Before reading this, I would like to encourage people who don’t know me to visit my Bio first.
Indonesian often says if you don’t know the person, you don’t care about them.
With all due respect, please do not pay any care of my articles before knowing more about me first 😀
“Wait, you’re a Queer?”
— Netflix’s Tales of the City. The Price of Oil: Ep. 4
“Thirty years I lived in San Francisco, I still have no idea what that word means. It’s like the price of oil, it changes every day.”
“You prefer just plain old “dyke”?”
“Honey, at this point, you’d have to pry it open with a crowbar, so who cares what you call me.”
A Fetish.
I think my fetish started all the way when I was a kid. I saw Power Rangers and Kamen Riders, where all these heroes were in tight costumes then often they got in some predicament situations, captured by villains. Or in western versions, cowboys, soldiers, or cops; yes they all wearing tight stuff too, captured by villains. The keyword here I think is tight clothing, something that would feature their muscles and abs. It is a known thing that in modern times, human by nature see muscles as something to seek as it represents beauty and health. In the Renaissance times and pre-historic times, men look for fat partners because they represents health and fertility.
In the current times, well, let’s be honest, it’s fucking hard to get a hook up if you don’t look like a twink or a jock. There’s a movement to get away from that kind of harsh view and tell everyone that everyone should be proud of how they look. We should not be judgy. We should be inclusive. We should be kind. Yet, we can’t tell those people that are exclusive to twinks or muscular people that they’re an asshole, they have the right to pick who to bring to their bed.
When gay men came out right after World War II, some people, just like other baby boomers, including Touko Laaksonen, were looking for the kind of partner ideal for them to have sex with. Hence they came up with a hyper masculine-looking man, cladded in leather, featuring their muscles. This image has become the standard of what leathermen should look like for the next decades. There is some alternatives like military uniforms, cowboy uniform, construction workers; again, they’re featuring muscles. I imagine back then, having muscles was not hard. Most works are not office works and people were back from World War II here.
Over decades, these ideas developed, standardized, cemented, and for some, turned into a cult that many practiced in BLUF.
And decades later, in the 21st century, how things have changed. Being gay in many places won’t cause you to: lose your job or get arrested by police and become a sex offender. You can get married in many countries as a gay man. We now recognize the existence of transgender, and non-binaries. We perhaps now also recognize the existence of People of Color and how some concepts of kink and fetish might be emotionally offensive to them. And to the future, just like what DeDe in Netflix’s Tales of City said “I have been in San Francisco for 30 years and I still don’t know what Queer means, that thing is like price of oil, it changes everyday.”. These days, we also have many more variations of fetish. There’s rubber, there’s puppies, there’s furries, and many that are in between and many that challenging the ideals of BLUF.
A Space.
2015 was a changing year for me. I was racially harassed and fired from my job. I have to realize that, fuck, I will have to return to Indonesia after tasting all the kinky gay endeavors. I was forced to a big crossroads of my life: Option A. Return to Indonesia. Live the rest of my life in the closet, and try to see if I could revive my Mom’s crumbling printing business. Option B. Let someone who is twice older than me marry me, and figure out the rest of my life with a ruined career. I opted for Option B. I still can’t wrap my head till now how the heck at the time I choose that, but, I never regret that choice.
Realizing how badly I was treated as an Asian from the job’s race harassment, I was angry. I needed to make the change to right the wrong. Then it happened, play space in San Francisco called the Alchemy got in the news. During Folsom, they hosted a POC party, and the space volunteers called the police for some reason. This caused a big rebuke in the community. The owner decided to let the ownership go. The Leather Alliance was trying to pick up that space and was looking for volunteers.
I honestly didn’t know what kind of pain BIPOC, in general, have gone through with the systemic racism in the United States. For one thing, I know being treated unequally just because of my skin color and my heritage sucks. The space is only one block from my house. So I decided to volunteer.
That short-term volunteer turned into a huge thing. Apparently, in the face of the premium price of space in San Francisco, every letter in the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup is fighting for its own spaces including straight people (I mean pansexual people). The whole marketing stuff where we need to have POC in the rosters and everything doesn’t matter anymore since the battles above are much more important. The POC issues are just issues that can be weaponized for queer space problems. The POC themself? Well, they have their own problem to deal with and they’re just out of reach.
I thought I made a mistake by letting myself get into this mess. I burned bridges instead of building relationships with people in the community. I lost potential people to be friends with instead of making more friends (and possibly to play with). However, Christopher Wood changed my course. I don’t recall if I initially met him on a recon hook-up or what not? But I remember meeting him by coincidence at 440. He knew I had been involved with what was then called SF Catalyst. I vented to him how things were broken. He decided to take over of the space, and I helped a coup that made that happen. From that point, my journey to the brotherhood of the 15 Association and beyond started.
On the other hand, I also started to be active in the leather bar scene. To this day, I often wonder if the leather bar (in real life) has contributed anything to my sex life. Probably not. I never get hooked with anyone there. But a leather bar has been a bit like a town hall. It’s a place where you can socialize and chat with others. Where Recon has taken the job of matchmaking, social media has not taken the role where one can socialize in a civilized manner. In fact, a leather bar perhaps still helps ensure we got a good hookup (e.g., meeting people to prevent you from getting raped by that crazy person you meet on Recon?).
Out of many events that leather bars do, I found that BLUF parties picked my interest due to my favoritism toward masculine ideals. However, to this day, I never get hooked with anyone at BLUF parties.
There are some people in BLUF that have earned my respect and got close to me. I hear a lot from a few of them about how time has changed. They long for the old-time leather bar where you strictly have to be in BLUF uniform to enter. There was a process on how one can’t simply turn into a Dom without being of service to others first. There was a romanticized cult of the so-called ‘Old Guard’ leather. Some said they hate how Folsom is no longer full of male energy these days. Few wonder what the puppies are and how they fit into the leather scene. Few questioned the cross-dressing people.
A Fetish and A Space
Everyone in the LGBTQ+ spectrums should understand that our identity means our existence. Each of us had to fight hard to earn the validation of our identity. Some of us had to fight harder due to our intersections (eg: POC, Women, Trans, etc), but in general, all of us fought hard to earn our validations.
If you look into a dictionary, a space can be defined as the freedom and scope to live, think, and develop in a way that suits one. Well, definitely hard to have a space that suits everyone.
As time changes from time to time, what looks good and what looks bad change. The terms of queers change from time to time. It’s like the price of oil; they change every day.
I think I would be interested to see, if the romanticized idea of what some folks in BLUF want, can exists in the current time. I think they can bring back that old tradition. That being said, there are parts of history, that probably best to be a history. Back then, we don’t recognize FtM as male. Also back then, we don’t recognize the rights of POC.
I had been in discussion with SF BLUF committee before. I think we need to acknowledge that bringing back the old tradition to the leather bar would not be possible anymore without a lot of money by renting the whole space for a private event. Leather bar these days is a public space, and thankfully we can have a public queer space. No longer it is a private space. Just as some of the minorities group within LGBTQ+ community are having an issue to have their own space, everyone have to pay their fair share to own the space, with enough volunteers to run them. Otherwise, everyone has be to be kind to each other to be packed in a share public space.
Yes, this is meant for everyone. It is known well throughout history that progressive queer movements often don’t align with their leather queer. These folks proudly believe they are ‘Queer-er’ than their dirty cousin. The Black Lives Matter movement recently has caused some people to questions the leather community fondness towards ‘Cop Uniform’, and by that, believing that we should ban BLUF. It’s the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ mentality they said.
I think this is a dangerous polarization that we shouldn’t go to. The idea of fetish is a reclaim of negative experiences. It is a taboo play. As many community leaders and something that I learned myself have said, it’s very rare for any institution to be monolithic, though it may have majority factions. If you don’t like the cop, be a cop! I originally joined the leather community to fight for diversity, and yet, here I am being in the middle of the crossfires. That’s because once I’m in, I do see the good parts and the bad parts, and they are not black and white.