Drummer: The Leather Canon

The Founding

Drummer was founded in 1975 by John Embry, a San Francisco bar owner who understood both the leather community he was part of and the gap in its publishing landscape. The early issues were produced with modest resources and extraordinary editorial ambition — mixing explicit photography of leather and S&M content with interviews, fiction, political commentary, and the kind of cultural journalism that the leather community was producing nowhere else.

The magazine found its audience immediately. San Francisco's leather scene in the mid-1970s was one of the most vital subcultures in American gay life, and Drummer became its voice with remarkable speed. Its readers were not passive consumers but active participants — contributors of fiction and letters and photographs, correspondents who treated the magazine as a community forum as much as a publication.

The bar ownership background gave Embry a practical understanding of his audience and their culture that academic or journalistic publishers of gay erotica rarely possessed. The community he was writing for and photographing was also the community he spent his evenings with, and the authenticity this produced was legible in every issue.

The Editorial Standard

Drummer's reputation for editorial quality was earned consistently across its run. Its fiction — short stories, serialised novels, personal narratives — attracted serious writers and developed a tradition of leather erotic fiction that was both genuinely erotic and genuinely well-written. Its photography, less polished than Mandate or Honcho in production values but more honest about what it was depicting, documented a visual culture — the leather bar, the dungeon, the specific aesthetics of S&M practice — with a directness that no other publication matched.

Its journalism was serious. Drummer covered the AIDS crisis with unflinching directness when other publications were still equivocating. It published political commentary on the issues affecting the gay community — the Briggs Initiative, the murders that preceded Harvey Milk's political career, the broader struggle for gay rights — with intelligence and without the sanitising that more mainstream-aspiring publications often applied. The leather community was at the forefront of many of these struggles, and Drummer recorded that frontline position faithfully.

Tom of Finland — whose work is covered in BoysDo's series on the [photographers who made the male body art](/articles/pillar-photographers-male-nude) — was a frequent contributor to Drummer, and the magazine provided one of his most significant American platforms. The relationship between Tom of Finland's aesthetic — the hyper-masculine, leather-clad, unapologetically erotic male figure — and the world that Drummer documented was intimate and mutually reinforcing.

Ownership Changes and the Tony DeBlase Era

Drummer changed hands multiple times during its twenty-four-year run, and the ownership changes were not always smooth. The most significant transition came when Tony DeBlase, a leather community activist and publisher, acquired the magazine along with related titles. DeBlase brought genuine community investment to the publication alongside the commercial management it required, and the Drummer of his era maintained the editorial seriousness that had made its reputation.

DeBlase is also remembered for designing the leather pride flag in 1989 — a piece of community symbol-making that was announced, characteristically, in the pages of Drummer.

The magazine's final years were financially difficult, and it ceased publication in 1999. The closure was widely mourned in the leather community, which had never found a comparable publication and has not produced one since.

The Archive and the Legacy

Drummer's archive — its complete run of issues, plus photographs, correspondence, and production materials — is held at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, where it constitutes one of the most significant collections in the history of gay print culture. Researchers, curators, and writers have drawn on it extensively, and the scholarship on Drummer and the culture it documented has grown substantially in recent years.

The leather community that Drummer served continues. The aesthetic it documented — the specific combination of masculine presentation, fetish practice, and community identity that the magazine represented — is part of the broader tradition of gay visual culture that BoysDo is part of. Different end of the spectrum; same conviction that gay desire, in all its forms, deserves honest and serious attention.

BoysDo does not publish leather content — its aesthetic is elsewhere on the spectrum. But the courage of *Drummer*'s editorial commitment, its refusal to apologise for what it was and what it served, is something the platform recognises and respects in the tradition it belongs to.