Masters, slaves, boys, daddies, bears, and cubs

It used to be one earned his leathers. There were leather “families” and the old guard had a pretty rigid protocol.   Are those days gone?

• Mostly gone. Pity. i used to be the total property of a very “Old Guard” German Master (there was no other kind back in the 60’s and the early 70’s). HE was part of a closed-knit group of MASTER and THEIR slaves but i do not know if there was any “earning the leather” procedure because, like any other slave in that group, i was considered as a part of my MASTER.i certainly miss that kind of a MASTER as well as the Old Guard group.
• If more LeatherSirs and senior Leatherboys spent the amount of time and effort investing themselves into the younger generation that they currently spend bitching about how OG Leather is dead, the community could be as vibrant as it was in the 70s, if given the right amount of time.i have an Old Guard LeatherSir; i am a part of His family, and He is investing time, effort, and money into seeing that i grow into an honorable OG LeatherSir who will continue the traditions, protocols, etc, that i have been taught. Why this is rare, i don’t know… AIDS may be a valid excuse still, resulting in a lack of mentors when we were busy caring for our sick instead of our young.i hold the opinion that if you have been in this community for a good deal of time, then you have no valid excuse for not mentoring a boy in a 1-on-1 substantive Leather association.
• The word “LeatherSir” itself is “new leather”, as is the use of the word “Sir” as a noun as in “my Sir”. So are many of these protocols claimed to be “old guard” by guys who’ve come out in the last decade. The term and concept of the “leather family” never existed until the mid-90’s. “Earning your leathers” was limited to certain clubs and regions, not worldwide, whereas other areas and clubs had different methods of initiation and recognition. Even the stuff in the Leatherman’s Handbook only covered the scene in Los Angeles, as Townsend himself said.And this “rigid protocol” people talk about actually varied from city to city and even from club to club within each city. Read some of Guy Baldwin’s lectures or talk to some of the few remaining guys who were there in the 60’s, not the guys who sit in their chat rooms and make up revisionist protocols and language because they can’t fake that confident sense of authority that came so naturally to the men whose memory they’re abusing.Not that any of that matters. Cultures evolve, and leather is no exception. What causes the controversy that makes these threads keep going is people pining for something that never existed quite the way they’re imagining it. Merely having had a master from that generation doesn’t make a man “old guard”, nor does it automatically make any practices he adopts “old guard”. Maybe it makes him “old guard style”, like a bagel from a supermarket in Iowa is “New York style”.

  So where’s my boy? My boy is dead, and so is the master who trained me to own that boy in his stead, and so is the master in whose house I met both of them and many others, and so, to my knowledge, is every other leatherman I knew when I entered the leather scene in 1989. The last one from that generation whom I knew to be alive was over 90 a few years ago. When people lament that the “old guard” is dead, it’s because for the most part, the “old guard” of whom they speak is literally dead, and now there’s a bunch of wankers pretending to speak with their voices despite being 10 to 40 years younger. People are using “old guard” like a brand name, as a substitute for experience and a shortcut to authority, and I think it sucks.

  The best you can do is respect and listen to your elders — as wide a variety of elders as you can find, not just one guy who claims to be the final authority, and not just follow someone’s romanticized (and most often desexualized) vision of a lost generation.

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