[What’s below is long, I’m not sorry to say. Research confirms that the Internet has reduced our reading attention span to about 600 words, maximum. But what is to be the fate of ideas and issues that won’t fit neatly inside that limit? Are we training ourselves to ignore complex or challenging ideas and consider only short and simple things—the mental equivalent of “fast food”? That would make politicians happy if we “dumbed ourselves down” so much that we became sheep: easily led, easily manipulated. I prefer to think that we’re made of better stuff; I hope you do, too. I’ve prepared some brain food here that I believe is worthy of our time and attention, but it’s a big meal, so I suggest you eat slowly to avoid indigestion.
To more easily manage the size of this paper, it has been divided into two parts. I suggest that the printer-friendly versions be downloaded and then printed out for easier reading, but suit yourself.]
PART ONE
Click here to skip to Part II now
Some wise person is reputed to have said once, a long time ago, somewhere,
”Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
I don’t know who it was, and I didn’t bother to find out because it doesn’t matter really, does it? Most of us accept this short, but powerful little saying as somehow, just simply … well, TRUE.
On the face of it, it seems clear enough … doesn’t it?
But the trouble with that deceptively tidy little saying, “Know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free” … is that there are a bunch of steps missing between TRUTH and FREEDOM. And some of those steps are hard ones to take.
For example, the problems of perceiving what’s “True” have to be solved. Next, we have to think about whatever connections there may be between what’s TRUE, and what’s THE TRUTH. And we do that, of course, because when we were children Alice (In Wonderland) explained to us that:
“Things are not always what they seem, are they?”
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As we’ve all figured out by now, refining perception and drawing conclusions are all processes that unfold over a period of time, and only sometimes happen consciously. But even when the problems of perception have been cleared up and we eventually settle ourselves upon whatever THE TRUTH is, unfortunately that moment is almost never accompanied by a convenient bolt of lightening or clap of thunderous confirmation to signal that THE TRUTH has arrived—at gate number 14-B.
And if you get through all that stuff, then … there you are. There you are with … THE TRUTH.
The Freedom part comes later—sometimes much later, after we have actually usedTHE TRUTH to change ourselves in various ways: our behaviors, our values, beliefs, choices, and courses of action. And, if the little saying is accurate, those new ideas and behaviors, now based on THE TRUTH, should produce more Freedom in our lives, either sooner or later.
The point of this little introduction about how we grow and change is just to say that the ideas I’m about to explore with you today flow from what I think I see, understand, and believe is true and is THETRUTH. If it turns out that I’m right about these things, I hope that, someday, it can help us move closer to that Freedom thing, somewhere down the road. If time reveals I’m mistaken, then I’ll have to apologize for wasting your time, and/or making matters worse.
For myself, I’m still trying to decide how I FEEL about the ideas you’ll soon be hearing, but I am confident that at the very least, TRUTH is not the enemy of FREEDOM, which is why I continue to seek both.
That said, here we go with:
RADSEX RISING TIDE TURBO PERVO TONIC
Despite the fact that I’ve done my level best to delay this as long as possible, I feel an obligation to point out that the sub-culture we have come to know as The Old Guard—Classical Leather Culture—as THE culture … THE gateway, the society through which one enters the underground world of BDSM and Leathersex, has died and is, I believe, gone forever.
It now rests in the arms of history, embraced there along with nearly all of the Leather Princes—Knights and their squires—who I was once privileged to know, and who adopted me as one of their own. Those men raised me up into manhood when my biological family threw me out at age 18 because they found out I was gay.
“There’ll be no … ’homo-sexshuual’ livin’ under my roof … I want you gone,” pronounced my Mother. But she didn’t know the half of it when it came to my sexuality. Many months would pass before even I began to realize just how different I was, and still am.
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I wish I could say that she threw me out because I “came out” to her honestly, but I didn’t … I wasn’t that brave. Not that my story is really all that different from many other such stories that we’ve all heard. She found out by accident, confronted me—I denied it—but doing that just ate me up inside. So after two gut-grinding weeks, I told her the truth. She detonated, and I packed and left a few days later. I left that little town in Colorado, and moved to Denver where I could be with my own kind; I had already met a few other gay guys there.
The year was 1965.
Only in retrospect did Mother’s disgust—her rejection and exile of me—turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Although neither of us knew it at the time, by throwing me out—throwing me away—she disqualified herself to parent a boy like me properly. Her decision actually revealed more about what sort of person she was, rather than revealing my worth, or anything important about me, really. But all that took many years for me to see and understand clearly; back when it happened, I was crushed. She went to her grave two years ago, not knowing me because she never wanted to.
I muddled around in the gay vanilla world for a couple of months, trying to become a competent queer … which takes some effort, after all. I doubt that many of us have a particularly easy time learning how to breathe, eliminate the gag-reflex, and deepthroat, all at the same time … to mention just one example. But I threw myself into my education whenever someone interesting paid attention to me.
Luckily for me, one Saturday night two leathermen decided it would be fun to go “slumming” in Denver’s main, fluffy-sweater bar (the Court Jester, if anyone cares). So they pulled on their Levis, cowboy boots, t-shirts, and leather jackets, and set out to go make the queens … well, “nervous” … which they did; all but one, anyway. I walked right up to them, compelled like a moth to flame, and we talked.
Long and funny story cut short: I fisted one of them later that night, with lots of coaching from the other one. I’d never even heard of fisting; I had no idea it was even possible. It was my first step in what would prove to be a long and amazing journey into a much larger world.
That very successful evening we’d enjoyed together authorized them to bring me along with them the next day to a back-yard cookout lunch of hot dogs and hamburgers at the home of the road captain of the Rocky Mountaineers Motorcycle Club. Those two men brought me along despite the fact that I wasn’t an attractive kid by any standard, and I was definitely the youngest guy there by eight years at least. The other men I met that day liked me, and maybe felt sorry for me a little bit, too—I never asked.
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But whatever their reasons, they soon brought me under their protection and began my education. Those men, that brotherhood, became my actual family. Some were fatherly; others were motherly, and even grandmotherly. Some were smarter than others, some were professionals, others were working class, and a few were even boring. But when all was said and done, it felt good to be accepted, and we needed each other.
They became the axis around which my life revolved for the next seven years. Those I was closest to urged me into University and followed my academic progress steadily. Sometimes they even made me bring something along to study on the motorcycle campout trips we took. Collectively, they were committed to my total development—sexual, intellectual, moral and spiritual (although they’d never have called it that).
But most important of all, they slowly socialized me—in an orderly and progressive way—into the courtship rituals and the mating dances of our “kind.”
That included an understanding of the erotic alchemy that produces the truly transforming and transcendent BDSM and D/s sexual experiences that made my spirit sing.
It was Classical Leather Culture, often referred to these days as the “Old Guard,” that did all that for me and countless others nationwide. During that era, it was common for older gay men to parent younger ones. Luckily, I found leather parents, and they found me.
I tell you all of this … and this time with these few personal details, not because I’m fast approaching age 60 and need to indulge in some misty reverie about fond memories from a well-spent youth.
No … I say these things to describe our sub-cultural system of socialization—an entire society—that is now gone.
I just want you to know what we have lost.
Who were those men, and what were they like?
It’s important to remember that people during the thirty years between 1950 and 1980 didn’t have many of the modern options for life-choices that we take for granted today. In general, nearly all of those Old Guard warriors were misfits who, by day, hid behind lies to pass as “normal” so they could earn a living. With few exceptions, they were honest erotic outlaws only on weekends and nights.
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But erotic outlaws they were. If you doubt that, spend 15 minutes reading DRUMMER’s early classified sex ads. With the possible exceptions of electro-sex and fire work, they did everything erotically that we do now. Before 1954, they were mostly rah-rah America fans, but after wars in Korea and especially Viet Nam, they developed a deep distrust of the military-industrial complex (“The Establishment”). When they voted, the ones I knew usually supported liberals or moderates.
Nearly all of them drank alcohol in moderation, some smoked weed and hashish when they could find and afford it, and, as they became more available after 1968, significant numbers added other mind altering/enhancing chemicals to their sexploits.
They made up their own minds about which laws and social rules applied to them and which ones did not. Outside the workplace, they governed their lives according to their own standards. And those standards simply did NOT have to make any sense to outsiders. They really didn’t care what the rest of the world thought of them, or about what happened after working hours, behind closed doors. These were erotic outlaws, and I feel lucky to have known them.
The men of the Old Guard equipped themselves with whatever erotic gear supported their sex lives—usually homemade before about 1975. (My first restraints were four brown leather dog collars from the Safeway Store, vintage 1966. I made a whip [what we’d now call a flogger] in 1972 because there was no place to buy one.) We created private and public spaces where we could be ourselves with our own kind. And without exception, the men I knew and ran with then saw and understood clearly that we were definitely not common, not average, and not conventional. For us, Radical Sexuality was our art form. And for a smaller number, it was also our religion, our salvation and destiny. It was the central, organizing principle of our lives.
It was our Nile River … joyful, life sustaining, inspiring, dynamic and creative.
Only by looking back in time can a careful observer notice that by as early as 1975, small cracks had already appeared from inside Classical Leather Culture itself. But Cultural Anthropology teaches us that small sub-cultures like the Old Guard can be easily overwhelmed by powerful outside forces. I suppose it’s possible that the Old Guard leather society across the nation might have survived any single one of the external forces that impacted us: cheap jet travel; the Korean and Viet Nam wars; the proliferation of strong recreational drugs; the AIDS nightmare; and most recently, the Internet. But collectively, those irresistible forces (and others) simply shattered the already vulnerable, and not all that flexible, Old Guard society.
Just as Feudal Society in Europe during the Middle Ages didn’t suddenly screech to a full stop one summer day, so too was the demise of Old Guard society a long process which had probably begun in most places by 1980. But yes, the Old Guard Leather sub-culture, that society, is certainly dead by now, despite the fact that there are still actually a very few of the original old Barons left. But not many; they were all born by 1940 after all.
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And yes, there are a few more second and third generation knights and squires like me—survivors who were mentored and reared by Old Guard Dogmas and Catechisms in their various forms. We’re still around, although generally out of sight. Yet even nowadays, a few of us and our successors actually do Captain the occasional household or extended family here and there. And each isolated clan bears the unique stamp of its patriarch’s quirky eccentricities, just as in earlier times. Thus, small pockets of some Old Guard ways do still live on in those settings, to be sure, and probably always will. But as the Pack, the society of leathermen—that’s dead. [To offer a parallel example, the Russian immigrants who have clustered together here in the U.S. since 1990 do not Russia make. They are strangers in a strange land, and they know it.]
(Nowadays, its much easier to identify special interest groups of people who’ve banded together, usually around a common erotic theme, because they’ve recognized that being in a pack has some real advantages; the FFA is the earliest example I can recall. I’m thinking of today’s “boy,” “pup” and “bear” groups, and even some fetish groups like the cigar, uniform and boot groups out there. Nevertheless, I’m aware of none that operate with any of the Old Guard styles or formula—the MOD and JIIIA may be a exceptions, but I don’t have enough information to be sure about that.)
What’s gone is Old Guard leather civilization itself … all the various traditions of introduction, referral, education, mentoring and socialization … gone, right along with every single one of the institutions that sustained it.
Here are some examples of what I mean by “institutions”:
If they wished, returning World War II vets could buy war surplus motorcycles for $50.00 at war’s end; cheap mobility was finally possible. (The INDIAN was the more preferred brand, by the way … not HARLEY.) Gay motorcycle clubs began emerging in 1953 and spawned nearly all of the early “leather” bars, because members gathered to socialize there. Bike clubs appeared all through the 1960s nationwide. By 1975, the leather bar in every big city was busy with leathermen talking and cruising by 10:30 P.M. every night, except maybe Monday and Tuesday. (By the way, in no surviving leather bar in the U.S. today has that been true for at least 15 years.)
But while the leather bars flourished, interest in joining a bike club had slowly begun to fade by the late 1970s for several reasons. In the 1950s, motorcycle riding was frowned upon; only socially rebellious, tough guys rode them. The mainstreaming of motorbike riding slowly eroded the earlier bad-boy stereotype that masculine gay men resonated with. (Which largely explains why the men from my youth scorned Japanese bikes despite their mechanical superiority.) But most importantly, the need for close association with the bike clubs to improve one’s access to radical sex opportunities was vanishing fast. The leather bar itself made access possible—it was open to the public; the bike clubs were not.
Some club members moved to more affluent areas farther away or migrated as the U.S. population became more mobile, and others found relationships so the urge to hunt changed. All the war stories had been told. As more strangers walked in, their leather bars lost the “clubhouse” feel that they’d originally had. In nearly all bike clubs, the ratio of bike owners to non-owners dropped steadily and by 1985, some clubs had already disbanded or morphed into “Leather-Levi” social clubs.
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Consequently, the number of bike club events at leather bars slowly but steadily declined. This was a problem because the bikers had always been the magnetic core group that attracted other kinkmen into the bars. Gatherings of biker sidekicks, some aided by a few beers, usually turned bars into easy-going reunions of buddies in a party mood. The less intense atmosphere of afternoon club events at bars offered newcomers a far less intimidating setting to begin meeting us and developing leather social networks. By contrast, most weekend nights in bars felt more serious, and even sometimes forbidding or sinister. Fewer club events meant fewer “casual” settings for newcomers; meanwhile, some bar owners got nervous about sales.
The idea of “leather-title contest” first appeared in bars in the mid-1970s. It caught on quickly and has survived to become the only remaining pseudo-institution in the “leather” world. (Contests are not universal.) For a while, it seemed as though the leather contests might offer us new, alternative, or replacement reasons to gather, socialize, and cruise to maybe hook up.
But contests don’t actually involve very many people directly; the rest of us who aren’t judges or contestants can easily feel reduced to the role of observers rather than participants. Thus, our personal emotional investment in the contest process and outcome is often pretty low … it doesn’t feel like there’s much in it for us personally. To outsiders, they look like butch beauty contests.
But c’mon … lets face it: From the standpoint of building and strengthening a community by tending to the needs of each man there, the best parts of contests for 95% of any contest audience are the bits of time for socializing and cruising between the contest segments. That’s important time for learning, practicing and doing the courtship dances requiring specialized social skills. In the days before 1985, that time was THE most exciting reason to get geared up and head down to the leather bar … four nights a week.
Even at IML Weekend, where upwards of 12,000 guys gather to bask in the shared Leathersex energy we create together, only about 25% park themselves in seats for contest segments. The great majority of the men who migrate to Chicago aren’t there to passively watch contest segments, as if going out to a movie. They want to see each other and be seen, maybe to find themselves engaged in some erotic Tango of seduction, perhaps to spark some high-end pervo-magic. Or at the very least, to see others doing those things … maybe to learn through observation just how it’s done. In short, whether they know how to get their needs met there or not, most guys at our big leather events want to feel the exciting potentials of that intoxicating atmosphere. They want to have the same feelings that were possible in all leather bars, four or five nights a week, every week, during the heyday of Old Guard leather society.
Happily, I’ve recently begun to discover that growing numbers of younger guys who came into radical sexuality through the Internet have finally begun to see the limitations of the cyber medium. Posted text and pics are simply not reliable for judging erotic chemistry. That man who e-mailed those great photos might actually have NO sex energy at all, maybe can’t talk in person, smells of perfume, lives with his aunt, is too tweeked to focus, is a crappy host, and is all about his fancy 800 thread count sheets.
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Conversely, the plain lookin’ guy standing across the room can feel sexy as hell, yet he’d get rejected online because his photo doesn’t reveal his heat. It’s still true that the best way to get the “feel” of someone erotically is face-to-face; no technology comes close. Typing can’t teach anyone the social skills needed to actually start, sustain and guide a meaningful conversation about sex or anything else. Those things are best learned, practiced and accomplished in brick-and-mortar establishments … Leather Bars. I see more new guys there all the time.
Missing Institution #3: DRUMMER magazine was, for years, the only inspiration, information and erotic clearing house for our world during the golden age of leather. Although it’s impossible to know with certainty, and reliable information is sketchy, some observers have suspected that, like a family’s only milk cow, slowly getting older, owners of DRUMMER took more from the magazine and gave less back to it. Whatever the details, in the end, DRUMMER was slaughtered for what little meat remained.
While still alive, it had also spawned a few edgy offspring magazines like POWERPLAY and MACH, but all those are long gone now, too. INTERNATIONAL LEATHERMAN magazine, which looked very promising for a while, also seems to have met an equally shameful end, apparently also through shortsighted stewardship. Typically, owners vanish without comment or explanation, never to be heard from again, thus fueling suspicions and feelings of betrayal and abandonment.
DRUMMER was messenger, mirror, censor and historian, all rolled into one. DRUMMER both reflected and also set, defined … and then protected and, therefore, maintained the boundaries and limitations of classical Old Guard society. The Internet, by contrast, is a free-for-all slew of wide-ranging iconography, opinions and standards, all competing on equal footing. The Internet has no agenda; DRUMMER definitely had several. So much for Old Guard institutions.
Currently, most of the surviving Old Guardians do not have the attention of newcomers, especially the young ones, because they think we have nothing to offer them beyond history, protocol and technique. The situation isn’t helped when youngsters must listen to some Guardians squabble and whine about protocol and technique, yet all the while continue to demand respect from the young. That just makes them lose patience with us; those issues seem … well … silly to most young guys. If we want their respect, we’ll have to get it the old fashioned way.
And when newcomers lose patience and respect, and then go off on their own to figure it out for themselves, some surviving Old Guardians typically become annoyed. Youngsters are frequently dismissed as “not being serious” … because in the old days, youngsters WERE patient with the seasoned men. Well … YEAH … they had to be patient back then, because we were the only game in town … but that’s no longer true.
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Most Old Guardians never acquired the skills to deliver the good stuff faster because we never had to before. But now, if we want to hold their attention and gain their respect, we will need to either get those skills or risk becoming irrelevant entirely to the new kids on the block. We have other things to talk about which the young might find of greater interest: stability, commitment, loyalty, honor and other values, continuity, social skills and more—things that are mostly not learnable on the Internet because they’re best learned over time and regular contact with the same people in face-to-face settings.
We’re also not helped by the fact that most classical leather iconography looks antique to most kids … and by that, I mean it ain’t as hot and sexy as what they’re all about. (Take a very close look at INSTIGATOR magazine if my point isn’t clear—especially issues 3 and 4.)
I don’t like that any of this is true, but we gotta live life on life’s terms or else the surviving Old Guardians will risk becoming reduced to some quaint, historical, triviality.
While a few Old Guardians remain, and perhaps always shall, the Classical Leather Culture itself … that society is gone. Long gone.
Any and all efforts to recreate it have been, are, and will always be doomed to failure. We must preserve the past, not try to reoccupy it.
Like children in a country field,
Aglow with swarming fireflies,
We dance the moonless night away
And reach and grab for some to prize.
We long to hold and keep alive
The magic joy to live and thrive.
But our few precious points of light
Can’t make the field again take flight.
It’s time for all who knew it, or maybe glimpsed it even, to take a long … deep breath, and then release our grip … and let it slip into history where it belongs … peacefully and with love and gratitude … and hopefully, in the spirit of celebration.
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And we must do this releasing … not reluctantly … and no, not even sadly either, because we cannot pick up and come to good terms with what’s happening now if our hands are busy grasping at dead fireflies in hopes that they will come back to life and dance for us, lighting our way back to that special time once again. Because that is not gonna happen.
Living in the past wastes the present.
I suppose that in a perfect world (perfect for me, anyway), we would listen together now, to a few minutes of the Mozart or Brahams Requiem. For a little while at least … because there were some special things about Old Guard society worth remembering; that’s just ‘cuz I’m a sentimental fool sometimes.
But frankly, those men from 1965 would have wanted the DOORS requiem saved for last. Definitely.
After this, I’ll not write about it again.
I, too, must let go.
And, as it turns out, I’ve been surprised to see that a new erotic society has recently appeared—a group that’s almost directly analogous to the first generation Old Guard in some very interesting ways. I’ve come to believe that they carry some of the Old Guard torches today.
In PART TWO, I’ll have a lot more to say about them, where they came from, who they are, and explain why I think they are today’s successors to the Old Guard I grew up with.
END PART ONE
Click here to read Part II
© Guy Baldwin, M.S.
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