FIRST, BE A HUMAN BEING

by Patrick Mulcahey

Doom is a pet theme of keynote and contest speeches. Leather is on life support. Clubs are fading away, leather spaces too. The big-tent kink scene to which our deserters fled has splintered into a thousand niche groups. People we’d never have let in the door forty years ago are taking over! Then, in defiance of all logic, we are urged to put the “unity” back in community.

But what if these supposed symptoms of our decline are actually evidence of our impulse to wholeness? That’s the question I’d like to entertain today — by way of, first, a quick detour through my personal history.

I had a disastrous coming-out, as gay men at that time generally did, and as soon as I was of legal age, I stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked to Provincetown. It was a couple of states away and I didn’t know anyone there, but I knew there were gay people.

I didn’t know anything about being gay, except for the two marquee sex acts starring the penis and that I wanted in on them. The people at home I’d always thought were my people had turned out not to be, so gay people had to be my people. I just had to find them.

The driver who picked me up and took me most of the way was a gentle professor of something, literature maybe, about the same age I am now. No advances were made, but he invited me to dinner. He was looking for the same people I was looking for, as it happened; but there was not an LGBT people then, more like a Fire Island crowd with good haircuts and a lesbian feminist crowd with all the same haircut. I told the professor yes, just to be nice, then stood him up. I was pretty sure neither of those marquee activities was going to happen, so what was the point?

See, America was obsessed with the filthy things it thought homos were doing day and night, which we obligingly took to be our job description. What was being gay all about, if not sex? We had no models for how to treat each other, except for the way men treated women, and sometimes we treated each other very badly.

Still, the 1970s were the greatest time in history to that point to come out as gay or lesbian. (Well, if you were white.) Stonewall was hardly a blip on the radar of anyone else, but for all of us closeted queers, it was the shot heard round the world. The message of Stonewall wasn’t that we were free. It was all too apparent we weren’t. The message was that we were not alone. Nowadays, whatever your proclivity, you can find out at many megabits per second that you’re not the only one. We had grown up in isolation. Suddenly the genie was out of the bottle, and we spent the Seventies finding each other.

And finding our queer ancestors, newly exhumed from the centuries-long conspiracy to erase us. We loved claiming cultural icons, sometimes on shaky evidence: Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Queen Christina of Sweden, Langston Hughes, the mythical Pope Joan. It made us seem so legitimate, even if that was not how we felt, ourselves.

We began to hold marches and protests. Speaking of Sweden, always a step ahead when it comes to sex, legend has it that Swedes called in “gay” to work, because wasn’t homosexuality an illness? We elected Harvey Milk and founded a handful of strong new organizations: the Sisters, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Radical Faeries, PFLAG. But the most widespread evidence of gay liberation took the form of much liberated personal behavior.

In Provincetown, I got a goodly number of those marquee sex acts under my belt, fell in love with a man for the first time, had my first taste of leathersex, and explained to many busloads of skeptical tourists what scrod is. Now, where could I settle down that was even gayer?

A new kind of activism was afoot in San Francisco when I arrived in the 80s: more targeted, more effective, less playful, more urgent. Not just our civil rights but our lives were in danger, prompting a high level of coordination among our organizations big and small, all the way through the mid-90s. Visible leaders emerged, a new breed of mini-celebrity, famous for being gay: Ginny Apuzzo, Larry Kramer, Vic Basile, Del Martin, Troy Perry, Urvashi Vaid.

The Lesbian Avengers and “On Our Backs” made their first appearance. The Democratic Party added “homosexual rights” to its platform, before awarding us the booby prize of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Domestic partnerships and civil unions gave “separate but equal” a try. We mastered the one-two punch of denying we’re different (“Love makes a family!”) and insisting on it (“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”).

The LGBT movement in the twenty-first century is something we haven’t seen before. It’s not leadership-driven. There are too many of us in the public eye to have an anointed spokesperson. Our old umbrella organizations seem muted or in decline, while the newer passionately focused ones bite off a single issue and retreat to their separate corners. We still have Ginny Apuzzo and Larry Kramer and other leaders of yesteryear, but now they’re like favorite aunts and uncles: we love them but don’t really want their advice anymore. When we targeted institutions long considered the exclusive privilege of heterosexuals — marriage, parenting, and the military — success came on the shoulders of ordinary untelegenic people filing lawsuits and testifying in state legislatures.

It may be that for the first time, a majority of LGBT Americans — I’m talking sheer numbers now, without reference to class, race or any other factor — feel assimilated into the mainstream. Even our celebrities: Anderson Cooper, Ellen DeGeneres, Laverne Cox, RuPaul, they’re everyone else’s celebrities too. We sometimes hear older gay folk complain that millennials take equality for granted, but isn’t that what equality is for?

I’ve observed the gay rights movement from inside. But from an aerial view, so to speak, it seems many other movements — women’s lib, the civil rights and environmental movements, even national liberation movements like South Africa’s — follow roughly the same trajectory.

First: finding each other and finding strength in each other. The Women’s Rights Convention of 1848. The United Negro Improvement Association of 1914, tremendously successful in its time. The South African Native National Congress of 1912, which became the ANC. The Sierra Club, founded in 1892.

Second: turning a searchlight on history to recover the names and deeds of the movement’s forerunners. I never heard of Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells, Mangosuthu Butelezi, or even John Muir in high school, did you?

Third: the development and maturation of activist organizations, and the elevation of leaders embraced or at least acknowledged by grass-roots followers.

Fourth: the success of those organizations and leaders in achieving broad common goals. Differences from the dominant culture may be strategically downplayed or played up, or both.

Five: decentralization and assimilation. Venerable institutions are supplanted by vigorous ad hoc groups. We don’t hear as much anymore about the Task Force, the National Organization for Women, the Audubon Society, even the NAACP. Instead it’s Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Planned Parenthood, PETA, the Transgender Law Center making the headlines.

You see where I’m going with this. Are we a “social movement”? Are we maybe even some kind of liberation movement?

That sounds a little hifalutin for our grungy goings-on. Maybe we’re more a hobbyist group, like bird-watchers or a bowling league? Or maybe we’re a social network serving a single interest, like the PTA. On the other hand, that’s not how we talk about us. We call it “the lifestyle.” And given the proliferation we see of special affinity groups and events (furries, wrestlers, MDHL, International Persons of this and that), our interests don’t seem so single anymore.

I’m not a sociologist. But Marc Edelman is, and he says social movements “look messy, with activist groups and coalitions forming, dividing, and reassembling, and with significant sectors of their target constituencies remaining on the sidelines.” Now that sounds like us, doesn’t it?

But if we really are an unsung liberation movement, what are we moving toward? What are we liberating?

We already had a Sexual Revolution. Ah, but did it live up to its name? Yes, women were freed by The Pill to delay marriage and motherhood — women who slept with men. Clearly, the Sexual Revolution was about heterosexuals having more heterosex, and did nothing to enlarge the sexual repertory, unless you count wife-swapping.

Expanding the menu of erotic acts and intimate relations: that’s what we’ve done.

First, we found each other, in leather bars and private clubs and “dungeons.” We found strength in each other, building associations like the Satyrs and TES and Janus and Samois.

We sifted through history to uncover our roots — sometimes fancifully, as in the case of the infamous Council of Elders, but also through the work of genuine scholars like Gayle Rubin, Michael Bronski, Rob Bienvenu, the academics of CARAS and the Leather Archives.

We undertook activist work: the Woodhull Foundation, NCSF, the DSM Project, kink-awareness trainings for law enforcement and healthcare professionals. We rallied around leaders who emerged organically: Chuck Renslow, Tony DeBlase, Guy Baldwin, Vi Johnson, Judy Tallwing.

Our institutions and leaders coordinated for the good of us all in the 80s and 90s, when we lost so many and saved so many. P.R.-wise we countered the big scary black leather image by holding drives for canned goods and Toys for Tots, proving we could be as nice as anybody.

Today we see the adoption of leather and kink tropes by the mainstream. Everybody knows “Hedwig” and “Kinky Boots” and what a safeword is. Meanwhile there’s been an increasing fragmentation and specialization of our clubs, contests and other events — sometimes redundantly, sometimes very successfully, as in the case of ONYX and bootblacks and pups. Our leadership, to the extent we still recognize any, has become diffuse and local. And we’re as likely to gather in comfy chain hotels as in leather bars, possibly more so.

The question has to be asked: might the fracturing of our interests and activism — what’s been called the “balkanization of kink” — be not a bad thing but a good one? If the organized scene we’ve looked to for decades is spinning off into apps and niche groups and giant You-Name-It-Cons, is it the end of something, or the beginning of something new?

Something like assimilation?

The thought is anathema to many of us, I know. What does the mainstream have to offer us?

Well, numbers. Resources. Room. HBO. Perspective, maybe?

The mainstreaming process, in both directions — kinksters coming out, outsiders dipping a toe in — has been going on among gay men for some time, maybe because we had a head start. You don’t think those twenty thousand guys who’ve been known to show up for IML weekend are all leathermen? They’re mostly adventurous types who like the look, the men, the toys, the parties, and an occasional walk on the wild side, before going back to the Oscar Wilde side.

How would it change us if we no longer walled off our sexuality from our friends and neighbors, and our day-to-day lives from each other? We all rely on the closet — yes: think of all the people in your life who don’t know you’re here and never will — but the closet is a treacherous friend. It asks us to judge the book by its cover. We are more than our sexual attractiveness, more than our ability to take or dish out a beating. As my slave once said memorably, fuming over some preventable leather relationship drama, “First, be a human being.”

Not a Top, not a bottom. Not a Master or a slave. Not a whip connoisseur. Not a fister. Not a masochist. Not a protocol hardass. First, be a human being.

I want to be that to you today, which is why I’m going to break a taboo and tell you I just spent a year without sex. Mostly. More or less. My libido used to be very reliable, even a bit too insistent. Suddenly it went to sleep. I don’t need medical advice. I have a great doctor. I’m not sick. I’m not even worried. It will come back. It may be different, it may be the same.

But I was worried. What did it mean? Who am I now? Am I not a leatherman anymore?

I’m not the only person in this room who’s has a year like mine, and if it hasn’t happened to you, it will. Yet it’s more awkward for us to talk about no sex than it was for our parents to admit there was such a thing.

Are we making room for the whole leatherperson? I don’t mean by de-sexing our scene. But are we fragmenting because people who’ve learned the fundamentals, and don’t care about edgy performance play they’ll never do at home, just get bored and look elsewhere? Would they stick around for workshops on, say, the history of pulp-magazine kink, how to be a mentor, the life and times of Irving Klaw, sadomasochism in Baroque painting? (The Leather Leadership Conference, by the way, is doing a good job of this. Topics straight from their schedule include: working with deafness and hearing loss, managing and marketing a kink business, how to be an ally, how to hold an auction, writing about kink, estate planning for the polyamorous.)

Are we fragmenting because we are too apt to present ourselves to each other as fragments? I’d like to see a conference adapt the format of the old OCLA Sampler. Alongside the usual workshops, silent auctions and so on, you’d get a list of respected leatherfolk and their areas of interest. You could sign up to spend an hour alone with each of three of them, in the coffee shop, on the patio, in their room or yours. I made some landmark friendships that way.

“First, be a human being.” We were drawn to leather and kink to become more whole, not less.

At this point in the history of our movement, if that’s what it is, instead of mourning What Was, might it be time to think about What’s Next, and What We’re Well Rid Of?

The exaggeration, the glorification of gender roles was foundational to leather culture. Men had to be men, and so did women who said no to corsets and high heels. Two gender straitjackets to choose from. Is that what we want our legacy to be, now that little boys can play with dolls and little girls play with dump trucks and straight men kiss each other in public?

You may say, “What if that big-chested, hypergendered sexuality is what turns my crank?” You like what you like, and that is what I like. But the suffocating social framework that shaped me, and shaped my desires, I would not want to bequeath to a new generation.

Might it be time to take advantage of the openness popular culture is showing us? We can return the favor by passing on what we know about consent, communication, safety and pleasure. And we have ourselves, our whole lives to share. I applaud the impulse to infuse a popular genre like romance with kink, but all Fifty Shades brought to the party was a helping of giddy unconventional sex. The relationship it presents is just a retread of Mr Rochester and poor plain Jane Eyre.

We have better stories to tell. Have you seen the “The Piano Teacher”? It’s a harrowing study of a kinky, damaged woman who finally dares to ask for what she needs but doesn’t know what getting it should look like. How many novice submissives have had to muddle their way through that alone? The film won the Grand Prize at Cannes fifteen years ago. Sometimes I wonder if we’re slower to accept ourselves and our kinks than the thinking public is.

When I look at where we are now, I don’t think leather is disappearing. I think what we called “leather” is already gone, and we are convened in the laboratory of its not yet named replacement, wearing the same clothes, using the same words, but not meaning the same things anymore. It’s like we’ve been so focused on whether the roof was caving in that we didn’t notice the whole house got a makeover. We thought it was just termites.

A month ago I bought a cemetery plot. Well? We Masters and Dominants are always exhorting each other to make arrangements for those in our service, should something happen to us. I figured it was time to put this last piece in place.

I didn’t know how to go about it. It’s not something you’re ever going to get much practice at. The two of us want to be cremated — not at the same time; little p was not receptive to that idea — and not scattered but buried, in a pair of my boots, me in the left one, him in the right. But of course there are no leather graveyards, only graveyards of leather titles.

Our little country cemetery cannot very often have two men walk in, one with a chain locked around his neck, two men moreover with the same name, who want to be buried together. Even so, the caretakers showed not a flicker of anything but kindness. They took us out to a hill overlooking the river and helped me choose a beautiful spot. A plot with a view, as they called it. Their eyebrows went up just a bit at the mention of my boots, which they acknowledged would be non-standard. But they promised to look the other way and let us have what we want.

I had some anxiety about leaving San Francisco, not the city but the community. There I could have my kinky attorney make arrangements with a kinky funeral director to get something like the same result, probably not in my boots or in the ground or in my budget. But my experiences since I left seem to be telling me I don’t need to be insulated in that way anymore. The world, not all of it but some of it, seems ready to shrug off my same-sex, same-name, Master-slave marriage. People don’t find us intolerably odd or worrisome. They find us, first, human.

Patrick Mulcahey
May 7, 2017
Northwest Leather Celebration