Salinedion
Posts: 198
Joined: 5/25/2012 Status: offline
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'May as well share my few NYC LeatherMan-type thoughts from back in the day. I may not be old guard, but I sure am old guy. I worked in the adult entertainment industry 1976-80 and it gave me a little entree into the infamous bars along the West Side Highway: The Anvil, The Spike, and the accurately named Toilet. None of them were strictly leather. In fact, a guy showing up ala Village Person would cause quite a stir. LeatherMen were 99.99% confined to the pages of Drum and Honcho; it never had a heyday, at least not in the West Village. The dividing line of Leatherdom was the film Cruising (1980). Leatherdom (such as it was) was over for a fair while in NYC by then. Many gay groups protested the film because of its negative portrayal of gay life; which was to say, leather. Leather and promiscuity were firmly linked in people's minds, at least those people's who even knew of its existence. It's telling that they could have that leather Village Person and to this day, he's just assumed to be a Hell's Angel. My experience was that a lot of subbie guys were looking for a non-existent leather dominant partner and those people were most certainly prone to bad sexual decisions. Likewise, the larger Gay community was in denial about the AIDS crisis. The Village Voice ran articles defending the "Gay Culture" of bath houses and places like The Barracks on 42nd Street. Some of it was a response to Morton Downey anti-gay ranting, some it was just ignorant hedonism. Was there an enlightened, condom-wearing Leather enclave somewhere? I vote no. I remember reading in the gay press circa /74 about "Run Little Leatherboy" by Larry Townsand who apparently did very well self-publishing it. It's a dreary read, as is it's sequel called something, "Leatherboy, Run no more". That's the earliest reference I recall. A pre/proto-leather writer ('68-ish?) that is due for a revival, John Rechy, has lots of elements of the lifestyle in his novel, "City of Night" -title borrowed by The Doors, text appropriated wholesale for "Midnight Cowboy". 'Hope I haven't offended anyone. Leather can be touchier than Gorean. It's just my pervy Forest Gump at the ass-fisting perspective.
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I hate the 'reply to' note at the end of the post. Just assume I'm posting to the board at large and not the person above me unless I say diff, OK?
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