The Boys Are Back In Town
From a distance, I have long since admired a particular subsection of the gay community: the leather men. They add a certain harmony to the gay population that balances out the Dior sunglasses and circuit boys. Generally, gayness is always about certain extremes and balances between masculinity and femininity. Straight acting, hyper-masculine macho gays must accept the fact that they are not going to look so manly with a cock in their mouth. With all the infinite classifications within the community there seems to be limitless numbers of ways for men to pair off. The chubbies, the bears, otters, cubs, pigs, the twinks, the professionals, blue collar types, the swingers, the meth addicts, the daddies, the gym bunnies. If there is a way that men look, the gays will find a way to classify them. We’re a shallow people.
And beyond appearances, there’s dom, sub, down-low and discreet, straight acting, purse carriers, nelly queens, scene and non-scene. So it is my particular pleasure to see Chicago welcome International Mister Leather to town yearly. There is such a sense of irony to the leather men. Yes, appearance-wise, they look very different from the drag queens, but if you examine the lifestyle that goes into fetish gear it’s remarkably similar. It’s a socioeconomic statement just to be able to attend IML, to spend a thousands of dollars on the hotel, the airfare and other travel expenses, the registration, the vast amounts of alcohol consumed at extraordinarily inflated prices via the host hotel’s (The Hyatt) bar. Then there is the gear. Let me tell you about the gear that some of these men bring. This is not Payless pleather ankle boots, this is high end leatherwear, entire outfits of it. Imagine: not just splurging on the leather jacket from Banana Republic, or the motorcycle boots from Kenneth Cole, but a head to toe wardrobe of leather. Chaps, pants, jock straps, harnesses, masks, arm bands, neck collars, boots, gloves, jacket.
But the clothes are not the end of the spending. Then there are the toys: the portable slings, rimming chairs, arsenals of dildos made of rubber vinyl and synthetic skin and even metal, cock rings and other accessories like nipple clamps and suction devices, the cleaning supplies and douching equipment, (quite literally) gallon-sized buckets of lube, bondage gear.
Though one of the central pleasures of a convention like this is the sexual encounters and the meet and greet factor, it is far more performative than that. It’s about looking a certain way and showing off, it’s the rebellion against months of office work that had to happen to finance this trip. These are men that will take off their harness and wear the same leather boots under a chalk-line pinstripe suit, wearing a cockring under their khakis, a thick-banded leather wrist watch the only thing left of their alternative wardrobe.
I find it incredibly hot, but from a distance. They’re nice to look at, strong, handsome reminders of the male ideal, but I can’t help but feel like these men are just not for me. I’m twenty years old, thin as a rail and the only leather I want to wear says Prada on it. Though they look sexy, I try to imagine the time it takes to remove all of that gear, or the other trauma to be incurred from not removing the gear before sex. The rashes, the scrapes, the poked out eye, the neurotic care to keep bodily fluids off of a two hundred dollar leather belt. Like most groupings in the gay community, this one comes with a dress code. It is easiest to identify with someone similarly dressed, but I still can’t shake my initial attraction to some of these very sexy, and seemingly untouchable men. And the Freudian analysis of the situation is that they remind me of someone else I could never get close to: my father.
And the closer you look at the men the more their leather shells crackle and you can see the worn wrinkles on their faces and their boots and though some of them look perfect you must remember that these are men who are given a few bars and weekends to be who they want to be. Their uniform, their “type,” isn’t one that is visible in everyday human traffic. A bulge here, a piercing there, but the thing that attracts them to each other is not their daily wardrobe, because few people live lives that allow them to wear fetish gear on a daily basis. Their dress code is not their daily dress, unlike the other groupings of the gays. So for the leather enthusiasts, this is it, the big IT. It’s more than eye candy for them it’s their lifestyle, and I couldn’t feel further away from it.
I think that this summer is already turning out to be one of the trickiest for me. I’m at a transitional point in a lot of ways. Most of the people I know are at least twenty-one and frequent bars and restaurants centered around alcohol and it’s a bit frustrating after having so many friends that are 36-45 and adapting bits of their lifestyle but never being able to have the whole thing. I think I’d settled too comfortably into the life of someone 10 years older that I can’t sustain. I’m out of money and my summer job still hasn’t started. I worked out my budget for the next month and with the phone bill, medications, rent, a thirty day public transit pass I’m just barely going to break even (at this point I’m still about thirty bucks short for rent next month). Notice how I didn’t say groceries or food or anything of the sort. Without the job at Student Affairs I’m only making about 80.00 bucks a week. I have about 70.00 coming from working graduation. And after all that stuff accounted for I’ll only have about 70.00 left in my bank account. Since I miss the first pay period of the summer I’ll only get paid for two weeks in June and the rest I’ll get in July. So, lets do the math: 160.00+70.00+70.00= 300.00. Rent is 366.00, meaning that before I’ve even moved in or paid my first month’s rent, I just predicted that I’m not going to be able to make my second month’s rent. I made these calculations after buying breakfast for a friend who’s in town, after eating out for lunch and dinner yesterday, after spending fifty dollars on organic soap, after spending another fifty on clothes from H&M, after spending about fifty dollars a week just on Starbucks, after going to brunch every Sunday for like a year now. All of those fifty dollars’ add up. I made those calculations outside on a bench, with a medium Jamba Juice, watching a line of leather men walk down the steps from the orange line. In that moment it suddenly occurred to me that money is unequally distributed among the people in this world and also that I have incurable father issues.
My ex sent me a message saying that he wanted to grab dinner and I told him I couldn’t because money’s tight, but the real reason is that whenever I see him I’m sad because I think it’s going to be a long time before I’m as happy as I was when I was with him. So, instead of offering to buy dinner he said he’s going to give me fifty dollars tomorrow. I thought about politely declining, but if my calculations are correct that fifty dollars covers the hours I couldn’t write because I was too busy feeling sorry for myself after we broke up, at a rate of 7.50/hour, minimum wage, the wage of the lonely. I thought about declining the money because it’s one more way I’m still connected to him and it’s one more time I have to see him and both of those things cause more hours of missed writing.
But then I thought of the things that I could spend that money on and how I was only going to be ten dollars short for rent next month. I agreed to accept fifty dollars from him.
Now, I’m left with two questions: Who owes me ten dollars and how many men am I going to have to date to get free dinner every night this month?
And beyond appearances, there’s dom, sub, down-low and discreet, straight acting, purse carriers, nelly queens, scene and non-scene. So it is my particular pleasure to see Chicago welcome International Mister Leather to town yearly. There is such a sense of irony to the leather men. Yes, appearance-wise, they look very different from the drag queens, but if you examine the lifestyle that goes into fetish gear it’s remarkably similar. It’s a socioeconomic statement just to be able to attend IML, to spend a thousands of dollars on the hotel, the airfare and other travel expenses, the registration, the vast amounts of alcohol consumed at extraordinarily inflated prices via the host hotel’s (The Hyatt) bar. Then there is the gear. Let me tell you about the gear that some of these men bring. This is not Payless pleather ankle boots, this is high end leatherwear, entire outfits of it. Imagine: not just splurging on the leather jacket from Banana Republic, or the motorcycle boots from Kenneth Cole, but a head to toe wardrobe of leather. Chaps, pants, jock straps, harnesses, masks, arm bands, neck collars, boots, gloves, jacket.
But the clothes are not the end of the spending. Then there are the toys: the portable slings, rimming chairs, arsenals of dildos made of rubber vinyl and synthetic skin and even metal, cock rings and other accessories like nipple clamps and suction devices, the cleaning supplies and douching equipment, (quite literally) gallon-sized buckets of lube, bondage gear.
Though one of the central pleasures of a convention like this is the sexual encounters and the meet and greet factor, it is far more performative than that. It’s about looking a certain way and showing off, it’s the rebellion against months of office work that had to happen to finance this trip. These are men that will take off their harness and wear the same leather boots under a chalk-line pinstripe suit, wearing a cockring under their khakis, a thick-banded leather wrist watch the only thing left of their alternative wardrobe.
I find it incredibly hot, but from a distance. They’re nice to look at, strong, handsome reminders of the male ideal, but I can’t help but feel like these men are just not for me. I’m twenty years old, thin as a rail and the only leather I want to wear says Prada on it. Though they look sexy, I try to imagine the time it takes to remove all of that gear, or the other trauma to be incurred from not removing the gear before sex. The rashes, the scrapes, the poked out eye, the neurotic care to keep bodily fluids off of a two hundred dollar leather belt. Like most groupings in the gay community, this one comes with a dress code. It is easiest to identify with someone similarly dressed, but I still can’t shake my initial attraction to some of these very sexy, and seemingly untouchable men. And the Freudian analysis of the situation is that they remind me of someone else I could never get close to: my father.
And the closer you look at the men the more their leather shells crackle and you can see the worn wrinkles on their faces and their boots and though some of them look perfect you must remember that these are men who are given a few bars and weekends to be who they want to be. Their uniform, their “type,” isn’t one that is visible in everyday human traffic. A bulge here, a piercing there, but the thing that attracts them to each other is not their daily wardrobe, because few people live lives that allow them to wear fetish gear on a daily basis. Their dress code is not their daily dress, unlike the other groupings of the gays. So for the leather enthusiasts, this is it, the big IT. It’s more than eye candy for them it’s their lifestyle, and I couldn’t feel further away from it.
I think that this summer is already turning out to be one of the trickiest for me. I’m at a transitional point in a lot of ways. Most of the people I know are at least twenty-one and frequent bars and restaurants centered around alcohol and it’s a bit frustrating after having so many friends that are 36-45 and adapting bits of their lifestyle but never being able to have the whole thing. I think I’d settled too comfortably into the life of someone 10 years older that I can’t sustain. I’m out of money and my summer job still hasn’t started. I worked out my budget for the next month and with the phone bill, medications, rent, a thirty day public transit pass I’m just barely going to break even (at this point I’m still about thirty bucks short for rent next month). Notice how I didn’t say groceries or food or anything of the sort. Without the job at Student Affairs I’m only making about 80.00 bucks a week. I have about 70.00 coming from working graduation. And after all that stuff accounted for I’ll only have about 70.00 left in my bank account. Since I miss the first pay period of the summer I’ll only get paid for two weeks in June and the rest I’ll get in July. So, lets do the math: 160.00+70.00+70.00= 300.00. Rent is 366.00, meaning that before I’ve even moved in or paid my first month’s rent, I just predicted that I’m not going to be able to make my second month’s rent. I made these calculations after buying breakfast for a friend who’s in town, after eating out for lunch and dinner yesterday, after spending fifty dollars on organic soap, after spending another fifty on clothes from H&M, after spending about fifty dollars a week just on Starbucks, after going to brunch every Sunday for like a year now. All of those fifty dollars’ add up. I made those calculations outside on a bench, with a medium Jamba Juice, watching a line of leather men walk down the steps from the orange line. In that moment it suddenly occurred to me that money is unequally distributed among the people in this world and also that I have incurable father issues.
My ex sent me a message saying that he wanted to grab dinner and I told him I couldn’t because money’s tight, but the real reason is that whenever I see him I’m sad because I think it’s going to be a long time before I’m as happy as I was when I was with him. So, instead of offering to buy dinner he said he’s going to give me fifty dollars tomorrow. I thought about politely declining, but if my calculations are correct that fifty dollars covers the hours I couldn’t write because I was too busy feeling sorry for myself after we broke up, at a rate of 7.50/hour, minimum wage, the wage of the lonely. I thought about declining the money because it’s one more way I’m still connected to him and it’s one more time I have to see him and both of those things cause more hours of missed writing.
But then I thought of the things that I could spend that money on and how I was only going to be ten dollars short for rent next month. I agreed to accept fifty dollars from him.
Now, I’m left with two questions: Who owes me ten dollars and how many men am I going to have to date to get free dinner every night this month?