final time he made me shoot there were tears in my eyes.
Well I remember the first time I tied a man up. Then and now, my rope work will not win any prizes for elegance but it does the job. He was big and handsome with a ‘seventies clone mustache’. He was an English teacher from New Jersey. And he was helpless, on his knees, me thrusting my dick in his mouth. His life was in my hands. With slight effort I could have made that his last night on earth. Instead of a feeling of power—I’m many things but not a sociopath —I felt a deep sense of responsibility for him. My senses were alive to the timbre of his vocalizations, the pulse I observed in the vein on his neck, the grin barely concealed by his begging, “Please tell me I’m a good slave, Sir…”
Drummer pointed the way to a life of erotic adventure. These adventures have given me a life filled with love and intimacy. I remember a man explaining to me why he wanted—needed—to be whipped. The love of his life, after decades together, had died of AIDS. And yet, he was unable to cry because he feared that if he let a single tear fall the torrent of grief he was holding back would come rushing out and overwhelm him, robbing him of his sanity. He wanted me to whip him and keep on whipping him, stopping only when I was exhausted. I obliged.
Afterwards, I held him in my arms for hours while he slowly pieced himself back together. Finally, he looked up at me and said simply, “Thank you. I can go on. Thank you.”
All those years ago, when I was just starting to figure out who I was, Drummer had an answer: I am a leatherman. I am part of a tradition that stretches back to the middle of the last century. The story of Leather is my story. Like the lonely combat veterans of the Second World War, I sought and found fellowship and fraternity. Like the leathermen of the 1970s in the blossoming of erotic escapades that Gay Liberation brought, I am always cruising, always on the hunt, appropriate handkerchief tucked in the appropriate back pocket even when it’s just a trip to the supermarket, entering the bar with my shoulders back and my hips thrust slightly forward so my dick comes through the door just before the rest of me. Like our brothers who fought for and cared for their stricken lovers and friends during the AIDS Crisis, I do whatever I can for a brother in need. As I was just starting out in life, making my way in the world, Drummer showed me all that was possible: I could push limits like the men in Bill Ward’s illustrations, I could realize my deepest longings like the men in John Preston’s fiction.
And yet there was something more that Drummer only hinted at. In his magnificent book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis describes the posture of friendship as two men, sitting side by side, surveying life’s rich pageant. The start of friendship is those men coming to understand that they respond in the same way to the same things. “Ah! You see the world as I see the world!”
Leather means that our time on this earth does not need to be solitary. Our leather communicates a shared ethos and understanding, a common spirit of adventure, a capacity to trust and a striving to be trustworthy. Some gay men, even those whom we love dearly, with a copy of Drummer dropped in their laps on a long plane trip, would just not get it. The men… not what I really go for. The fiction… pretty implausible really, and some of the things described… do people really enjoy that? Seems like a lot of work for an orgasm. But for fifty fucking years Drummer has found its way into the hands and fired the imaginations of thousands of us. In the pages of this magazine we see not just the men we desire but catch a glimpse of the man we could be: brave, strong, living life on our own terms, not worrying about keeping in step but marching to the beat of a drummer only a few can hear. We are Drummermen.
“Ah! You see the world as I see the world!”
Author: Drew Kramer