CITY LIFE

Scenes

Leather could be for everyone

By MICCO CAPORALE

In a dimly lit bar with a checkerboard facade overlooking Clark Street, erotic magazine magnate Chuck Renslow and his fetish-artist partner Dom Orejudos held their first BDSM-infused physique competition. It was the 1970s, and they were trying to grow the club as a destination for the then-burgeoning leather community. Forty-five years later, what started as the “Mr. Gold Coast” pageant at the legendary Gold Coast Bar has blossomed into International Mr. Leather (IML), an annual event held over Memorial Day weekend at the Congress Plaza Hotel that attracts hundreds of people from across the world to celebrate queerness and kink.

By the end of the weekend, one person out of 100 global citizens is crowned the new year’s International Mr. Leather—but truth be told, that might be the least exciting part. IML has endured as an institution that serves the LGBTQ+ community by fundraising for grassroots groups as well as providing opportunities to gather and exchange goods, information, and kinship. In addition to three days of pageantry (with some of the best people-watching a chronically stoned journalist could ask for), there’s also a fetish market, bootblacking, and classes on topics like improving sexual safety, romantic communication, and kink’s accessibility for those most marginalized in the community. There are also endless public and private parties.

Kink is enjoying a renewed moment of pop cultural interest. Look no further than last year’s Balenciaga campaign (which drew the ire of pearl-clutching parents because children in the ads held bondage-ish teddy bears), or the latest season of American Horror Story, which takes place in 1980s New York and borrows generously from the histories of the clubs Mineshaft and Danceteria. In underground T-shirt and tattoo culture, visual elements of pain and role play—barbed wire, chains, maces, gimp masks—are everywhere.

“I think it’s something about trying to make being gay dangerous again,” said Eric Lee, a board member for the longtime New York fetish and kink festival Folsom Street East. Lee also runs a silkscreen apparel company called Come On Strong that advances a very specific visual tradition of bratty humor, scrappy punk attitude, and debauched sex. “Fetish has become like a benchmark for resisting gay assimilation.”

Even as kink enjoys a moment of attention and urgency, IML represents mounting tensions about how best to preserve physical and cultural space for everyone under the queer and kinky umbrella, not just the more privileged members. IML serves as a touchstone for power exchanges within queer masculinity, preserving and expanding on archetypes like the cowboy, the soldier, the o cer, and so on. While not expressly for gay men, the event is widely understood as a primarily gay male space—with a bias towards cis men.

During the weekend, photographer Brittany Sowacke and I visited an una liated lesbian leather event to hear their perspectives on the gathering. Of those we spoke to, most expressed little to no interest in attending IML, citing it as a place “not for them” or, more specifically, “for men.” This event was advertised for “women, trans, and nonbinary” people—a common but somewhat fraught tethering of identities that rhetorically maintains there are cis men and then there is . . . everyone else. Not only does the phrase invite questions about how anyone perceived as cis male might be treated in such a space, but it lacks specificity about what the exact problem with “men” is that’s being guarded against.

“I’ve been wrestling with observing this,” a 21-year-old trans man named Mercury told me. “I don’t like having transness separated from the masculinity of IML. Making a separate space feels a little humiliating in a way. But then, I also get it. It’s very hard to explain.”

In their 2015 docu-short for Vice Media called Searching for the Last Lesbian Bars in America , JD Samson notes that gay male spaces have enjoyed a resiliency in a way lesbian spaces have not, not only because of how patriarchy results in the unequal distribution of resources, but also for the way that lesbians have shouldered much of the responsibility of gender and sexual expansiveness in a way gay men haven’t. (It’s worth mentioning that, as of today, there are only 23 self-described lesbian bars operating in the U.S.) Right now, gay spaces of all stripes are facing closures and growing threats of physical and legal violence. There is a pressing need to keep intracommunity wrinkles to a minimum and center the most vulnerable members for the safety of everyone.

Left: Mercury has noticed more people of color and people with disabilities at the convention since they started attending.

Middle: Mx. Maryland 2023 Finn Gerhardt (a clear crowd favorite) gave an impassioned speech about how leather inspires them to champion trans rights.

Wrinkling was apparent at IML in this year’s absence of International Mr. Bootblack (IMBB), an annual competition umbrellaed under IML festivities where trans and gender nonconforming people as well as people of color have always been more visible than in the namesake competition. The winner of IML is supposed to embody leather as an attitude. The material is tough, protective, and primal. The winner of IMBB represents the knowledge and skills necessary to support leather—the physical material, and by extension, the attitude. The competitions are like the yin and the yang of the lifestyle, but as was pointed out in private online message boards some weeks before IML, IMBB and its contestants have never received as much institutional support or funding as IML contestants. Confrontations over this forced a dramatic institutional reckoning that put IMBB on temporary hiatus.

“Noticeably, we are without an IMBB contest this year,” said Billy Lane, one of three members of IML’s operations board, during opening ceremonies. “That did not come lightly. We felt in order for it to be successful moving forward, we would take some time to regroup and recreate the contest.”

On the final night of the IML competition, audience members don their most sophisticated gear to witness the top 20 finalists strut their stuff between intimate stories of what leather means to them. Contestants describe surviving rape, homelessness, suicide attempts, drug addiction, and other soul-slicing experiences that their leather community has bandaged over. They also detail the ways this has empowered them to give back to their communities and how this embodies “leather.”

This year, there were several speeches throughout the night on the absence of IMBB and the future IML should aspire to. Alistair LeatherHiraeth, International Mr. Bootblack 2022, remarked on the growing hostility towards trans people in his native England and much of the U.S. and how that has limited his ability to participate as fully in the community as he’s wanted in the past year. But he also pointed out how being a titleholder allowed him the platform to crowdfund his then-upcoming top surgery and realize opportunities he never could’ve imagined. He expressed agreement with many of the criticisms that led to IMBB’s cancellation. But he also requested people find grace for IML and nurture them as they improve—a dutiful bootblack polishing leather.

At the end of the night, Marcus Barela was christened International Mr. Leather 2023. But the new title couldn’t capture the full range of the weekend: skillshares, poppers, floggings, AA meetings, polycules, pup patrols, live nude men, NA meetings, panels, history books, diapers, disco lights, erotic art, a wedding. Leather isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be. Di erences in lifestyles and priorities are healthy. Still, the leather community shows a desire to soften so it can protect as many as possible. v

Women were less visible until Sunday when crowds were much thinner, but at the ceremonies, women showed up in stronger numbers—a noticeable reminder that kink enjoys a coalitional community.