So, I’m sure there were gay vets who returned home from WWII
in 1945. Some of them, I’m sure, were
into rough sex. Some of those may have
bought motorcycles worn leather (but probably only after 1953 when Marlin
Brando defined that look in The Wild One). And I would assume some of these guys must
have sought out other locals w/ the same interests and rode together and played
together. But that was as much of an
“Old Guard” as there ever was. They were
small in number, isolated, scattered, deep in the closet, and there was just no
leather community, leather culture, or cultural norms involving rules,
protocols, dress, hierarchies, etc. That
part is all B.S. You had a spattering of
largely unassociated guys cruising for rough sex, each doing their own thing
and making it up as they went along.
Larry Townsend first entered the scene in the late ‘50’s, and he
describes it thus: “In 1957… I really started going out a lot, and I had a lot
of sex scenes, but I wasn’t really involved socially w/ these guys until
probably ten years later…” I gather that
was kind of typical of the 1950’s “leather” experience.
This shouldn’t be surprising b/c you can’t have a culture or
a community (of any great size) w/ behavioral norms and traditions until you
have a medium or media to communicate and network though (contrary to secret
society and illuminati conspiracy believers), and, according to Larry Townsend,
that didn’t appear until around 1970.
But let me back up first.
During the 1960’s, these really small and scattered groups of masculine
gay men grew as younger, non-WWII vets, came in, and they starting finding a
couple of footholds. In 1958 Chuck
Renslow opened the Gold Rush in Chicago,
the first full-fledged leather bar.
Before that, guys into leather rarely publicly gathered anywhere (at
least in Chicago). Renslow said that once he tried getting a
group 5 or 6 leather guys to go to a gay bar together in gear, and they got
thrown out b/c they were “scaring the customers.” So Renslow opened the Gold Rush. Phoebe’s (or Febe’s – I’ve seen both
spellings and I’m not sure if that’s the same bar or two different ones) opened
in San Francisco on Folsom St. in 1966,
followed (I think) by the Tool Box.
These bars were, at that time, just gathering places – Renslow has
mentioned that guys weren’t even allowed to dance together back then (much less
fisting or flogging) and so, style of dress aside (and Febe’s did open the
first in-bar leather store in ’67), the activity wasn’t really any different
than any gay bar (i.e. drinking and cruising) – just that they were places specifically
for masculine guys. So if by “Leather”
you mean kinky sex, whips, chains, St. Andrews crosses, water sports, M/s, and
slave protocols, it doesn’t sound like there was a lot of that going on then –
at least none of it going on publicly.
Also happening around 1960, the first gay leather motorcycle
clubs were forming: CMC and the Recons
in San Francisco started in 1960 and ’64, Empire MC in NY started around that
same time, and Renslow started Second City MC in Chicago in 1965. So, in the 60’s, you had two or three leather
bars and a spattering of gay motorcycle clubs and everything was still fairly
provincial.
In 1970, the country’s third or forth leather bar opened:
the Eagle’s Nest in NY (later the “Nest” was dropped, and this became the
original Eagle), and over the next few years several other leather bars
opened. Marcus Hernandez said that in
five years there went from being three Leather bars in the whole country to “ten
or twelve different ones.” Why? Stonewall happened in ’69, and that had led
directly to the appearance of more gay bars – and leather bars. Stonewall was (to use an overused word) a
game-changer.
Here’s my theory (and I‘ll again remind folks that I am not
a leather history expert; there are many others who know this stuff much better
than I do, but here’s what I’ve gathered):
The Leather community and culture doesn’t appear until after
Stonewall. To talk about an “Old Guard”
of protocol-laden WWII vets as the foundation of Leather is pretty
misleading. And when Leather culture
does finally appear, it had more to do w/ poppers than protocols (but I’ll get
back to that).
Here’s Larry Townsend:
“[In the late ‘50’s] it was just smaller and more scattered. People have
been playing these games since the cavemen, but I think that what happened is
that we sort of broke the barriers in the late sixties and early seventies. We
broke this barrier where you were afraid to write anything. The government
wasn't censoring the written word anymore because they'd lost every case they
tried to bring up on it. When this happened, then, I think, you were free to
put things in the mail that you would've been afraid to put in before.”
It makes sense. You
can’t have even a semi-unified culture w/o some media they communicate and
network through – whether it’s the press or radio or the internet. In 1966 The
Song of the Loon, the first gay romance novel, came out. It wasn’t S/m, but the significant thing was
that nobody went to jail for selling it, and it got turned into a film in 1970. In 1975, the first Leather porn movie came
out: Born to Raise Hell.
Townsend published the first real Leather book in 1971: The Leatherman’s Handbook. Townsend has described the flood of letters
he received saying, “Thank you for this; I thought I was the only one!” Also in 1971, Marcus Hernandez started
covering the San Francisco Leather scene in The
Advocate and then BAR, and Tony
DeBlase started writing gay S/m erotica under the pen name Fladermaus. Drummer
Magazine had started in ’75, and in 1979 DeBlase started Dungeon Master inspired by a trip he took to the West Coast where
he discovered totally different play styles and thought, “Why aren’t we talking
to each other and sharing these things?”
The networking and had begun.
Meanwhile, Townsend says that the bike runs in the ‘70’s had
almost turned into S/m runs as the number of gay leather bike clubs grew and
grew. According to Hernandez, by 1971,
there were 13 bike clubs in San Francisco
alone. You also got the appearance of
non-motorcycle leather and S/m “social clubs.”
The Chicago Hellfire club started in 1970, and did their first Inferno party
in ‘76. In 1979, when they expanded Inferno
to two nights and had to come-up w/ something to fill the in-between daylight
hours, Tony DeBlase organized the first BDSM teaching con by organizing
lectures, demos and contests to run through the day. This was around the same time he started
publishing Dungeon Master, and in the
early ‘80’s, DeBlase started touring the country giving lectures and workshops. This led to him starting SM University, which
the first event in Chicago that was
open to women.
Fundraisers also became an important part of the culture in
the late 70’s and 80’s. They had to do
w/ the political activism of the time and the necessity for the gay community
to band-together for self-protection and to provide for themselves what straight
society took for granted. So, do we call
this a “leather value” or was it something that was more properly a value of
the 1970’s political and social culture – especially for minority groups? (Unfortunately, there’s still a need for this
kind of charity work: e.g. LGBT kids are vastly disproportionately represented
among America’s
homeless youth.)
Charity fundraising is where the whole Leather title contest
thing came from. The first were Mr. Gold
Rush in Chicago and Mr. Phoebe’s in San Francisco
– both in 1972. They were charity events (which, to me, is the only reason to
do one of these things… but that rant is a whole other post), and initially
they were straight-on beauty pageants judging physique and wardrobe (Renslow
was a body-builder and had produced and judged body-builder competitions prior
to starting Mr. Gold Rush) w/ no pretense about being anything more serious
than “Little Ms. Leather Sunshine.” By
1979, Mr. Gold Rush had grown too big to fit in the bar, so Chuck Renslow
started International Mr. Leather. He
sent posters to every Leather bar he knew of (one in London,
one in Germany,
etc.) and had 400 people show up from around the world. The number of title contests grew even more
in the 80’s, driven largely by the unfortunate necessity to raise money for
AIDS victims.
In 1980, Cruising
was made into a film staring Al Pacino.
It was filmed at the Mineshaft and other NY leather bars. According to Wikipedia: “The Motion Picture
Association of America originally gave Cruising
an X rating. Friedkin claims he took the film before the MPAA board "50
times" at a cost of $50,000 and deleted 40 minutes of footage from the
original cut before he secured an R rating. The deleted footage, according to
Friedkin, consisted entirely of footage from the clubs in which portions of the
film were shot and consisted of "[a]bsolutely graphic sexuality....that
material showed the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching, and with
the intimation that he may have been participating."” Friedken later tried to restore the footage
for a DVD release only to learn (unfortunately) that it was all destroyed by
the studio. Nonetheless, despite giving
a poor depiction of Leatherfolk (the movie is a psychological thriller and
generally depicts Letahrfolk as twisted neurotics or abusive psychotics) the
remaining footage gives a great idea of what those raunchy late-70’s NY leather
clubs were like.
And this finally brings me to “Poppers over protocols.” I was used to the myth of a protocol heavy
Leather community w/ strict rules and ridged hierarchies, where everyone
entered as submissive boys and had to wait before becoming Masters, and
(according to Guy Baldwin) switches were not respected… so I was really
surprised when I first read Geoff Mains’ Urban
Aboriginals. This is a really good
book, in which Mains, w/ the eye of a participant-observer anthropologist and
psychologist, describes and analyzes the leathersex scene of the West Coast in
the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. Mains
talks about S/m, bondage, watersports, fisting, limit-experiences, and lots of rough,
raunchy, primal sex… and he talks about modern tribalism and modern primitivism
as being the best way to understand this subculture… but he doesn’t talk much
about M/s relationships or protocols or hierarchies. I was surprised that most of the men he
profiles in his book were switches, and a lot of the scenes revolved around
dominance challenges, or men taking turns beating one-another! Listen to him: “[The] leather mythos is a reconciliation of
the human and animal… [A] leatherman comes to embrace his animal side freely
and w/ joy. Aggression, sex, dominance,
animal marking… a joy found in forbidden behavior. Behavior that is very animal… Leather itself
is the ultimate metaphor, symbol of our animal nature and the dark side of our
souls… Leather is the culture and art of
the forbidden… Leather crosses the barriers of cultural sanction to re-embrace
animal instincts.”
WOOF!
Screw that paramilitary, ridged, toilet-trained at gunpoint
B.S. That’s my kind of leather! Primal.
Growling. Snarling. Barking. Licking. Drooling. Panting. Werewolf sex!
Of course Mains is describing the West Coast scene (mostly Vancouver
and San Francisco), but the Chicago
1970’s has been described much the same way by Jack Rinella. Rinealla wrote: “You can read [Townsend’s] Handbook, for instance, all you want and
you'll find only few references to slaves… You see, a person into Leather in
those days was called an "S" or an "M," which stood for
sadist and masochist and had little or nothing to do with dominance or
submission. Even the words top and
bottom are rare in the Handbook, as they were rare in the seventies.”
I don’t think D/s or M/s was a big part of the Leather scene
until after AIDS scared everyone off from raunchy, primal sex… and that’s where
I want to go in Part 3: AIDS, the internet, and the myth of the Old Guard.
Please leave comments and tell me if I’ve got anything
wrong; that’s how we learn.
