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1. 1 2016-04-22T11:59:42-07:00 Lindsay Weinberg 5309c3a14c83f984f5b090ca0c1c88a57707fcd6 Motorcycle Photo Group 2 Adrienne Adams 12 Aesthetic, Leather, Policing, and Bringing Camp to Camping gallery 2018-02-10T19:11:26-08:00 Adrienne Adams c84ceaad4bc814407a2311bfd2e2adde22a6b905

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• 1 media/DrumMag.png media/Drumming.png 2016-04-19T14:44:10-07:00 Media In Tension 22 Drummer Magazine image_header 2016-05-30T18:29:19-07:00 The inaugural issue of Drummer Magazine, published in June 1975, asks "Ever search the newsstands or book stores for a magazine on the Leather Life? If so, you learned finally not to bother, there isn't any."
  
  Their goal is to fill this hole, and within it to create a "Leather Fraternity" which allows members to post and respond to personal ads while maintaining discretion and with reasonable assurance that you are not responding to a police sting. The magazine was a resource which was heavily influenced by its readership, with letters to the editor with purposes ranging from suggesting new features and informing which bars were still active and which were no longer "leather-friendly" to cancellation for political reasons, or simply to request more content of one specific fetish or another.
  
  Drummer's articles and ads frequently illustrate the tensions of queer masculine desire--in an article describing a police raid which effectively destroyed a group whose purpose was legal protection for gay men, two full paragraphs are dedicated to the physique of the sergeant who led the raid that night. An issue was dedicated to uniforms, and another featured an interview with a former LAPD cop who was gay--and includes his stories of both fucking fellow members of the force and being subjected to their taunts--including one particular cop who did both. The comic section includes one which depicts a leather-clad stud equipping his sub for the road--though he is obviously in charge, his position is almost servile, kneeling before his shorts-clad slave and yet still clearly in charge. 
  
  These tensions can be viewed through the lens of the Freudian death drive--apparent not only in the explicit sadomasochism of literal bondage, but also in the fierce, lusting attraction to the powerful, and specifically the powerful threat--whether that's the threat of the policeman to the gay bar patron, the motorcycleman to the general public, or the Nazi to the homosexual. Beyond that, there is some scholarship which links fascist organizations like the Nazi party to gay men's organizations on issues of solidarity (citation needed, it's a Bersani thing though). The Nazis, perhaps more successfully than other fascist regimes, built an ideology of exclusivity and supremacy for their members. They created systems of signs, symbols and meaningful iconography which identified them not only to enemy soldiers, but to one another as members of a social collective. Creating an "us against them" understanding of Germany's sociopolitical position in the world helped fuel the fires of Nazi aggression, but also "protected" the group's means for group identification and survival. Gay motorcycle clubs, especially those which participate in the broader leather scene, could be said to participate in the same kind of aesthetic social project for the protection of their members, claiming deathly Nazi symbolism in an attempt to resist death at the hands of a repressive state. Interestingly, Drummer ran both ads for the National Socialist Party and letters that complained about these ads. 
  
   
• 1 media/Rabbits.png 2016-04-07T11:13:36-07:00 Welcome to Bondage Camp 20 image_header 2016-05-10T08:45:53-07:00
  Leather as capable of being lighthearted, even when about sex. 
   
  
  Bersani creates strict lines between camp and sex and simultaneously criticizes theorists who prioritize their theory over reality. This is ironic because one does not remove their leathers before making a campy joke, and even if cruising, there is the ability to do more than one thing at once. While it is easier to separate camp and sex, and easy to act as though human activity occurs in discrete categories, reality is much more muddled. When speaking of a "leather community," this is even more true--if a motorcycle ride lasts a whole weekend, it would frankly be tiring only thinking about sex the entire time--here the practicality of wearing leather while on a ride must be considered as well as the aesthetic utility of leather.
  
  If camp is a sensibility and a sense of humor, camp in leather is a sex joke.
  
  While leather is sexy, sex is sexy, and camp is explicitly not, part of what is camp is "converting the serious into the frivolous" (Sontag), and leather becomes no less sexy when it is not taking itself seriously.
   

  Off the Beaten Path: Media In Tension

• 1 media/leatherfraternity.png 2016-04-22T00:12:42-07:00 The Leather Fraternity 1 gallery 2016-04-22T00:12:42-07:00 Drummer magazine, in addition to curating a list of leather bars kept up to date by reader input, upcoming movies with particularly "attention-getting" scenes, and acting as the "Playboy" of Leathermen, also included the "Leather Fraternity," which, for a one time fee of $25, which would be returned if your application was denied, would allow you to post an ad in the magazine, respond to one of the posted ads, and included a subscription to the magazine, all without sharing your name with the ad responder or poster. This meant discretion and a reasonable expectation that you would not be arrested for this behavior.