The Leatherman’s Protocol Handbook — Guest Editorial Review by Guy Baldwin

Editor’s foreword — Some months ago, after a soul-satisfying dinner of Chicken Korma with Guy Baldwin, our after-dinner conversation turned to leather history and the “myth” of the Old Guard. It’s a topic that I’m keenly interested in for a variety of reasons including a tendency to pretentious pre-occupation with Old Guard protocols that I see in our various communities, and that, despite growing my leather eye-teeth in San Francisco, I’ve never seen one shred of evidence that the Old Guard, as it’s currently mythologized, ever existed.

As it happened a new book, in fact a new “handbook”, had just hit the scene and was making a big noise with accolytes lining up to sing praises and critics to heap abuse. I asked Guy if he’d seen it. I can only describe his look as withering. “Yeeeesssss,” he said, drawing out the response. “And I’d be happy to review it for Leatherati but I refuse to buy a copy and put money in the author’s pocket.” So of course I purchased a copy (we weren’t offered a review copy) and had it express delivered to Guy. I won’t tell you his reaction but I believe it was a reference to my having maternal carnal relations.

But the gauntlet had been thrown and Guy rose to the occassion. And by the way, this is only the second book review Guy has written and judging by how excrutiating he found it to write this one, it’s distinctly possible there will not be a third.

Both the book, and the subsequent review have distinct viewpoints. Beyond those, I think the most important dialogue we can have is “why”. Why is the Old Guard important? Why are many of us seeking a connection to it? Or disavowing it entirely. Why does it matter to us, in 2012, what a bunch of leather guys may or may have not been up to in the early days? I encourage you to link this review far and wide and let’s start that dialogue.

Loren Berthelsen, Editor in Chief

And now, Guest Editor, Guy Baldwin, offers his review of The Leatherman’s Protocol Handbook: A Handbook on “Old Guard” Rituals, Traditions and Protocols by John D. Weal Published by The Nazca Plains Publishing Company, 2010 Las Vegas, Nevada ISBN: 978–1–935509–76–9

by Leatherati Guest Editor, Guy Baldwin

First, some background: an advance manuscript of this book was sent to me for comment many, many months ago, but unfortunately my own health preoccupations at the time prevented me from giving it any attention. I told the author, John D. Weal, I would try to get around to it when possible, but that never did happen. Much later, by the time a window did open up for me to look at the manuscript, publication was already a foregone conclusion, so I didn’t bother. Now, of course, we have the book itself.

So, what have we here?

The cover and title announce that the reader is holding a “handbook.” And www.dictionary.com tells us that a “handbook” is:

• a book of instruction or guidance, as for an occupation, a manual; a reference book.

The cover and title further tell us that this book of instruction or reference book’s subject is “protocol.” And again, the dictionary explains that protocol is about:

• the customs and regulations dealing with diplomatic formality, precedence and etiquette; manners

Importantly, the cover and subtitle, A Handbook On ‘Old Guard’ Rituals, Traditions and Protocols, more narrowly tell us that this book’s information will be a book of instruction — a reference book — specifically about Old Guard customs, regulations, etiquette and manners.

We all know that for many years now, there has been great interest in learning about “The Old Guard.” Therefore, it’s easy to guess that any book with the cover and title messages I’ve just described would be an attention-grabber for sure. After all, no one has ever before attempted to offer a handbook, a reference book, about O.G. practices.

I opened the book with curious anticipation.

Only to have the author, John D. Weal, inform us — in the very first paragraph of the preface — that instead of the advertised reference book, what we’re holding is actually “…strictly an informative book on my personal journey, traditions, values, rituals, ceremonies and lifestyle I lived.”

As my own disappointment welled up inside of me, I reminded myself that most authors, especially first-time authors, usually have no control over what their books are called, or what the covers look like, for that matter. Many publishers of kink have a long and infuriating history of abusing authors.

After all, I reminded myself, personal stories can be useful because they help illustrate the tremendous range of local variations that we know existed during the Old Guard days of gay leather. In fact, I’ve spoken and written extensively about that regional variation — most recently right here at Leatherati.com:
http://www.leatherati.com/leatherati_issues/2011/09/the-old-guard-classical-leather-culture-revisited.html

As the preface continued, John Weal asserts a version of the Old Guard based on “successive ranks or levels”:

Leather submissives start as novice trainees and systematically earns (sic) their leather while progressing through the levels of third class, second class, first class and senior trainee.

(Hmmm. Wow, I thought to myself, that’s news to me. I’ve never heard of that. I wonder where all this was going on?) Weal continues,

A true Master or Sir that has been trained in Old Guard, started as a sub and worked his way to this title…. This was the way of the “Old Guard”. I grew up knowing and which this book is based upon.

At this point, I raised an eyebrow. Why? Two reasons. First, whenever I read or hear the phrase “a true master,” my own bullshit detector starts to twitch, because I know I’m listening to ideological propaganda. And secondly, because while it was (and is) true that many masters have had at least some slight experience on the bottom, I and others certainly know a few masters who have never played on the bottom side of things and who are perfectly competent, well-respected and accepted members of their respective communities all across the nation.

Again, I found myself wondering just where and when John Weal was writing about.

After finishing the preface, I turned the page and, much to my surprise, I found four long-ish paragraphs attributed to myself from an essay I wrote about the Old Guard way back in 1991. John D. Weal doesn’t explain why these paragraphs are there, or even comment on them. I also noticed he didn’t properly cite the quotation, and the paragraphs themselves had five errors, all of which surprised me.

Right after the fourth quoted paragraph, we read, set off by itself,

A manual of traditional ceremonies, rituals and etiquette.

So now, I’m wondering if maybe THIS is what he really intended as the title to his book — maybe. Or maybe a copy editor just goofed and left it there, dangling in the wind, as it were.

We turn the page and the book proper launches with the first chapter. Here we learn that our author, John D. Weal, began his “leather journey” in the late 1960s, and that he, “…became a collared boy in 1968 to a World War II motorcycle man in San Francisco, after meeting him in Chicago.”

Weal continues,

He (the motorcycle man) remained in San Francisco after the war, starting his leather journey with some of the other men from the war. These men missed the camaraderie they had when they were in the military as well as the strict way of life, so they formed a club. Out of that club grew what I knew to be the “Old Guard” leather culture that incorporated rigid order and rules with a new member being apprenticed to a more experienced member. It was with that club I became a member of “Old Guard” culture.

Upon being collared, Master and I lived in the Castro district of San Francisco during the time of Harvey Milk and the gay rights movement.

Ahhh, so now we know that John D. Weal is talking about San Francisco. Interesting.

Soon, we get to page 81 and a new chapter entitled,

THE “OLD GUARD” HEIRACHY (sic)

After we get past the misspelling of “hierarchy,” we read:

COUNCIL

The council, which was a group of Elders of the community, really governed the local leather community. They were a board of directors, so to speak, for the community. The Council pretty much set the regulations and such in which the clubs/organizations would function within the community and with each of the other clubs. The Council was made up of senior members from each of the local clubs each having equal representation on the Council.
The council group established all the rules, what clubs were governed by the council, and defined the punishment when someone made a violation. It was with their approval that everything would happen within our club and probably most of our dwellings, dungeons, and lives. In “Old Guard” days we had our council which for us had members from several groups to govern the San Francisco Bay area…All coverings for Masters had to be approved by this council so the clubs around recognized the Masters.

And then on to perhaps one of my least favorite sentences in the book:

All other ceremonies would be club controlled and that information would then be passed around at the council meetings giving the council knowledge of who had been received what titles within the said community.

As for this “council of elders” idea, and many others found in this book, well, uh … no. Not really.

Why not? Several reasons:

REASON 1:

I lived in San Francisco twice: first, from 1972–76, and again from 1978–80. I knew and played with Tony Perles, President and Road Captain of the RECONS Motorcycle Club, founded in 1964. Tony is first from left in the photo of the RECON MC below. I also knew Owen Huckle (an Australian, second from left) and Joe Taylor, last on the right. (Later, Joe ran a small leather shop, “Taylor of San Francisco,” and his private dungeon was featured in the “Dungeons of San Francisco” issue of Drummer magazine, #17. Joe built a bondage table for me that’s now in Race Bannon’s possession.)

I also knew, studied with, and played with Jim Kane (mentioned by John D. Weal on page 22 of this “handbook”). Jim became a close friend and mentor to me. Kane had been a founding member of the Rocky Mountaineers Motorcycle Club (1968) in Denver before moving to California, and was a member of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club.

I dated and played with Ron Johnson, who was manager of the No-Name bar on Folsom Street (now Powerhouse) and also a founding member of the Rainbow Motorcycle Club. Both men along with another friend, Bobby Smith, threw me a surprise Saturday night going-away party at the No-Name before I left San Francisco in 1976. Before leaving S.F., I was made an honorary member of the Rainbow MC.

The invite to the party appears below, along with a photo of (left to right) Bobby Smith, myself, Jim Kane and Ron Johnson, behind the bar at the No-Name during the party. Attendees at the party signed the back of the invitation as a memento.

So why all the personal history and photos? Because they offer proof that I knew these guys, that I rode with them on bike runs, that they cared enough about me to produce a black cake and a going-away party in a premier S.F. leather bar on a Saturday night.

I can promise readers here that NONE of these men would have submitted to the rule of any such “Council of Elders.” NONE of the “covers” (we called them “bike caps” by the way) on the men in the photograph above, including mine, were received in any sort of ceremony, or with the prior approval of any sort of “council.”

I was in the homes and dungeons of these men and never heard or saw any evidence of control by any “council,” nor did I ever hear it mentioned by any man during any bike run or event.

REASON 2:

As you have read in the material quoted above from John D. Weal, this “council” is supposed to have set regulations for “clubs and organizations.”

Uh … well, first, there were no gay BDSM organizations in the gay leathermen’s world of San Francisco until The 15 Association was established in 1980. I’m not a member, but I invite members of The 15 to offer comment regarding any so-called regulation by this “Council of Elders.”

Some loose-knit fisting groups and networks did exist before and after 1980. These centered mostly around the FFA San Francisco Chapter, a few local T.A.I.L. members, the Catacombs, a private and by-permission-only fisting palace, and the Slot and Handball Express, both local kink hotels. No “council” could have imposed rules on fisters, even if such council had existed.

The only other possible “clubs” for this mythical council to have regulated would have been the gay motorcycle clubs. But the politics and personalities in the bike clubs were sufficiently contentious that, in San Francisco, enough members resigned to form (with new arrivals) new splinter clubs continually, as the following list suggests:

Club Name

Founding Date

CMC MC1960RECONS MC1964BARBARY COASTERS MC1966CHEATERS MC & CONSTANTINES MC 1967SERPENTS MC1968SAN FRANCISCANS MC1970RAINBOW MC (RMC)1972CENTURIONS MC1975KNIGHTS OF MALTA SF MC1975

All these clubs had officers, they all had recording secretaries, they all kept minutes of meetings, and they all had disgruntled members come and go. The mere suggestion that a “council of Elders” could have kept any of the bike clubs secretly under its thumb is absurd.

I asked a professional librarian (Lucesco of leatherati.com) to look at the surviving records of the S.F. bike clubs of the period, in the GLBT history section of the San Francisco Public Library, for any hint that such a “Council of Elders” existed. No scrap of evidence was found.

I believe that’s because it did not exist.

To assert that such a huge secret (an all-powerful “Council of Elders) could have been kept by so many people, over such a long time, is both absurd and an insult to any thinking person’s intelligence.

REASON 3:

The period during which this council is said (by John D. Weal) to have done all this grand regulation has been left conspicuously vague. No matter, because the entire mood of San Francisco, beginning even before 1967 and continuing right through the 1970s and into the 1980s, was about freedom from social regimentation. (Think: Gold Rush Morality.)

With the “Summer of Love” in 1967, LSD and other hallucinogens began to flood into the city. Leathermen were using these drugs (including marijuana, hashish, and alcohol) during sex about as often as anyone else. Drugs and rigid community regulation don’t generally go together, by the way. Especially among sexual outlaws.

Gay bikers saw ourselves as outlaws to one degree or another, so the whole notion of some grand council of elders regulating the clubs simply doesn’t square with the spirit of freedom and adventure that were so much a part of why we rode bikes in the first place.

If John D. Weal had written that all this stuff had happened in, say, Pittsburgh, or maybe even Memphis, his fictions might have escaped close examination and he might have got away with it. But in San Francisco? No, simply not credible.

REASON 4:

Three years before Jim Kane died in 2004, he brought some 16 boxes of his personal archive to me so that I could give it some preliminary organization before sending it on to the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago.

Going through each and every scrap of paper, photograph, clipping, address book, all his BDSM equipment, his book and art collection, all his leather gear — doing all that took me the better part of one year.

As you might guess, I found nothing to confirm anything I read in John D. Weal’s Handbook. Nothing.

Readers curious to know how the Leather Archives & Museum describes its collection of the Jim Kane material are strongly encouraged to read it for themselves by following this link (it’s a 90-second read).

REASON 5

On page 22, John D. Weal quotes an unnamed “well-known leatherman” as follows:

“If Sy Lechter, Jim Kane, Bill Swenning and Val Martin are to be made gods in a pantheon they would not recognize, I don’t think they would have a problem with it.”

I know that Jim would have had a big problem being compared with Val Martin for any reason whatsoever.

In 1975, Jim invited me to attend the premiere private showing of the first feature-length gay leathermen’s BDSM porno film, Born to Raise Hell, at the Nob Hill Cinema on Powell Street on a Sunday afternoon. Of course I said yes, and discovered that, at age 28, I was one of the youngest among the fifty or so men invited to watch the premiere.

Val Martin stars as the “bearded sadist.” From the lead IMDB review: “Val Martin stars as the brutal psychopathic sadist who sexual energy is a riveting, relentless and jaw-dropping experience for his unwilling victims and viewers.”

I couldn’t agree more: the audience at the premier was stunned almost to silence because what we saw on the screen looked nothing like the BDSM we knew. Race Bannon knew Val Martin, and Race tells me that Val never saw himself as a leatherman, which is probably why he is such a crappy top in Born to Raise Hell.
Val Martin had arrived by plane from Brazil or Argentina only a week or so before shooting the movie and spoke almost no English. Which means that what we saw on the screen is what the director, Roger Earl, thought was BDSM — but Jim Kane sure didn’t. And neither did I. So one wonders why John D. Weal was moved to quote some nameless leatherman who drops the names Jim Kane and Val Martin.

(Oh, and by the way, the unnamed leatherman was Joseph Bean, in his essay Old Guard? If You Say So. And John D. Weal didn’t even have the courtesy to give Joseph’s comment a proper citation — wow. Makes me wonder just how much other unattributed material from how many sources got woven into this “handbook.”)

REASON 6

On Friday, November 4, 2011, I delivered a keynote address to a specially invited audience of about 150 of San Francisco’s leather elite to kick off a special-event weekend hosted by the Leather Traditions group there. After speaking on a topic unrelated to this “handbook,” I asked the audience to wait and hear about a favor I wanted their help with.

I read the paragraphs about the “Council” quoted in boldface above and asked of the audience that if anyone there, or anyone they knew anywhere, could confirm for me the existence of this Council of Elders, would they please either email me or speak with me after my keynote speech?

It’s been almost two months since that speech, and I’ve received not a single whisper of confirmation. Not one.

REASON 7

No academic professional who has studied the gay men’s leather community in San Francisco can confirm the existence of the council John D. Weal asserts existed, or any of the protocol behaviors he says were typical.

REASON 8

On page 61, John D. Weal offers readers Positions for Protocol, and later we find Hand and Eye Signals for Protocol. I actually laughed out loud when I turned to these pages, simply because I knew exactly zero leathermen who employed any of this stuff, either during BDSM play or in their relationships, “back in the day.” I know none who do so now, either.

Yes, it is true that, mostly in the Gorean portions of the het world, such positions and postures are sometimes used in high-end D/s relationships. But for John D. Weal to assert that Old Guard gay leathermen used them in the 1960s or 70s is insulting beyond belief.

REASON 9

Weal asserts that a “true master” had to demonstrate skill and proficiency in fifteen areas of BDSM technique. Again, more insulting nonsense. Gay leathermen back in the day learned only about the activities that turned us on. What possible reason would there be to master some skill or technique unless it turned us on? Jim Kane himself once claimed (I thought too modestly) that he was only really good at about eight specific activities, all of which turned him on.

###

I could easily go on with twenty more reasons why this “handbook” offers little that’s useful to readers — other than as an example of how unwise it is to try to fool people.

We cannot allow anyone to make shit up about us, or themselves, and peddle it as our history, much less call it a “handbook.”

Enough of us know where we came from that those who perpetrate fraud and call it history can expect to be similarly scrutinized and exposed.

For about the last 25 years, the het communities have been plagued periodically with “reports” of European lineages of kink nobility — generations of high-end BDSM players, brought up on grand estates, often in castles, and schooled in the BDSM arts in fabulous dungeons, by the cruel but classy head(s) of this or that clan.

The “reporters” typically maintain that traditional, formal rules of secrecy prevented any record-keeping, any photographs, any diaries, any mention to “outsiders” of the goings-on inside. But they supposedly saw it with their own eyes, always alone, or they had heard the stories from the “last survivor.”

Gay men and lesbians have typically raised a dubious eyebrow as our internal bullshit detectors went into red-line. And all too often, we have smugly thought to ourselves things like, “Oh those het folks and their silly urban legends! Thank the leather gods we aren’t burdened by such self-aggrandizing tellers of tales who take us for idiots!”

But with the publication of this “handbook,” our turn to wrestle with fiction presented as fact has finally come. Bottom line for me: credibility = zero.

I have thought it kinder till now not to dwell on the author’s fourth-grade grammar, tortured sentence construction, confusing syntax; but it becomes important to ask ourselves why the owner of Nazca Plains Publishing would allow such embarrassing language skills to so poorly represent his company — and the author, the Old Guard, and gay leathermen?

Just to make a buck? To show cynical contempt for the Old Guard itself? To mock the leather literature? To let the author hang himself in public?

To throw rotten scraps of invented protocol to those hungry for the superficiality which protocol too frequently offers?

Couldn’t Nazca find or afford an editor to fix the language problems found on every single page?

I don’t know; it’s a mystery to me why any thinking publisher would do this to us, and to himself. I’m deeply offended and I urge others who feel similarly to register their feelings here, to post their reviews at AMAZON, and also protest directly to the publisher.

Oh — and ask for a refund:

The Nazca Plains Corporation 4640 Paradise Rd, Suite 141 Las Vegas, NV 89109–8000

The trees that died for this book would, in my opinion, better have been used for essential household paper products.