Mike Gerle, IML 2007, takes on the crisis of identity and authenticity in our leather titleholder community in this insightful and hard-hitting article. The topic he’s confronting will be uncomfortable for some in our community which makes it all the more important that this discussion begins to take place. This article also recently appeared in print for Instigator Magazine.

As I lay there in bed pondering my participation in some recent local fundraisers, I became more and more unsettled and had to ask myself why I was feeling so pissed off. Why was I unsettled by an event that raised a bunch of money for a worthy cause? Hell, all the fundraisers that weekend raised a bunch of money for several different causes. So, what sort of asshole am I to bemoan such charitable acts?

The answer is simple: I am witnessing my leather world being overrun by non-kinky people manipulating the powerful energy of the leather tribe into a vehicle for their own self-promotion. This has got to stop.

If for no other reason, it is driving the kinky men I want to hook up with out of the few spaces we have left. This is cock-blocking on an enormous scale.

The proliferation of leather carpetbaggers is threatening to erode the very core of what we are as a community. As I understand it, that core has always been the special magic we create via specialized radical sexual behavior and rituals non-kinky people just don’t understand. It was born of leather and has grown to include new instruments and materials of kinky pleasure. But the core remains. It is what draws us together.

We congregate to meet and associate with people who play like we do. It’s pure and simple. That’s the point. Punkt aus! Unfortunately, this basic reason for gathering has been lost on a great many people—especially in the titleholder community.

You, with the microphone, please shut up so that I can do the dance Leathermen once did in these spaces. It can only happen when the environment is right, and your screeching is making it impossible.

If you’ve forgotten, the dance is usually done very quietly while the music penetrates everything around us. It resonates in the gear two Leathermen wear. It starts when the gaze from under his Muir Cap catches your eyes from across the room, and that bolt of sexual energy blasts into you, through your chest, into your gut and down into your nuts. That’s the dance we’re here for, right? Your vision of children without toys has just obliterated the chance of that happening. Thank you, so much.

How did you end up here, anyway? And how can we get you to put down the microphone or at least sex it up and start doing the dance actual kinky guys do? Or how can we get you to leave? Maybe kink has nothing to do with Leather and being a Leather titleholder anymore – maybe I’m just living in some kind of fantasy.

I am willing to concede that I am often wrong about a lot of things, but this is not one of them. Sorry. I got into the Leather titleholder scene for many reasons. But one of my primary goals, as my first judging panel can tell you, was to find a guy into the same kind of sex I was into.

The first IMLs weren’t chosen at the Gold Coast because they were great at raising money for gonorrhea, or because they were coached on what to say by a professional “stylist.” Having heard the stories from David Kloss, and read about Patrick Brooks, Marty Kiker, and other early IML winners, it seems that their performance at play parties surrounding the original event garnered them as much respect as anything else they had to offer – if not more.

Radical sex has always been a huge part of being a Leatherman and the current emphasis on sexless Leather titleholder events is a course being charted in the wrong direction. It is taking us away from our origins.

From what I’ve read and witnessed (I am 44), AIDS is the reason our leather spaces changed so much. Other men more eloquent then I have outlined the transformation that occurred in our world during the first outbreaks of the great plague, but let me try to break it down here for the Twitter generation…

Our government was ignoring the AIDS issue, so those suffering from the effects of the disease had to pull together and take on the enormous task of fighting it, as well as caring for the dying, burying the dead, and consoling the survivors.

Along with most of the vanilla queer community, leather folk made miracles happen. We felt dignity for the first time as we found out just how powerful we could be in the face of such horrifying adversity.

When we were raising cash for the cause, we didn’t care where it came from or how it was raised. We dropped everything to look after of our own. Our dignity swelled, just as it should have. We made a real difference in the lives of people who really needed it. This necessitated opening our spaces to anyone with money to spend or talent to lend. We just did it—and many people, myself included, reaped the benefits of the programs those efforts spawned.

The sad reality is that along with all the family and friends we buried in those days, we also lost many of our kinky leather spaces. An echo of what they once were is all that remains.

The idea that radical sex should be the primary banner we raise when we gather as a Tribe to celebrate who we are was replaced by something new. Instead or celebrating kink and radical sex, the act of fundraising itself became celebrated. We didn’t seem to notice that huge organizations like APLA, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and the Jeffrey Goodman Clinic were built. Somewhere along the line we forgot why we were fundraising and just did it out of habit. The hunting grounds of kinky people were changed. Forever? That remains to be seen.

There is a growing group among us in the titleholder community who value the act of fundraising over the ability to celebrate what it means to be fully functional and celebrated kinky people. They now look for charities to do fundraiser for, just so they can do fundraiser. Being a Leatherman or a kinky individual is no longer relevant to their gatherings.

These are Leather carpetbaggers. They have been drawn to the light our powerful energy creates and have found opportunity in this new fundraising paradigm. The gear they wear is a costume rather than an expression of their basic nature. They have little or no interest in our world beyond its ability to generate notoriety for themselves.

Since they are no longer required to be kinky in order to exist in our spaces, they thrive as event producers and fundraising experts. In the titleholder sect, fundraising expertise has begun to replace mastery of fetish sex as the defining characteristic of a Leatherman. “How much money have you raised this past year?” is a common question thrown out by judges these days.

When carpetbaggers who do not value anything except their own personal gain are allowed to thrive, their behavior weakens our core and threatens the magic that binds one kinky person to another. They have learned to speak our language and wear our gear, but they are not part of the kinky core from which the leather community sprang. There is no love for radical sex or desire to protect the spaces in which it occurs. What’s more, some actually align themselves with right-wing politicos. No kidding.

Every action they take is one of self-promotion and self-interest – fundraiser “for the children” become fundraiser for personal notoriety. The concept of brotherhood is nothing more than a collection of empty words when it is measured against actions. Carpetbaggers have no integrity, other than to remain faithful to their own self-serving interests. Is this the kind of person we want out front representing our community?

Maybe these individuals could be allowed to serve the leather community in a supportive role, but they almost certainly would decline because selfless service is beneath them. These people are “bad players,” and they need to be treated as such. We need to watch them, we need to educate them, we need to council them, we need to dis-invite them, or we need to eject them from our spaces.’

I guess that’s really why I was so damned irritated when I woke up that morning. I was in fear that my sacred spaces were being threatened, and not by a benign force of nature or some natural extinction event. It was being threatened by people who would erase the very core of what it means to be a Leatherman to suit their own ambitions and make a name for themselves.

Wait! Let me be honest for just a second. Being irritated and pissed was simply bravado to cover up the fact that I was really frightened. Afraid that what we’ve lost to AIDS is unrecoverable. Afraid that Leather bars full of men in gear cursing for kinky sex are a thing of the past. Afraid that the stories of kinky spaces filled with kinky people are going to remain stories for me and future generations. Afraid that trust, honor, and respect are no longer core value words which set us apart from the masses, but rather empty words parroted by ego-driven leeches sucking our scene dry.

I hate complainers who decry everything they see wrong in the scene but offer no solutions to correct it, so please allow me to make some suggestions…

As much as it pains me to say it, I think we should keep doing some of the fundraising. Raising money for AIDS made us feel dignity, joy and that one thing we enjoy most of all, power. So let’s hold on to that. Those are strong community-building emotions. But why not use our kinky spaces to support our own kinky kind?

There is no shortage of worthy kinky and kink-related endeavors. The Leather Archives & Museum, NCSF, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the Spanner Trust, FSC, and your local titleholder are just a few institutions preserving our history, our traditions, and our civil rights. With a bit of research it is easy to find all kinds of kink causes that need support. When they have secured our equal protection under the law, maybe I can start worrying about feral kittens as I’m cruising that guy at the Eagle. (And by the way, I’m a three-time pound rescue kitten owner, thank you.)

Leather contest producers and judges have a huge role in shaping the immediate and future image of the leather/kink world with the titleholders they deliver. Producers, you set the tone for the judges. Be clear. Judges, you pick the contestants. Pick wisely. Your contestants will be in the press and carry the banner as the “ideal” Leatherman. What kind of individual did you participate in picking? A vanilla fund-raiser or a smart fetish player?

Producers, if you want quality titleholders running in your contest, be the kind of producer quality people want to work with. Is he going to be burnt out and broke at the end of his year? Word gets around. If you want an example of a good producer, follow the trail of strong contestants who have the same producer. And don’t confuse a stylist with a producer; the stylist grabs them after they’ve won a contest and are headed to IML. Every contest matters. Every score matters. Every winner matters.

Many of our sacred spaces have endured this trend, but some have disappeared because they are places kinky folk no longer enjoy. Some of this is AIDS fallout and some of it is because of on-line hookups. But some of it is happening because we let carpetbaggers run off with the show. And it is an easy situation to correct.

Honestly, change does not require “going after” anyone. We simply need to embrace who we are (were) as radical sex-loving leatherfolk, shed some of our internalized phetishphobia, re-calibrate the fundraising tool, and celebrate our kinky core.

I actually sense the tide is about to change. Some who took shelter during the worst of the plague are feeling that it is safe to come out again. And there are just too many young kinky people bursting out of the woodwork who are desperate for a place to meet other kinky people for it to stay contained. The Internet only gets us so far. A rebirth of the scene is upon us. Question is: Are we prepared to welcome them home?

~Mike Gerle

———–

My own 2 Cents:

Like I said, this is nothing new. But major Kudos to Mike for being vocal about this in a publication many (but not all) read. It’d be great if he could get this into the Leather Journal ..but then again, I know know many guys that don’t read that either. LOL! Oh Ball

You know, I’m all about fund raising. I think I was 24 when I first started doing monthly fund raising at the Detroit Eagle. Even back in the beggining for me, everyone I knew cringed when it was time for “That Guy” that Mike mentioned in his article to get up on stage with the Mic and babble away like Steve Carrell from “The Office”. Killing the mood. I remember 1 time at an event, the guy I was into said to me “Can we leave before he gets back on the Mic? It’s going to kill my hard on.”.

It seems difficult to have a fundraiser without having “that guy”… but man… work on a Script! At least try make it sexy!

Having new presentors is a big thing too. 7-8 yrs ago, Patrick Stewart said “Star Trek is dying because of Franchise Exhaustion”. When you see the same emcees & demo guys at events over and over, it’s the same thing, it gets old. I go to events to see friends, make new friends & have sex… but when you see an overly familiar face on a poster for an event, there’s some reconsidering of attendance.

I feel the same way about having Dragqueens at a Kink Event. They’re female impersonators. It’s not sexy. They’re clowns. Is Ronald McDonald sexy to you? If so, well, at least he’s male. LOL!

So, I may be rambling a bit, but I still agree with Mike. I don’t see how events can be fundraisers without “That Guy”. So maybe he just needs to be minimalized so we can all can socialize, meet people, find somebody to play with and enjoy the brotherhood. You know, all the things we go to the bar/event for.