Lead, Follow, or get Out of the Way

I clear my eyes enough to see that before me lays the dead sea.  It's been long in the making, on the backs of the radicals that once dared to exist.  They have gone now and left a silent world a ruckus with questions.  They have taken with them a language that is no longer spoken, and with it a tradition that held the secrets to our culture; The Leather culture.

 

We have studied the manuals, and copied the garb of the pictures that we have long fawned over and desired to be like.  In a matter of moments and a big enough bank account, you too can be a man clad in leather and look fucking good.  You too can feel like the big man with a flogger in your hand, rope in a bag, and a cigar in your mouth that you don't even enjoy smoking.  It's an image to be a Leather-man today.  How one looks in a freshly cut pair of chaps and a leather shirt that still makes it impossible to put your arms down is the only important thing.  You can give a man a title and sash and use him to raise money for some worthy organization, but he won't know the first thing about what it means to not just be a man clad in leather, but a Leather-man.  There is nothing sacred in that.  He doesn't know that his leather means nothing more than the price tag he so eagerly paid.  He doesn't know that in the Leather Culture, "You have to earn your leather in this part of town."  

We can no longer hear the voices of our elders and forefathers, they are dead and gone and only echoes remind us that there ever was a Guard to call old.  We were not taught ritual and we were not taught culture, now what we have is a proximity of what we think we know.  It's like coloring of a dinosaur's skin green because you think that's what a thunder-lizard should look like.  A Leather-man is tough, not because he choses to be but because he has to be.  He is an outsider, a rebel a radical who is abnormal amidst the abnormal.  He defines himself by his actions, merit, and strength of character.  Strength of character is not something you can buy at a Leather store or order online.  

I have come to San francisco, one of the birthplaces of the Leather culture, and find it baron; It's as bland as white bread.  WHen the first wave of AIDS took our Alpha males it took with it the substance of what it means to be a leather-man and left the beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, and all the way to omega males who knew and know little to nothing.  They then perpetuate this tame watered down culture to the following generations, watering it down further with each bloodline that faded away until all is left is a memory.  Currently we are honoring a memory and not a way of life.

I took two boys with me to a play party to play like Leather-men do.  While I watched the others put each other in bondage bags and play with vibrators, I took a fledgling on a journey in to his mind.  With a firm hand and a compassionate voice I taught his first lesson at the end of a whip.  As the blood ran down his back and his adrenaline peeked he learned, he is far more powerful than he has given himself credit for all these years.  When the whip's crack echoed and deafened all those with in reach it left all men silent and still.  They witnessed first hand the power between men.  They witnessed the first baby steps of something new born from the ashes of a long gone distant memory.  We are coming in to ourselves now, young and filled with fire that makes a blaze with each step in to the unknown.  It is being written now- today by players like myself.  We who are the new guard, and we who are forging our own rituals and charters day by day.  Urban warriors of the fetish tribe are clearing a path in the urban jungle, and now a warning to those who would get in the way with their tired ideals and broken manuals.. help, lead, follow, or get out of the way..