My life exploded at five years old when I first found my dad’s Physique Pictorial magazines in his underwear drawer. I was a curious child with sketchy boundaries. What I found in those B&W digest-sized pages sent me on a journey that is still in progress. Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial had body builders in posing straps, Tom of Finland art, Leather men, wrestlers, hustlers, and trade who might steal your wallet if you left it on your dresser while you drove him back to the church steps on Selma Avenue where you picked him up. I grew up idolizing those rough trade guys that Bob Mizer collected for his magazines that also included lots of photos of guys in leather and leather jockstraps. When I was thirteen my dad came out to me, and I came out to him. Then, naturally, we started sharing our porn.
In 1975 at 21, I had a job I hated as an art director at an advertising agency. I would spend my breaks at the magazine stand in San Francisco’s North Beach, where I came upon my first Drummer magazine. It was fairly new on the newsstands and because it was very kinky I was enthralled, taking the copy I bought home with me after work. Quickly obsessed with it, I wanted to live in that world at a tender age. What I saw was essentially something like Physique Pictorial but much more intense and super-masculine. Drummer was more focused on leather clothing, leather culture, bondage and discipline, and much more. I learned a lot about that world from reading the magazines––drooling over photos, the amazing art and the detailed fiction. What rocked my world was the wealth of information about bars all over the U.S., leather events around the world, and social groups to learn about it all. The super-masculine guys overwhelmed me. I wanted that and dreamed about it. The pictures in Drummer depicted very confident guys at the extreme level. I never could imagine that being me. I was a pipsqueak. A very horny one, but basically a twink faggot. I hadn’t even heard the word ‘twink’ yet, and I had no idea that’s what I was. I had to figure out how to romp around in the world of the ultra-butch without getting my ass beaten. Of course, later I found out about getting my ass beaten, but I am jumping ahead of myself here.
Like many of Bob Mizer’s models, I got in trouble with a little light criminal theft and had to leave town, so I headed to Los Angeles. [I] needed work but the idea of going to an ad agency again kept me at home for a while in east Hollywood selling drugs to pay the rent. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I see now I was building a personality profile of a Drummer magazine model with my anti-social habits and behaviors. One day I saw in the LA Times job listings, “Wanted: Art Director for Adult Publishing.” I began to believe in God at that point. I didn’t really want to work in Advertising. I wanted to smoke pot and look at photos of rough trade all day. I wanted to gambol through the paper pages of Drummer magazine and Physique Pictorial. “Adult Publishing” sounded like the closest I could get to that. I took the job on the first day I applied in Encino. I had a fake diploma from my art school which made me a more viable candidate and got me the job. Now I felt my life made sense. In reality I had to learn shit and prove my worth doing magazines like Pregnant Enema Nurses in Bondage and the like. It wasn’t Drummer, but I knew I was on the right track.
Porn wasn’t a flight of fancy to me. Porn had already changed my life. I took it seriously.
Eventually I landed in New York to work at the various straight porn mags of the ’70s. I got educated at the Mineshaft, the Piers, and leather bars from the Village to the upper West Side. I lived a homo-sex life, but still only made straight porn. As the ’70s were coming to an end I was fresh out of straight porn magazine engagements. I was couch surfing, stalking the streets, and getting sex where I could. People were getting sick with something mysterious, and disco was dying. Winter landed in NYC. I was a little depressed and a little addicted to booze and drugs. I comforted myself with porn, specifically Drummer.
Deus ex machina happened just in time — as it’s supposed to, in a call from the first Adult Publishing company that hired me in LA. They wanted me back in Los Angeles to start a new magazine that was to be hardcore, kinky as fuck, and just for men.
On my first real interview with MagCorp (as they were called then), I parked in the lot with bougainvillea spilling over fences, sidewalks with grass planted in the medians, and the AC on high in January. What the Hell had I been doing in New York? I signed the contract and made arrangements to close my NYC life and start a new life in the San Fernando Valley, known as the ground zero of porn production.
My new porn bosses were a nice couple, the Smiths. She told me what they wanted as far as hardcore content, color and black and white pages, budgets etcetera, and that was about it. “Astonish me,” she said.
Like Warhol, my only strategy was to imitate or steal what I already loved. Of course, Drummer, and Physique Pictorial, but also a recent digest-sized journal called Straight to Hell by Boyd Macdonald that blew me away. Compiled of reader-written letters, they focused on the collision of straight and homo sex connections on the fly, underground, dangerous and anti-social. Who doesn’t love that?
Those influences turned into Stroke magazine, “For Men of Action.”
My secret wish continued to be working at Drummer with the big boys. Except one of the reasons I was in L.A in the first place was that summer in San Francisco was too cold for me. The San Fernando Valley in summer was just right for me, so here I was in 1980.
With Drummer as my spiritual father, I began to look at my influences to see how I could steal from them. I tried to keep it in “the sincerest form of flattery” vein. Because Stroke was mostly all color and kind of Pop, no one clocked me to my face that I was very close to plagiarizing my heroes. All-color and hardcore also put me in a different bracket than all my forefathers.
I did get in deep trouble. Looking for material that was already in the archives at MagCorp was helpful, as some pretty good stuff was gathering dust in the file drawers. I wanted original material, but the archival photos and art weren’t used to their best advantage –– most likely because the male art directors alongside of me weren’t into it. I thought back to my jobs at Cheri, Penthouse, and Nugget in New York. I had no problem creating good stuff with photos of only women. Why was it so hard for the bros?
There was a big box of photos and ephemera at the office in a dank hallway. Dusty and in bad condition. Lots of Tom of Finland copy photos. I asked the Smiths about the legality of using them as they were hardcore, which wasn’t that easily found at that point. “All good, we own those,” Mr. Smith told me.
Months later when the issue of Stroke with the Tom images was published, reader reaction was great. Almost simultaneously a couple of motorcycles revved up the drive of the publishing offices. I got a call from reception warning me a couple of leathermen pushed through the front door and they were stomping through the offices trying to find me. Two leather goons in full cow walked into my all-pink office demanding money for publishing Tom of Finland’s artwork without permission. I was flustered. They were clad in leather and chains, and I could smell them, which further flustered me. I still wore deodorant.
“We own those images!” I pipsqueaked back at them.
The big blond one crossed the room in a single bound, grabbed my shirt collar with one hand and throttled me. “We can do this the easy way, or …” he started while gnashing his teeth and spitting in my mouth.
“Boys, boys,” Mrs. Smith said as she entered my office serenely. The blond goon put me back on my feet and Mrs. Smith continued, “You’re Durk Dehner! I have been trying to connect with you. Sorry about the confusion with those images. That was never supposed to happen, but I’m glad it did because we want to do an article in our new magazine, Stroke, about how you are chasing down all the copyright infringements of Tom’s beautiful artwork. We would love to give you publicity, maybe even a collaboration.”
Thus, I learned a hell of a lot about publishing and got throttled by a very hot butch man in leather at the same time. I’d better be careful about my scheme of “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” (Oscar Wilde of course.)
At 25 I knew how to drink, sell drugs, and look at porn. In the pre-digital era, the drafting table and T-square were my design friends. Understanding how to get the material to assemble the first issues of the magazine was challenging, but I had a few tricks in my bag thanks to Mrs. Smith. And a few more from Boyd MacDonald’s Straight to Hell: Reader Contributions.
Looking at other magazines and their reader contributions, Drummer was pretty great, so I tried to expand the concept. I included in Stroke a model release with a call to send what became “selfies” in the ’90s when the digital word exploded. We did just fine with Polaroids incentivized by free copies of Stroke if we published their letters and photos. What came in was remarkable. Who knew there were so many people dying to expose themselves in four-color magazines? The perversity came in the mail every day. Encouraged to send their real-life sex stories, I often photo-scanned the letters full page in color because the most direct version had the most potential punch. I liked bad English, bad spelling, and hand-written typos on PeeChee binder paper. Great letters came in with large globs of drying cum on them. But even more exciting stuff came that I hadn’t counted on. Early on a Monday morning after the daily mail came, I heard Judy the receptionist screaming and sobbing in tears. I thought she was being attacked. I ran to the front office and Judy was sliding down the wall staring at an opened box on her desk and weeping. Looking at the torn box I saw hundreds, maybe thousands of condoms filled with cum and tied off.
The good news was that reader contributions paid off, evidently.
The men that contributed to Stroke were very happy with their free issues. They became a loyal team of fearless creators of photos, art, and letters. They must have passed along the pitch for reader-created porn, because a lot more started to arrive. The contributors started to get fan letters themselves, and I would forward the letters to the creators.
Finally, I broke down and connected with Boyd McDonald of Straight to Hell and sent him a few issues. I told him how long I had been a fan (since art school in the ’70s), and how I hoped he did not take offence with my using reader-contributed letters. He was pretty great and liked Stroke, so I dared to ask if he would be willing to let me include older letters from Straight to Hell issues in Stroke as promotion for STH, with ways to contact him of course, to sell his books and magazines. That was a happy collaboration. It was only later I noticed Drummer had also included some of Boyd’s revolutionary reader-written work in Drummer too. Feeding from the same trough again. At that point I stopped worrying about stealing ideas from other magazines. Warhol seemed to not care, so why should I?
With fewer scruples than ever before, I contacted Bob Mizer at Physique Pictorial. Because seeing his photographs when I was five-years old had been so influential on my formation as an adult I felt duty-bound to try including Mizer’s work in Stroke. Yes, I had seen Mizer’s work first in my father’s underwear drawer back then, and later in Drummer, but I wanted it so bad I decided not to play the good boy anymore. Plus, a chance to possibly meet Bob Mizer himself was too good not to attempt.
Driving to Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles I was trying to be calm and not get over-stimulated. For me it was like meeting a movie star you had seen in the theaters when you were a kid. Not being good with directions made detecting the building I wanted difficult. I may have been too excited when Bob gave me the address and directions. Memory of the buildings — were there three or five? — is lost somewhere in the last 40 years. I think there were at least two Victorians next to a concrete bunker. I had to ring a hanging bell at the gate, and a surly shirtless guy with tattoos and a cigarette dangling from his sneering lips barked at me, “Whadya want?” Wow.
Between closed circuit cameras and loud buzzers, I made it into the first floor of the bunker. It was in complete but delicate chaos. On every surface there were stacks of 35-millimeter, cardboard mounted photos in precarious towers like in a Dr. Seuss book. Past them I saw a large cage with two monkeys. Boys rang the buzzer outside and asked for money and favors. It was busy.
Bob was kind and a little distracted. I gave him a few copies of Stroke and he seemed happy enough with that considering he was living in an all-male sex studio. He had a few small boxes of the 35 millimeters he had set aside for me to look at. “Take as many as you like but return [them] to me after you have used them.” He didn’t make a receipt or anything like that.
It was that simple. I kept a working relationship with him for years up through the 1980s. He was a kind and loving man and took care of as many of his models as best as he could.
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Harry Bush had it all: astounding artistic talent, the ability to draw figures with an attitude, and a knack to create figurative boys and men with humor and loads of sex. I saw his work first in my father’s underwear drawers of course, but surprisingly in Drummer as well. Bush’s drawings rarely depicted Leathermen, but they did appear. Drummer certainly didn’t turn up its nose at great beauty and talent. Harry had a clever way of adding perversity to all his work, and that made it just right for Drummer. Harry Bush was a genius at depicting the All-American Boy with a tendency to dress in very brief clothing. There was casual nudity, of course.
When I started to track down Harry Bush a great coincidence occurred. New York artist Neel Bate had already been working with me on Stroke for a minute. A great erotic artist who had published very risky, legendary male hardcore such as The Barn, 1948. He contacted me to let me know he was coming to Los Angeles. He arrived with another legendary artist (Sean John Klamik) who had also appeared in Drummer. He specialized in creating daring fetish, kink and leather art that pushed hard on the boundaries of acceptability. Even I was shocked when I saw his private files. Their plans were to visit Harry Bush in San Juan Capistrano.
The three of us descended on Harry’s condo. I was introduced as a young art director with a magazine of interest. A bit art-intimidated by the three guys in the room that were about 40 years older than me, I made a pitch to Harry. I told him I had been seeing his art since I was five years old. (That may have been a little awkward for everyone.)
Harry wasn’t convinced. He complained about unscrupulous “Hollywood types.” His main complaint was the reproduction of his art on cheap paper printed with muddy gray and no sharp blacks. The cheap paper was no problem. Stroke used heavy white Kromekote paper and his work would be printed in color. That seemed to meet his needs. I was prepared for an astronomical price per piece to run them in the magazine. “As long as you reproduce them beautifully, I need no money.”
On that good news we all piled in Sean’s car and headed for Laguna, a one-time hotspot for boys in bars and sailors. As we sat for lunch they complained at the lack of male flesh on the beaches and in restaurants. I saw a lot but apparently, we missed the heyday of it all. I was very happy to listen to their stories about the risky sex hook-ups and sex hijinks all over the town. On the drive back to Harry’s condo Harry told us amazing stories about porn stars that had approached him to present themselves for portraits by Harry. Sean and Neel laughed. William Higgins’ mega-star Lance was one of them. “He offered himself to me for sex to pay for the art.” (See Leo and Lance, Directed by William Higgins, 1983). Harry later did a small cartoon of Lance for Stroke but never took up Lance’s offer.
Drummer regularly published great fiction. Some of it influenced writers not in the porn world. I had a Dom during my days in New York. She referred to me as “the boy.” Besides punishing me and helping me understand what pain was all about, we also shared a love of erotic fiction. We simultaneously found Mr. Benson by John Preston serialized in Drummer in 1980.
Mr. Benson was a sophisticated story of a boy searching for a strong top. Maybe even a little sadistic. The boy finds the handsome and sophisticated Mr. Benson in a serious leather bar in the Village. The boy is taught that cruelty can be erotic, pain can be transforming, and to understand that Mr. Benson is now to become his master, all in 6 serialized chapters in Drummer. My Dom and I waited for each new issue anxiously. Suddenly Drummer was more important than ever. During that time, I relocated to Los Angeles, so my Dom and I stayed in touch on the phone and sometimes we would read the chapters to each other from the pages of Dummer.
During this pre-AIDS time, John Preston’s book Mr. Benson gained popularity and many fans such as Anne Rice, Samuel Delany, Michael Lowenthal, Laura Antoniou, Joan Nestle, Michael Rowe, and Cecilia Tan. John became a popular voice of post-Stonewall culture. He was an icon for a more sophisticated reader wanting fully-developed characters and more complex emotions. Eventually he wrote more than 30 books both fiction and non-fiction. Then, of course, he and my Dom became great friends.That was both wonderful and scary, as I thought of the two of them creating scenes for me to survive 2,800 miles away on the other coast.
Much later in the ’90s I was working at The Advocate, an LGBTQ news magazine, and Alyson Books in the art department. My life in porn had expanded. One day, a small group of editors bustled into the art department squiring a tall handsome man with a mustache. I peeked over and I heard my executive editor mention Mr. Benson, so my ears pricked up, and I wandered over to the group. I interrupted the group saying to the mustache guy “I think you know my Dom. I am the boy.” Everyone looked confused except John Preston who broke open a big grin and hugged me right there. Again, Drummer was the hub of the wheel connecting various parts of my art and creative life. Don’t listen to the critics, porn can enrich your life.
The nicest, talented, and enormously productive editor-writer I ever met and collaborated with was the founding editor of San Francisco’s Drummer magazine, Jack Fritscher. Jack was certainly a polymath and authority on sexual practices both divine and bizarre. Jack reached out to me when I started Stroke and was kind and helpful. When I read more about him, I was blown away. I couldn’t figure out how he got so much happening all at the same. Maybe he didn’t sleep? I published Jack’s writing in Stroke. He wrote numerous books including Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982. Jack had a sizzling affair with Robert Mapplethorpe in the mid-1970s. Jack Fritscher’s Love and Death in Tennessee Williams was the first doctoral dissertation on Tennessee Williams. His list of credits goes on to highlight books of poetry, essays, plays and scripts, books on Catholicism, and witchcraft. All the while he was running Drummer. If we included all his work in this list, we would be here for a few days. Again, when did he sleep?
Jack introduced the “bear” to homo-masculinist culture. He brought a number of great talents to Drummer: Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Opel, Arthur Tress, Sam Steward, Larry Townsend, Wakefield Poole, artists Rex and A. Jay. You wouldn’t be far off if you claimed that Jack invented gay.
Fritscher was born June 20, 1939, in Jacksonville and raised in Peoria, Illinois. From a young age Fritscher was raised to be a priest. In 1953 at age 14, Fritscher attended the Pontifical College Josephinum, for both high school and college, studying Latin and Greek. Maybe it’s just me, but this all sounds ideal for educating a future arbiter of male sex and leather culture. Fritscher entered post-Stonewall gay publishing as founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer (March 17, 1977 – December 31, 1979), San Francisco’s longest-running magazine (1977–1999). He was one of only two editors-in-chief under publisher John Embry 1975-1986. Fritscher was the magazine’s most frequent contributor as editor, writer, and photographer through all three publishers, emerging as historian of the institutional memory of Drummer. But that’s not all. Together with producer Mark Hemry, Fritscher co-founded the pioneering Palm Drive Video in 1984, dedicated to homomasculine entertainment. Fritscher wrote, cast, and directed more than 150 fetish features for Palm Drive Video. I lost a lot of sperm with the aid of Palm Drive Video. And I’m grateful for it.
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Where we are today.
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 magazine’s original run – #214 – was published in April 1999. A complete set is at the Leather Archives and Museum. 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 was a consulting editor on the first relaunch issue. The current editor in chief, Darkqwolf, was appointed in August 2023.
I am grateful to have been enjoying, reading, and jerking off to Drummer for 50 years. I learned much about the rules and regulations of the leather and fetish groups and community. The magazine and its powerful identity have stayed true to its course in this half century solidly. In these 50 years I witnessed people come and go from its hallowed halls and always envied the people who worked there and devoted themselves to its message. Now I have the pleasure of saying I wrote something for the magazine after all these years. I have known Darkqwolf, its current editor in chief, for a minute from other hallowed hallways. Thank you Darkqwolf for making a long time wish come true.
Author: Christopher Harrity/p>