Drummer Magazine (Issue # 100 Cover Art Tee Featuring Artwork by Rex)

Drummer Magazine — Vintage Gay Leather Tee

First published in 1975, Drummer became one of the most important and influential magazines in gay leather culture, documenting a world of leather, Levi’s, motorcycles, masculinity, sex, art, and community that was rarely represented anywhere else.

Founded in Los Angeles and soon closely associated with San Francisco, Drummer arrived at exactly the right moment. Gay liberation was transforming cities across America, leather bars and motorcycle clubs were flourishing, and gay men were creating their own visual language of boots, harnesses, uniforms, denim, mustaches, and unapologetic sexuality.

But Drummer was more than an erotic magazine. Its pages mixed photography, illustration, fiction, interviews, personal ads, leather culture, politics, and community news. For readers living far from cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York, a magazine like Drummer could provide a connection to an entire gay world they might otherwise never see.

Its influence on gay male imagery was enormous. The magazine helped document—and amplify—the leather and masculine aesthetics that became some of the most recognizable expressions of post-Stonewall gay culture. Artists, photographers, writers, leathermen, titleholders, porn stars, and ordinary guys all passed through its pages.

During the AIDS crisis, Drummer also became part of the historical record of a community undergoing devastating change. Today its old issues preserve faces, businesses, bars, clubs, advertisements, artwork, and personal histories that might otherwise have disappeared.