Does a harness make you a real player? In an Era of Closing Leather Bars and Harness-Wearing P
Does a harness make you a real player? In an Era of Closing Leather Bars and Harness-Wearing Poseurs, Where Are the Real Leather Men? By Mike Miksche, Slate.com, June 29, 2017These days, even the young’uns are showing up to gay, kink-themed events, styling themselves in decorative neoprene harnesses as if performing some kind of butch drag. It’s worlds away from the hardcore BDSM scene of the 1970s and ’80s captured by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, who immortalized the leather man in his photographs. Be it the master and slave, the boot fetishist, or the fist-ee: They were rough personas, serious and perverse. In the New York Times, the gay nightlife chronicler Michael Musto wrote a few years ago that the scene has now lost much of that overt sadomasochistic edge; it’s becoming more about dressing-up, shifting from a serious lifestyle to a sexy costume:The leather scene used to occupy a very visible part of gay culture. In the 1960s through the early ’80s, men in leather caps and chaps could be seen strutting about Christopher Street, looking as if they had emerged from a Tom of Finland illustration by way of a Marlon Brando movie still.Musto cited the closures of New York leather and fetish bars: places like the Ramrod, Spike, Rawhide, and Badlands. This shift also happened outside of New York in cities like San Francisco, where more public venues are shutting down or morphing into mainstream-like bars. On the bar scene and in the street, it can seem like leather has gone the way of the disco, the piano bar, or the Times Square sex cinema. So what does it mean to be a real leather man in today’s apparently dying scene?Continue reading at Slate.com. -- source link
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