Woven Lives: The History of Leather Households

Documenting the history of our Leather Households

Rob Ridinger

Documenting the past of the variously patterned households and family structures constructed by men serving in the roles of masters and the leathermen drawn to both them and their vision poses several problems for any researcher.  The first and most contradictory is that such households are, by their nature, both very public and very invisible to both the wider leather community, and certainly to the more mainstream gay and lesbian social world, a fact that despite the foundation of MAsT remains substantially unaltered.  This is due partly to the manner through which they form -- sometimes via contact with an already established pairing which then expands into a household, or by word of mouth -- a process which may be remembered in later writings by members but does not lend itself to other types of recording.  This invisibility has also affected the recording of the lives of the men who build and maintain them.  While the amount of literature on the leather community in the social sciences has improved in both quantity and accuracy over the past few decades, the bulk of what is available on leather history is still produced within the community, often as columns such as those appearing on Joe Gallagher's forum leatherpage.com, or existing as essays in book form, where memories of early contacts with a household can appear.  Reference to now-vanished networks of leathermen as de facto families and households is also made in some of the speeches given at special events, an example being the address on "The Future of Leather", given at the Great Lakes Leather Conference in Louisville in 2000 by Joseph Bean, in which he described the private world into which he had first stepped as a novice and the men who were looked to for leadership.

The hunger to belong that drives the formation of any leather household is balanced by a less stated but equally powerful force -- the wish to be remembered, the sense of making yourself a part of the legacy of the leather world so that, fifty years from now, someone with the same craving for a home can see pictures of you, read the philosophy underlying the formation of the household, and perhaps, find your successors still practicing the pattern of life your Master and the men who looked to him created as a living legacy.

With the coming of the Internet, word of the existence of leather households built upon varied themes and combinations of thoughts has been easier to spread, sometimes resulting in numerous applications from member-wannabes to an already full-extended Master.  Yet this very accessibility, while it has worked to diffuse the idea of formal household structure, has worked against the preservation of its past by stimulating a large number of experimental groupings, many of which are short-lived, a phenomenon reminiscent of the widespread rise and often swift dissolution of gay and lesbian communes in the 1960s and 1970s.  This being so, as an historian of the leather community and a member of a household, I should like to offer some guidelines for MAsT members and the community in general to consider to begin discussions on this matter.

GUIDELINES

1. When a household is first formed, the Master responsible should set forth in writing the statement of purpose, giving his rationale for creating this new social form and the criteria by which individuals may earn the privilege of membership.  This is one of the most crucial aspects of household life, yet all too often rests in the personal interpretation of leather held by one man, whose dreams, while known to his boys, will pass with him unless formally codified. An excellent example of this may be found on the homepages of Household Keppeler and Master Taino.
2. All documentation created as part of the functioning of a household, beginning with applicant essays and extending up to the formal claiming ceremony (however structured) should be set into a handbook in paper form.  The use of websites notwithstanding, there is no guarantee that the site which bears the household today will still exist even six months from now, while a handbook can be copied onto the web or disseminated via a newsgroup to reach as many potential readers as possible.
3. Take pictures of your household -- visual records of the leather community are often limited to images taken of titleholders and contests and runs, and all too often portraits of families go missing or are thought of only too late.
4. Create and maintain a history of your household in some fashion or format that can easily be updated, perhaps making it the duty of one member to handle this.
5. Place suitable documentation on record with the Leather Archives and your local gay and lesbian archives, so that your presence is acknowledged both locally and nationally.

I hope that the above suggestions, while admittedly general, will spark an awareness of the unique and precious heritage that households bring to the leather community and will spur us all to work to keep their legacies alive and growing.

Rob Ridinger
Oblate, Household Keppeler
May 16, 2005