I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “gay vs. queer” argument lately, especially as I see it playing out among some leathermen.
And I think I’ve finally figured out what bothers me about some of the ways we talk about it.
I am a cis gay man, white, wear Wescos, Mr. S formals from Berlin, custom breeches from Northern Ireland. I have a boy in a 24/7 D/s dynamic whom I married in a church. I ride an old-fashioned Indian bagger, Ive taught flogging class, cofounded a leather club and have been on the board of the Chicago Hellfire Club—the world’s oldest known gay leather club.
By any reasonable measure, I’m about as “old guard” as you can get for my age. I spend a lot of time in spaces that were built around gay men and gay male sexuality. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
And I actually agree that we sometimes make the mistake of imagining that all of these cultures were always one culture.
They weren’t. They aren’t.
In the past, gay male culture was its own thing, lesbian culture was its own thing, leather was its own thing, drag was its own thing, leather dykes existed, dance culture was its own thing, and trans communities had their own histories and spaces. There were intersections, of course, and people moved between them and alliances absolutely existed, but they were not simply one seamless “queer community” waiting to be named.
But something specific happened that changed the relationship between all of these communities:
And I think the American experience of AIDS matters enormously here, because this is not just a story about illness—it is a story about what it means to be sick in America in the 80s and 90s.
In the United States, you didn’t have to die to have AIDS destroy your life. Your first doctor’s appointment could begin the process, because in a system where healthcare was tied so tightly to employment and insurance, with employers free to discriminate, becoming seriously ill could mean losing your job, losing your coverage, losing your income, and suddenly being unable to afford the care you needed. You weren’t just sick, you were often instantly poor, and in a Reagan’s America where money was power, that meant something very specific: no job, no insurance, no income - you didn’t just lose health, you lost agency, you lost protection, and you lost your ability to participate in the world. Western Europe had AIDS, for sure, but they had some kind of framework for caring for the sick independent of employment.
And as our community began to die AND to lose everything, we were not only facing a medical catastrophe, we were facing the collapse of our collective power.
And then, in the smoldering ruins of that crisis, something incredible happened: ACT UP.
At first, it was the dying—people with every reason to be afraid and every reason to be furious—but then the circle widened. Lesbians showed up, trans people showed up, drag queens showed up, people from other queer communities showed up, and people who didn’t share our identities, our sexual practices, or our subcultures began fighting for our lives alongside us.
And anyone who knows the history can tell you that leathermen were not outside of that crisis—they were inside it, fully exposed to it, and among the earliest and hardest hit waves of infection in many cities. They were part of the same unfolding catastrophe, not separate from it, but living through it in real time alongside everyone else.
Queer power was born—not in abstraction, not in theory, but in the very American tradition of direct action, protest, disruption, and refusal. The same country that taught us to organize labor, to march in the streets, to confront institutions head-on, also produced a generation that turned grief into political force.
And ACT UP didn’t just change how queer people protested. They changed how medicine worked. Their activism helped force the FDA to rethink how experimental drugs could be made available and how patients could participate in the drug-approval process.
And slowly, something shifted.
The separate cultures didn’t disappear. Gay men were still gay men, lesbians were still lesbians, leather was still leather, drag was still drag, and dance culture was still dance culture. But the boundaries between them became more permeable. We needed each other, and in needing each other, we became something larger than any one of those identities alone.
That, I think, is where the modern idea of a broader American queer community actually comes from: people standing next to each other in the streets of American cities when the stakes were high enough that difference stopped being the most important thing about us, and collective survival became the only thing that mattered.
And that solidarity didn’t end when AIDS became treatable. It became political infrastructure. The broader coalitions and political consciousness that developed through decades of queer organizing helped make later victories possible, including marriage equality.
And that history matters to me when I hear people today arguing about who does or doesn’t belong.
Because I am not interested in erasing gay male culture. I don’t think every gay male space needs to be for everyone. I don’t think everyone has to call themselves queer. And I don’t think the differences between our communities are a problem. I actually think those differences are part of what makes our culture rich.
But if people who weren’t cis gay leather men were good enough to fight for our lives, care for our dying, risk their safety, and stand beside us when the country was watching us disappear…
You fucking bet I stand by full queer inclusion in the spaces I move through.
That’s just paying a debt.
