 Welcome to Inside Leather History, a fireside chat. I'm Doug O'Keefe, the host and producer of the chats. This evening we're doing another Zoom interview and this time it's with Joe Easton in California. And we're going to hear a lot about his life and his history in the community. Welcome to Inside Leather History, Joe. Welcome from Palm Springs, Ferriette. I wish I were there. It's 106 now. All right, let's start right at the very beginning. Tell us a little bit about your early life because you told me that your family moved around a lot. Yeah, my parents moved about 35 times before I was 15. Oh my gosh. Dad had just gotten out of the military. He had a series of short time jobs. We moved through at least eight different states and 14 different cities in that time. You mentioned when we were preparing for this that there was a lot of difficulty within the family when you were young. Dad had some anger issues. He drank a lot and he was also, shall we say, a bit of an attic for methamphetamines. During World War II, the soldiers, sailors and Air Force people were given methamphetamines to make them more aggressive, keep them up longer. And the people who handed this out were the sergeants or the platoon leaders or the lieutenants, the medical staff, all of them were handing out methamphetamines to make their soldiers and sailors more aggressive. Now that led to other issues. I recall when we were preparing for this, you mentioned there was a lot of abuse going on in the family. What can you tell us about that? And my parents both drank a lot. My parents both used methamphetamines. They both did? Yes. Wow. You know, trench mouth and how bad that is, both of my parents lost all of their teeth in their early twenties. They were both extremely thin for most of their life. That was six foot one. And when he passed, he was 120 pounds. Oh my gosh. My mother was under 90 pounds and she was five seven. But at that time, probably the addictive qualities of that were not known. No. They were able to hide it quite well. But did there come a time when the drug was not available to them anymore? Yeah, but that wasn't until, I would say until about the mid seventies. How did they cope then? Badly. Okay. Lots of anger issues, lots of emotional up, down, twirling around that sort of stuff. So you said you lived with your grandparents for a while and then that was a very sort of stable and a better time for you. Tell us a bit about that. My parents had moved out of town while I was in the hospital for burns. And my grandparents picked me up, paid the hospital bill and took me in for several months until my parents moved back into town. Why were you burned? I was trying to see my baby brother who had just come home from the hospital. He was in a crib and underneath they had a single burner stove type thing with water in a big pot. And I got up on the crib to look and see my baby brother and my dad kicked me in the backside and the crib rolled and I fell off the crib, the side of the crib and into the water. Oh, it's terrible. Well, it was terrible but also later on when I got into law enforcement and as a paramedic it allowed me to see more easily when I was seeing families who were dealing with extreme drug use but hiding it well or extreme alcoholism and hiding it well. And I was able to see the signs and symptoms of children when they're dealing with having to lie to everyone about how bad things are at home. How do you feel that those experiences influenced you on a general scale as your life went on? It made me more aware of what was happening and sometimes more aware of why people were acting certain ways. I quickly learned that when mom and dad were stoned or drunk they acted a different way than when they were sober. That was a simple thing. And also when they were under the effects that their emotions would be up and down and all around. They'd go from extremely sad to mad to effervescent hyperactivity to catatonic. You explored bondage at an early age. Tell us a bit about that. All the cowboys and the Western serials the cowboys were always getting tied up. The Indians were getting tied up. Same with Tarzan and Flash Gordon who were all movie serialists and also on the television at that time. And as kids that's what we did. I went into Cub Scout, what we learned to do, tie knots. What does that lead to? I was quite proficient. How did you engage in this as a youngster? Somewhere around the age of nine, right around nine, 10. I discovered that I was having wet dreams and that I could make it feel just as good as the wet dream by moving things. And what excited me the most? Getting tied up in my dad's leather jacket and his engineer boots and his gloves. So people were tying you up, you were not doing it? No, I was doing it by myself. Oh, I see. How were you managing to do it yourself? That's not too hard. I even got to the point where more than a couple of times I tied my feet together and used the hoist in the garage that we used when we went hunting for deer and stuff to hoist myself up to the rafters upside down with just the boots and jacket and gloves on. How did you get down? Let myself down the same way I went up, only reverse. And nobody caught you doing this? No. I mean, it sounds like the makings of a modern dungeon scene. So I really got my leather fetish going when I was about eight. My parents were driving home from grandma's house in Antioch down to Hayward and dad was driving drunk and he got stopped by two CHP bike cops. Well, they were talking to him through the window and then they said, up the car, we're going to have to arrest you for driving drunk because he obviously was. He gets out of the car, takes a swing at the cops, the cops take him down, handcuff him, he tries to kick them so they hot-pot title. They went to the passenger side. My mother was sound asleep in the passenger side because she was drunk. She couldn't drive. They didn't want to put us into child protective services on Christmas Eve. So one of the cops said, do you know where you live? And I said, I did. I knew how to get there. I just didn't know the names of the streets. So he had me direct him while he drove us home with my mother in the backseat and my dad in the rear of the station wagon and my brother and sister with my mother to our house. They put my brother and sister to bed and tucked them in. They walked my mother up the stairs and she went into her room and closed the door. And I got to hug both of those beautiful cops with leather jackets, tall boots and gauntlet gloves on and give them a big hug. So that's how I got an early start. How did it progress from there? Well, that progressed into the bondage leather stuff that I was doing later on. And I was collecting pictures of motor cops, leather bikers, cowboys, Indians, all sorts of. So I got rubber leather uniforms, bondage, cowboys, Indians and scuba gear all at a very early age. You mentioned that you are Mensa level intelligent. So for the benefit of an audience that may be seeing this video, would you please explain Mensa and where you fit in that? Mensa is an organization that back then, the minimum requirement was that you had an IQ of at least 135, which is well above in the high 1%. And a lot of my classmates were well above that. I'm the only one of the graduating class who does not have a PhD. I'm the only one of the class so far that is not a published author. If that gives you any kind of a clue. Well, we can look at that a lot of different ways. Why is that the case? I came from a much rougher background than most. By the time I got to the seminary at the age of 15, I'd already seen five homicides occur. We lived in a very rough part of town. And the others were raised in almost exclusively in middle class, upper middle class and upper class white families. And it wasn't until after I got there and a number of us started pushing that we got more people of color into the seminary. Because it was almost all white. And yet a significant portion of our pastoral duties were going to be with people of color. And why are we learning dead languages when we needed to learn Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and later on Vietnamese and Hmong for that area. Okay, let's take a step back. Why were you going into the seminary at such a young age? Actually, for the Catholic Church at that time, they would get people that get young men, young boys into the seminary freshman year of high school. It was easier for them to give up sex before they had it than afterwards. It was a basic idea. Okay, I think I'm confused. So your time in the seminary was what would be considered high school time for you? Yeah, okay. High school and college. Okay, okay. So the Mensa part of that, Mensa is an intellectual organization basically that enables people to excel and measure their intelligence levels. Tell us how that all affected you at that time. From that school, we were expected to be among the best of the students no matter where we went, no matter what we did. And that remained fairly true throughout for most of them. We had an unusually high number of people who became, got into the priesthood and became priests. In a small school with less than 350 students, we had one that became a cardinal and seven that became bishops and over 80, oh, it was 95 of them became priests. We had over 40 doctors and over 70 lawyers in that small group of people. So a lot of people were quite well educated even though they didn't continue studying for the priesthood. Okay, why did you choose to go that particular route? I thought it was the best way to help people. I had been brought up by my grandparents with a strong belief in the Catholic church. And I had followed through with that in my daily life as a kid. We went to church every Sunday. We went to confession every other week. Mom had us saying the rosary at least once a week and other things like that. So we were part of the church. We were active in the community. We went to catechism lessons twice a week. And it was part of what we were at that time. Is there not an incongruity there with what was going on in your home life among your parents and then this religious devotion? There were more than a few incongruities. I used to put out that I felt like we had a facade that we were the public and then there was a real life behind it that was real nitty gritty and deep into a lot of stuff that wasn't anywhere near the facade. So what was the motivation to keep up the facade of religious and indoctrinated practices? For me, it felt real. And it felt more real than what my parents were doing. I felt that being an alcoholic or drugs was giving your life over to things that controlled you. I didn't want to do that. I saw faith in the church as doing more for the real person than alcohol or drugs could. And I saw it as a real way to help some people. Do you feel it helped you? A lot. How so? The abuse had gotten so bad at home that before I went into the seminary, my father threw a butcher knife at me and tried to stab through it at my back. And fortunately I turned and it only cut a small slice on my chest. Another time he shot a deer rifle at me and broke a bottle that I had in my hand with my back to him and I was putting it on a log and he shot the bottle out of my hand between my legs. And that was, it was close enough that it tore my pants on both sides of my, both legs, but didn't hit me. I thought it was time to leave. How did you even know that this was available in order to pursue it? Even in junior high school, I was still going to Catechism to learn more about the church. Your classes were taught by the seminarians from that seminary that I eventually went to and they were the influence for that. Joe, you lived with your grandparents for a while when you were young. That was a very, as you mentioned when we prepared for this, that was a wonderful time in your life. They were very wonderful to you. Tell us about that time. What did they do for you? My grandparents picked me up from the hospital after I'd been in the hospital for burns. My parents had moved away and they picked me up, took me in and raised me for a while. Grandma and Grandpa's house was sort of like a daycare center for my cousins and I. Grandma would take the other kids to the park, but I couldn't go because I couldn't get dirty and I couldn't get wet when it was summertime. So I would go with Grandpa to the workshop and he taught me how to do the math, make the designs, cut, sew, cut the wood, stain it and make furniture. Grandma would do the same sort of thing when Grandpa was taking the kids to the park and she would show me how to cook, how to sew, keep a house. They taught me the basic life skills. Between the two of them, I learned more in just the six months with them than I did in the 15 years at home. Then they were also quite religious. When we've got dropped off at Grandma and Grandpa's house later on, quite frequently, Grandma would take us to mass with her during the week and on the weekends while our parents were working. So, and we had Bible readings, we had catechism classes that Grandma and Grandpa taught. So we weren't taught and we were shown how to be generous, how to be loving, how to be caring. And when I lived with my other set of grandparents later on in life, when I was between second and third grade, they also did similar things. And I was living with not only my grandparents but my great-grandmother. So it was a learning experience. They did more for teaching me how to read, write, do math and that sort of stuff than my teachers at school did. So is that also from where your religious convictions began to evolve? They involved in spite of my parents and with the assistance of my grandparents on both sides and great-grandparents. Do you feel that that's what taught you more of a calling in your life? Definitely. It taught me to be kinder and more gentle when I lived in areas that were extremely rough and shoddy. Other kids didn't have the experiences of being held up at gunpoint or knife point before going even getting to junior high school, let alone having seen as many homicides as I have seen before I was even 15. Tell us a little bit about that. The drive-in restaurant that my parents had in Fresno, California, Fresno was somewhat of a segregated town. And on one side of the street, it was okay if you were Hispanic and on the other side, it was okay if you were black but don't cross the street. We didn't fit in either way, but we had lots of people coming to our drive-in to get food and then go back to their own side of the street. There was a lot of violence there. We were held up a number of times, both at knife gunpoint. Saw my first homicide when a lady stabbed a man to death in one of the tables in the area. And later on, saw two boys deliberately run over on their bicycles by an old lady. But they had robbed just a few moments before. She got in her car and just ran right over. As you were going through the seminary, what were your plans? Did you intend to go become a priest yourself or what are you thinking? I wanted to become a priest and I wanted to be assigned to one of the poorer areas. We had large populations of Asians, Africans, Hispanics and Native Americans. And we were encouraged to, on our own, pick up languages. I picked up American Indian sign language and sign language at that time. But you served in the Navy. Tell us about that. What did you do in the Navy? I left the seminary at the end of my junior year of college, went to one year at Fresno State, was drafted to go into the Army. They wanted me to report two weeks before the end of the semester. And I would have lost the whole semester if I wasn't able to take the test. So I enlisted in the Navy so I could finish the two weeks of college. I was a hospital corpsman. I was assigned to Lamor Naval Air Station and then into Taipei, Taiwan in a place called Tianmu in Taiwan. Tell us a little bit about your time in, as a medic in the Army. I understand you had a very, a really interesting experience happen there. One of the funny ones. It was the night of the Navy ball and a Marine came in and said he had fallen in the shower on a piece of glass and he was hurt. And he wouldn't say anything beyond that. So I took him into the examining room and started the examination. And he said, well, I fell on a shot glass and it went inside. So we did some preliminary tests. I did a finger wave, couldn't find it. We did an X-ray. Fortunately it was lead glass so we could find it on the X-ray. The emergency room doctor said, let's call in the surgeon because he's the one that's going to handle it. Surgeon comes in, he's all dressed for the Navy ball. Big hat, sword, white gloves, the whole nine yards. He looks at the X-ray, he looks at the Marine. He goes, we ain't doing surgery tonight. My wife's already home from the horn out there. So we gave the guy a muscle relax and put him in the proctoscope table. Doctor has me squeeze a whole tube of KY up his ass. And he says, now put one finger in and check to make sure there's no cuts or hemorrhoids. I put the finger in and all of a sudden I risked deep on the guy. He pushed back on me and came the first time. I reach up, grab the glass and as I pull it to his prostate, he comes again. And as I pull out, this is a big fist around a shot glass. As I pull it out of his ass, he comes a third time. Doctor throws his hands up and says, you write it up. I don't want him kicked out of the military. And I'm leaving. My gosh. So I had to go and beat off a few times before I would fit back into my uniform because I was in scrubs before. A few months later, after I had come out, I went to a bath house and who do I see? Once again, that same Marine bent over, lots of lubricant right there, even though we saw each other frequently for the next six months. My gosh. How long were you in the Navy? I was there four years and three months. Okay. What years were you in it? 69 through 73, back when it was a felony to be gay in the military. Do you think it was- When I came out, I went up to San Francisco and my first night out was in full leather, on Folsom Street. When I got back to the base, I got into the barracks and a third of the lockers were all busted wide open and everything all over the place. I said, what the hell happened? And one of the other corpsmen said, they found all the faggots and drug addicts and they're all gone. I said, how many? He said, we lost over a third of the entire staff. The only ones they didn't take were the officers who were gay or lesbian. So was it just a well kept? Secret? I had to close the closet door and wait until I got out. I was not gonna spend 10 years in Leavenworth for being who I was. But you mentioned just a moment ago that you went out in San Francisco at that time in full leather. How did you know about that? I already had leather and I'd had it since I'd left the seminary. So going up to finding anybody who was gay and into leather was hard back in 69, 70. And when I finally found out where there were leathermen, thanks to the Life Magazine, that's where I went. I went up to San Francisco on Folsom Street. So tell me about this Life Magazine. What was going on there? It was an issue that was published, I think it was in 68 or so. And a friend showed me the issue and it was about one of the leather bars and how leathermen would gather there on their motorcycles in their leather gear and they'd get all sorts of terrible things. Back then I went into the bar in the afternoon. There wasn't much there on a Friday afternoon. And there was a very handsome bartender and there was a fair amount of activity going on further back in the bar. People were sucking and fucking and carrying on in the backs of the bars at that time. But the bars were having to pay a huge protection fee to the police to keep quiet about it so that they didn't lose their licenses. So did you have any other knowledge coming your way about the leather scene or was it strictly this magazine? I had a friend in the Navy for a few weeks who was fresh back from Vietnam. He had gotten a congressional medal of honor but they were trying to force him out. The problem was his uncle was a representative in the house of representatives and on the armed forces committee. So they weren't going to kick him out and they weren't going to arrest him but I'll put it bluntly, he was a flaming queen. He had presidential citation from the president of Vietnam. He had saved a number of lives. He had numerous purple hearts. He had accommodations up the wazoo. He had more bars on his chest from awards earned than a lot of people who had been in for 20 and 30 years and it was only his first enlistment. I don't know why this happened. Wow. But he directed me where to go and what to find and he was the one who showed me the magazine. So did you just turn up in San Francisco and look for leather bars or did you have some direction? I was told where to go. Okay. And I found a dirty bookstore and back then they had mimeographed pages where the leather bars, where the gay bars are, drag queen bars, all the different kinds. And I tore the sheet off and took all of them and went to the leather bars where they were listed. Now, what year was this to give us some timeframe? 1970. So 1970. How was San Francisco in 1970? Not just the leather bar scene, but in general. South of market was a lot raunchier, dirtier. It was an industrial area. There weren't many homes there and what homes there were there had been rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and they had been kind of quickly all wood burned fast. Lots of businesses, lots of auto repair shops, gas stations. There was a lot of manufacturing going on of clothing. Part of the south of market, well, kind of a little ways away. Levi Strauss still had its main factory for making jeans there. Oh, wow. So it wasn't exactly, Folgers was making coffee on Folsom Street. They come off the Bay Bridge and you could smell the coffee before you got off the bridge. But that was a very fascinating time. The hippies had had their time. They were on the decline. The drugs were on the rise then and the drug scene within the gay community was just unbelievably rampant. We were losing as many people to bad drugs as we were to AIDS just 15 years later. Wow, okay. When you say bad drugs, tell us a little bit about that. There was a lot of overdoses. Hepatitis A and B was rampant and there was still no major cure for it. You had to tough it out. There was no shots for either hepatitis A or B. Alcoholism was very rampant and lots of people were very, very drunk. I hate to tell you how many drunk drivers I had to pick up in the ambulance and a lot of them were on motorcycles. So yeah, I got a good feeling for that. And then later on, 1976, 77. 1977, Dr. Steven Boyd, the corner for the city of San Francisco, came to Southwood Market and was giving classes on how to do safe SNM, how to fist safely, how to do piss scenes safely so that you didn't get hepatitis, you didn't get all that stuff and how to be safe about what you were doing, checking the hands for pulses and bondage stains, checking the faces. One of the big things he warned us about was breath control. Even back then, that killed a lot of people and it still remains a very deadly practice when not done. Well, it's not a safe thing to do. What was the most fascinating thing you saw in San Francisco at that time? The leather bars were an oasis for those of us who were kinky and the variety of leather that they had at that time was amazing. You think the village people went to the extremes on what was happening in our community. Back then, the leather community included hippies. You'd have long-haired people coming in in fringe jackets or nothing on at all on the top or even in loincloths. You had cowboys coming in from all over the country and they wearing their Western chaps and their boots and their big hats and all of that. So there was, and there were a lot of people out of the old military from World War II. The aviators would come in with their cheerling flight suits. Sweating to death, even on cold nights. And then you had some of the divers coming in with rubber tops, the neoprene wetsuits. And leather was being experimented. There were trying all sorts of things at that time. Now it's sort of cubed off and not much variety. So how long did you live in San Francisco? I moved there in 74 and it was there until 98. I lived in the Bay Area until 2000. Then I moved way up north to Washington State and then later to Calgary. My gosh, okay. How did you see the gay scene proliferate in San Francisco? Because that's a time when it would have been going gangbusters. South of Market, when I first arrived, only had seven leather bars. And over the years, it built up to a point where at one point there were 14 leather bars south of Market and two in the Castro. And another one up on the Hague. And that was in one town. And there was enough people there that they had dress codes in the middle of the week to get into the bars. You either had, if it was a leather night, you had to have on leather pants, leather chaps or something like that and a leather shirt or a leather jacket or vest to get into the bar. If you just had on a harness or something like that, you weren't getting in. Uniform nights, you had to have a uniform. Rubber nights, same type of thing. Cowboy night, same thing, but Western wear. Again, you were living there sort of in its heyday. Right. So you mentioned, when we prepared for this, that you knew a number, a very iconic people in the community. You mentioned Tom of Finland, Dirk Denner, let me go through the last with you. Sorry? Let me go through the last with you. Okay. You were doing a first ever Randy West had a publishing company and he had hired Tom of Finland to do a number of drawings for four of them. Okay. And he, Randy paid Tom of Finland a dollar, a card for every card that he sold. Okay. The first month, he sold 20,000 cards. My gosh. He sent that to Tom and Tom was able to come to the US on that first 20,000. When Tom arrived in San Francisco, that Randy had a full quarter. And at that time, it was just under $100,000 that he was given at that time to Tom of Finland. So he was able to make a partial payment for the house that he later bought that became Tom of Finland. Oh my gosh, okay. So I got to meet him a couple of times along with Dirk who was his manager in the US at that time. Okay. And Dirk had won both IML and drummer a few years before back in 82, this was 83. Okay. So it was a little later than I would have thought. Okay. You mentioned you worked at Mr. S. Leathers. Right. They had a night shop at one of the bars which was called the Bolt at that time. And I worked in the night shop four nights a week. When they closed that out in 1980, I went to working in the shop itself and sewing. And I worked there until I went to, I went into the police department in 82 to go through the academy, police academy. And then I went over to the sheriff's department from there. But let's keep back at the Leather scene for the moment. Okay. Because you mentioned you also knew Tony de Blas and Harvey Nel. Tony de Blas would come into Mr. S. for the advertisements that Mr. S. would put into his magazine, The Drummer. And to talk to Alan Selby and Peter about, well, can I borrow these clothes for this photo shoot? Can we get this model fitted up and looking good? So we worked with Drummer at Mr. S. And that was another advertisement of sorts because sometimes they'd give us a little byline of leathers provided by. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk had the only Photoshop that you could take your film to get developed if it was anything to do with gay. All right. Back then a lot of the Walmart, Walgreens, Kmart, all of the big places that had Photoshop's, you'd go in with your film and you'd come back to get them. None of your film had been developed and the negatives would have a scratch right through the middle or worse, not even there. Harvey would print just about everything. The only thing he didn't print was kid porn. Yeah. Which was, that was fine. What were your thoughts about him, especially what were your thoughts about his assassination? The day before he was assassinated we had caught the same bus downtown. And I got to talk to him on the way downtown and he was complaining that Dan White was turning into a pain, trying to get back onto the board of supervisors but his replacement had already been appointed. Yeah. And I said, well, that's going to be a rough one because he has some support in the city. And as I found out later on when I was going through the academy he had a lot of support. Now tell me, how did you see what happened with the assassination and then the riots that came after it? That was as devastating as when Kennedy died for me. I talked to Harvey and actually met Moscone a couple of times. Harvey I'd met just about once a week when going in up and down the Castro for the Saturday shopping. So, felt like a personal friend. And to hear him talk, the first couple of times he ran for office he wasn't so good in talking to the public. But he picked up a very good style and he related to just about everybody except white supremacists. On just about everything. And he worked for, he didn't work just for the gays. He worked for everybody. He tried so hard to get more senior citizens housing available. He tried so hard to work on what was then a small housing homeless project getting go but we ran into the not my backyard syndrome. He was really great in a lot of different ways. So I really missed him. He would have made a great mayor. Moscone made a great mayor. Feinstein did too. You mentioned you went into the police force. Right. I went through the San Francisco Police Academy. Why were you doing that? I wanted to get into law enforcement. A, it was a better paying career than working at Mr. Rass. More benefits. And I've seen some of the good work that a few of the officers had done. And I was greatly inspired by them. And I wanted to be like them. One of them was Paul Seidler. He was, he'd gone into the department shortly after he got married to a woman. Was married for 15 years. Departed. He was more open about coming out and being gay. And then he became the gay liaison. How long were you with the police force? I went through their academy and their field training operations. And at the end of that, somehow I'd picked up hepatitis A and B. I believe it was when I gave CPR to a drug addict who threw up in my mouth while doing CPR. And so I had to drop everything at that point. And then I went into the sheriff's department because they were more accepted of me being openly gay. I was one of the first three openly gay men to go through the academy. I told everybody in my class on the first day when we were introducing ourselves, I am gay. This is what I've done. This is where I'm at. And some of them dealt fine with it, but a lot of them made Dan White's homophobia look mild. I believe it. Yeah. And we first got our guns and we were carrying our weapons during class time. A number of the other officers would come up to me, pull their guns out, take the safety off and then stick it in my head and push me, pour into my chest and push me and say, bang, you're dead faggot. And that was not considered harassment. That was boys being boys. Because that gives you a clue how bad it was. Yeah. My locker was vandalized daily. My tires were slashed a total of 19 different times. My house windows were shot out in two different homes that I lived in. So what benefit was there for you in doing this? I needed to make a change. The police department and sheriff's department were both rampantly homophobic at that time and it was 1982. It was time for a change. And you can't force change on stuck in the mud organizations like law enforcement from the external. It's easier to make the changes within. The first day I started with the sheriff's department, an article had been published by Randy Schultz exposing the names, addresses and phone numbers of everybody who had taken a test that was, they were trying to see if they could test for AIDS. I had taken the test because I had had hepatitis. Randy Schultz identified everybody who had taken the test as being HIV positive. I go into work at the sheriff's department and that's my first day. That was what was in the newspaper that day. The staff over half of them were cap, gown, mask, goggles, paper gowns and paper booties on and gloves. And they refused to work with me. So that evening or that afternoon when I got off work, I went over to the public health department to try and find out what the hell can I tell these people that are so ignorant about what AIDS is. And they didn't have anything that I could take with me. So I called up the sisters of perpetual indulgence. They said, how many sheets do you need and how much information do you want? I said, make it clear, concise and easy for stupid people to understand. Because these people have their minds made up. They believe they know everything. Within two hours, I had 70 sheets of paper with the basic description of what AIDS was and how it was transmitted. And basically it came down to the last couple of lines which were, do not share needles with people, do not have sex with people who are HIV positive. And that was it. That was the only way. And after that day, I was the AIDS counselor for my department for 17 years. Great. We lost over 20 people to AIDS in my department alone. And I made names quilts for 60 law enforcement officers who died between 1982 and 1996. Wow. How did you see AIDS impact the community? It was devastating. At first thought was, oh, it's only the drug addicts that are getting it. Oh, it's only the gays that are getting it. And the gays went, there was such a loud closing up of everything, certain types of things. When it was pointed out that it was sexually transmitted and through IV use, so many people tried to stop their drugs and tried to stop having sex right then. And a lot of people didn't give a damn. And they went on using IV drugs and they went on having unsafe sex and passing it on and on and on. How did you see the city of San Francisco change as a result of this? If you think COVID is bad now, it was worse for that. The gay community was decimated by the amount of AIDS deaths that we were having. There were times when the local gay paper, BAR, would have sometimes two pages of obituaries in a weekly paper. And at the worst, it was up to 10 pages of deaths every week that were reported. There were lots that weren't reported. There were lots of people that went back to where they were from or where they had support to pass away and we never heard from them again. Lots of people just disappeared. I would say that in my leather community of a few thousand people, easily, 200 people just, we don't know what happened. Wow. There are houses, there are homes, there are apartments, whatever, were suddenly vacant and nobody knew where they moved or what. Lots of people went quickly. I had one friend who was diagnosed on Monday and was dead on Thursday. The death, it was extremely quick for a lot of people and other people lingered on for a while. And yet, I know now, I have one friend whose blood work was kept because he had a mysterious illness back in 1977. And it turns out it was AIDS, but they didn't have an AIDS test back then. So it predates Randy Schultz's and the band played on by five years. When we prepared for this chat, you mentioned that you learned a lot from your elders in the community. But people of my generation really didn't have that luxury. So as someone senior to me in this community, what would you like people to know about the community that your elders taught you? There's a lot more under the sun than you ever dreamed about. Sam Stewart was a friend of mine. He was also known as Phil Andross or Sam Sparrow, a prolific writer in many genres, porn, actual, he did intellectual scholastic tomes on tattoos and that, their history, identification of tribes and gangs. And that was used by the FBI. But he also wrote regular stories, novels. And he was a professor at the UC Berkeley. He was quite active in the leather community back in the 20s. It was a wealth of information about what was happening on the East Coast and in Chicago and in Europe back in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and the early 60s, long before I even knew I was gay. There were others like him that I met when I first came out who were in their 70s and their 80s. They may not have been the most attractive of men, but damn, they were good at sex. And they had really great stories about what had happened or how you do this or how you do that. Why would you ever think of putting something in your ass? Yeah. But they also had wonderful techniques that they taught me on how to have sex, how to give a good blow job, how to fuck well, how to get fucked though, how to do water sports. So you don't ruin all of the furniture in your house and you don't ruin your house. One of the exercises that they taught me was the kegels. It's an exercise for your ass. And it helps you to gain better control of your bodily functions, but it's also great when you got somebody's cock in your ass and you want to massage them and they're already far enough in, you don't wanna lose them. You can actually do the peristalsis, the reverse and keep pulling them in. I was also taught some of the methods that a lot of us who went to Asia learned of meditation, control of bodily functions, control of pain, the transference of pain and making it into pleasure and how you release your endorphins. Well, what advice would you like to give people, new people entering the leather scene? Find knowledgeable people and learn from them. It will save you a lot of time and grief. There are classes in a lot of the big events, but in many of the areas, like out here in Palm Springs, we have a thing called the bondage club. And what we do is we used to meet before COVID once a month and those of us who had experience were basically teaching people how to flog about bondage, cock and ball torture, electro, saran wrap used as a bondage tickle torture and lots of other things. One of the things we all in that group that we stay away from is breath control. That is still one of the most dangerous things that an untrained person can ever get into and way too often it comes to death. But you said you're still a leather tailor? Oh yeah, I do that for myself and my lover. I do things like what I've got on. I've made the shirt and the breeches. Very nice. The breeches are fully leather-lined. But I also make things like this is a leather kimono. Oh, okay. That's elaborate. There's a ton of colors of leather in it. Wow. Oh, that's amazing. How elaborate and beautiful. Wow. When I was a kid and going through Boy Scouts in order to get my Indian War Merit Badge, I did the beadwork and made the moccasins. Ah, that was my first leather outfit when I was a teenager and I made other leathers later on. Fantastic. I took what my grandfather and grandmother had taught me for making furniture, quilts and clothing and adapted it to leather. Yes, that's wonderful. After I was a paramedic in San Francisco, I worked for three years doing orthotics and prosthetics and that taught me to learn how to tailor things exactly. Our tolerance level in orthotics was one 100th of an inch. Wow, amazing. In three-dimensional making of leathers. So that made it easier when I worked at Mr. S to fit people. Sure. And I've been working in leather as a hobby ever since. So since the 1970s, well, actually 1960s, I've been making leather clothing. That's amazing. So what's the biggest misconception about you? A lot of people think that because I am a tailor and make leathers that I'm too effeminate and that I don't know how to do things masking. Okay, look at it this way. I've been shot four times, stabbed 17, blown up once, been in over 8,000 hand-to-hand combat situations with prisoners. I think I know a little bit about being rough. Well, Joe, I would like to thank you very, very much for being part of Inside Leather History of Fireside Chat.