BONUS NUMBER 118: WE MARCHED TO DIFFERENT DRUMMERS

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

When I became editor-in-chief of Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy in 1982, Honcho functioned almost as a separate enterprise from the other two. The editor, Joe Smenyak, favored leather, heavy S&M, a gritty look and feel to the magazine. Despite our different outlooks, I liked Joe. He was congenial, almost a guy-next-door type — if such a personality isn’t a contradiction in Manhattan. It wasn’t easy to picture him cracking whips in dungeons or barking orders at the Spanking Club.

He did have an odd streak, however. He often spoke of starting a “gay country,” yet he also stated that he didn’t like being around “queens” — who surely would have made up a sizeable wedge of his demographic pie.

Joe’s report (below) on the Mr. Leather Contest, held in Chicago in 1982, was certainly appropriate for Honcho; it would not have been for our other magazines. Later that year, however, his inclination became became more and more raw — and not in a way that I thought best for the magazine.

Why, I asked, are we trying to do in Honcho what Drummer does much better? No matter how rough our magazine might become — BDSM, a cavalcade of fetishes, and sexual interests that more mainstream gays might find outré — we would always be Drummer Lite. (In one issue, Joe ran a featurette on the Diaper Pail Society; I leave to your imagination the order of business at their meet-ups.)

There was, of course, some crossover among our readers to Drummer and similar publications. But our identity was mainstream gay. To be sure, we tried to accommodate a deviation or two for the less conventional — but not on every page in every issue. Joe did not seem to grasp this concept.

Another problem was that he thought too locally. By that I mean he ran lengthy features on New York gay bars, as well as bars in other cities, when in reality there was little to say about them beyond the obvious: you go there to cruise, to drink, to dance, etc. I couldn’t imagine that a reader in Kansas City, for instance, would find great allure in the minutiae of Boot Hill on the Upper West Side of Manhattan unless he planned a trip to New York. In which case, the Spartacus Guide furnished relevant details. Besides, our fiction often took place in gay bars, with incidents more typical of the Mineshaft than of a neighborhood watering hole. The centerpiece of Joe’s bar features was invariably a “hot” bartender pictured shirtless or in a tight white t-shirt. Honcho was in a rut.

There were other problems, and as editor-in-chief I made a painful decision. Joe Smenyak was let go.

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