not the racist kind

Today we remember the 49 lives lost and countless others forever changed on June 12, 2016, at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. What was meant to be a night of joy, music, and pride became one of unimaginable tragedy.

We honor the memory of those we lost—most of them young, queer, and Latinx—and we stand with the survivors, the families, and the community still healing.

Omg hi yes! My favorite segment:

[ A work by the avant-garde genderqueer performance group Antony and the Johnsons comes to mind, “The Cripple and the Starfish’.” I have it on my iPod, and Ian and I share an earbud apiece to listen to Antony, in the role of the titular cripple, sing of a sadomasochistic love:

It’s true I always wanted love to be hurtful

And it’s true I always wanted love to be filled with pain and bruises...

And there’s no rhyme or reason, I’m changing like the seasons

Watch! I’ll even cut off my finger

It will grow back like a Starfish!

I am very happy, so please hit me

I am very very happy, so come on hurt me

I’ll grow back like a Starfish

I am moved, from my post-operative transsexual perspective, by the singer’s plaintive association of amputation with the yearning for a transformation of affect. In the song, the (fantasy of the) self-inflicted bodily wound functions to create a space of subjective fulfillment. The empty space of the missing digit is produced, through an act of evacuation, as a space of regeneration. That space, being void and not filled, allows for the movement of desire into it. It is thus not memberlessness itself that is desired, but the subjective experience of transformative growth in which absence becomes the space of possibility.

In that the amputation of the member produces a space of actualization, it functions as chora – an ancient Greek concept with the double meaning of both an enclosed space and the act of enclosing, which figured prominently in Plato’s cosmogony and which has become a contested site in feminist poststructuralist reworkings of the western philosophical tradition. In Plato’s Timaeus, the chora is as his phallocentric philosophy imagines the womb to be, a passive vessel for the active male elements from which the world is formed. Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and others have emphasized the active function of enclosing, holding and containing to assert the positive contribution of the chora in the process of generation as a space generative of movement that spills forth from containment.

From my forward-facing perspective I look back on my body as a psychically bounded space or container that becomes energetically open through the break of its surface – a rupture experienced as interior movement, a movement that becomes generative as it encloses and invests in a new space, through a perpetually reiterative process of growing new boundaries and shedding abandoned materialities: a mobile, membranous, temporally fleeting and provisional sense of enfolding and enclosure. This is the utopian space of my ongoing poesis. ]

you need to be more specific. books? films? fiction? non-fiction? p*rn mags?

i'm staring at my bookshelf right now...

slapping leather by ford & scofield is a wonderful historical archive of queer and gay rodeo culture. not exactly capitol-L Leather, but (imo) tangentially related.

leatherfolk - radical sex, people, politics and practice by mark thompson is harder to come by but is an absolute must-read for the context of our leather culture and the intersectionality throughout, largely thru anecdotal accounts.

i'd already recommended in a past post the leatherboy's handbook (3rd edition) by vince andrews, and while focused primarily on leatherboys, it provides a ton of historical context and guidance for old guard protocols that a lot of us still use. (it does, however, defend the use of "leatherboy" as non-gendered and a role - just like how anyone can call themselves "daddy.")

I really hate the way corporations and others are trying to capitalize on Leather culture for shock value and attempting to appear subversive, while doing little or nothing to help Leatherfolk or the advancement of sexual freedom and LGBT+ rights

Don't silo yourself into only interacting with the dykes if you're a dyke. Don't only talk to men if you're a man. Don't stick with the 25 year olds if you're 25.

Are there going to be people you don't like? People who are annoying? People with bad opinions? Are you going to have to push out the cop and uniform apologists? Yeah. But those people exist in your smaller groups too.

Leather is a community. That means having strong friendships, acquaintances, comrades, etc. who aren't like you. Who you might not want to fuck. Who you might not want to make bleed. People who will bring you to their events, who will vet you to others, who will collaborate you on projects, who you can learn from, who can learn from you.

I think about when Cynthia Slater entered the Catacombs for the first time. Sure the men raised their eyebrows for a minute, but then she was welcomed with open arms and fisted with abandon. And everyone treasured her presence there, even though she wasn't a gay man. And because of her, the Catacombs began welcoming broader groups of leather folks. More leather community got to experience what is widely regarded as one of the most magical leather spaces to have existed.

I think about how the leatherdykes showed up for leathermen during AIDS. That even though they were not running in the same parties or fucking each other all the time (certainly they were sometimes), they saw their kin in crisis and helped. And were some of the ONLY people who did. Because that's what leather community is and does - we don't leave each other behind.

Some of my dearest friends in leather are not leatherdykes, they're not people I'd fuck, they're not people I'd fall in romantic love with, but they are so fucking important to me. We nerd out about history, we go to and service events put on by our loved ones, we meet each others friends and gush to them about each other. We keep each other safe. We hold each other when the world fucks us once again.

Photos of leatherdykes, a lesbian contingent of the leather S/M subculture that emerged in the 1970s and 80s

I believe that the world’s problems can be solved in the bedroom. … S&M is a liberating game; it liberates both man and woman, butch and femme without necessarily taking their chosen roles away from they (if they still want to keep them once they understand the game). S&M teaches you that both sides have the power and how they can use it to their best advantage. —Rosenjoy, in GCN, 1976

We've done a solid amount of digging on the internet over the past couple years and found scans of a bunch of important leatherdyke-related magazines, zines, books, etc. in a bunch of different places, in addition to our own work at collecting, cataloging, and scanning whatever materials we've been able to get our hands on. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we wanted to post some links for people to find a lot of the materials we've tracked down. We do archival work to keep our history and culture alive and accessible. We highly encourage everyone who sees this to share this post widely, share the links around, send them to friends off tumblr, download all of these materials, repost them elsewhere (every online archive is at risk of being taken down without notice, so the more places things are, the better!), and just generally spread it far and wide!

So, here's a bunch of links:

Our archive, which we're continuously updating as we scan and prepare materials we've collected. If you tab over to "Lists", we've made a bunch of lists of other materials we think are important - including scans of Quim, Venus Infers, On Our Backs, a bunch of important leatherdyke books, and a full run of TransSisters!

Carta Monir's archive, with a couple things we put in our lists, and a bunch of cool trans materials

Digital Transgender Archive's Internet Archive page, where we found the full run of TransSisters. It's got a ton of trans fetish magazines, which can be tough to read at times but there's a lot of stuff to be found in there if you're willing to wade through it all. If you've seen chastity's Trans Leatherdyke History talk, a lot of that research came from these kinds of magazines

Middle and Ring has an extensive archive of lesbian materials sorted by topic, including a lot of important books, 12 issues of On Our Backs, etc.

A couple Flickr albums with incomplete scans of two issues of Quim

We have not been able to track down any scans of the original run of the BIPOC leather magazine Black Leather in Color (BLIC), but there is a revived version of the magazine first launched in 2024, available exclusively online on their website. At the time of this post, they've put out 5 issues

Fat Girl has been publicly archived in full (save for some images of people who have not consented to be included in the archived versions) on the Fat Lib Archive, with a wide range of accessible options to view its contents

The first 3 issues of DaemonumX's FIST zine are available for free download

Not a digital archive, but if you're interested in physical copies, the long-running leather shop ASWGT produced issues 18-39 of the leather periodical SandMUtopia Guardian, and you can order a full run of the issues they produced from their website. The website looks ancient and you might be nervous to order from them, but we can confirm they're still active - we ordered and received all of those issues! You can also order single issues from them. And while you're at it, order some gear from them! They've got really cool looking impact toys!