 Leather Mystery at Fireside Chat. I'm Doug O'Keefe and I am the host and producer of the Fireside Chats, which are a program of the Leather Archives and Museum. Today, I am in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and guests are community activists Devin McLaughlin and Bruce Marcus. Say hello gentlemen. First thing I'd like to know and what I think the lobbyants would love to know about both of you is tell us a little bit about where you're from, a little bit about your world here. Ten years ago, he got a early retirement packet to drive me out of Hell's Kitchen, but that's how we've been without him in Fort Lauderdale. He sits probably in the mid-90s. I was on the South Market Bear and Chest calendar in San Francisco for a couple of years, which was a benefit for the AIDS Emergency Fund. You know, so we were out raising money, raising awareness, doing things, any reason for me to take my clothes off and love it. You know, it's like, oh, calendar here. I'm so shy. So I moved all over the country and we met in Manhattan 15 years ago. What took you to San Francisco? I grew up on an 800-acre cattle farm in Iowa and turned 18 and ran basically. But why there, especially anywhere else? A boyfriend I added to time wanted to go. I wanted to go to New York. He wanted to go to San Francisco. He was born in San Francisco. We left the Midwest. Two cats, us, the 17-foot U-Haul, go west to a man. Wow. They have no jobs, no apartment, no nothing. Just took all our money out of the bank and went to San Francisco. When I broke up, from bottom, I broke up. We'd been together about five, five and a half years. Within four months, I had my nipple pierced chops and a motorcycle. So we hit the ground running. Take me back to your motivations for settling in San Francisco. How did you know about anything going on there? When we first got there, I didn't. It was my wide-eyed. The first morning we got there, we'd gone straight through from Reno. My partner at the time was calling his mom. We were on a hay thong right on Castro in 19. Even up against, he was talking to his mom and there's this guy in a big window up above across the street doing that. Like, come on up. Like, bop, bop. That was my introduction to King and Things in San Francisco. You know, but mostly just got to know a few people. I was curious. I was a little bit scared of the 1920s and not sure what's going on. Eventually found my people. Tell us a little bit about that. What was the leather scene that you encountered when you got there? Oh my God, it was easy. It was like my first big outing was the Mr. San Francisco leather contest. Oh well. So I pulled up in my new chaps and on my motorcycle I meet my friend, Charlie, and I sat there and was just like, oh my God, this is where I belong. This is, you know, this is where I sit in. This is, you know, lots of hot sexy leather. I want to be part of it. It was a tumultuous time though, in the 1990s wasn't it? Tell us a little bit about how the community was evolving and changing. You know, there was a lot. It was a tumultuous time. Like I said, the calendar was a benefit for the AIDS emergency fund. There was a lot of HIV and AIDS issues going on. But there was still that sort of sexual energy intention within the leather community. And, you know, SM sex, you know, this is how we express ourselves through the SM sexually, but it doesn't have to be about penetration. So it was a way to connect with other people without having to worry about, you know, that happened great, if not, you know, there were things, other things to go. So in Iowa you had no concept on any of this? No. Wow. No. I just, you know, dove into the deep end of the pool and decided to this is where I belong. Tell us about your experience as a person. So I've been an activist in various communities for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the East Coast, moved to California at one point, helped organize the first gay pride march in San Diego in the early 70s, helped organize against the British Initiative in Los Angeles a couple years later, leading the big contingent of activists into the LA pride parade, which at that time was a bunch of bar floats and they didn't want people arguing about it. So forced our way into several hundred people. I think the audience would probably want to know about the Briggs Initiative. I don't know that a lot of people would remember that. So Briggs was this reactionary state senator, state senator, I think, in California, introduced an initiative and would prevent mar homosexuals from teaching in public schools. And he had a lot of support and big areas in California were then and some of them still remain quite conservative and it was a huge fight. In our community the fight broke down to we're going to have stars on our behalf on TV or we're going to have masses of people in the street doing something about it. And you know that's what we did. We had masses of people in the street doing things about the English group and we succeeded in defeating it. It was one of the first big victories for gay rights in that That was depicted in the movie Milk. What were your thoughts on seeing it depicted in the Hollywood film? You know I thought that the film softened all the edges as film often does, right? You know, activists tend to be quirky. I mean no one becomes an activist to satisfy with a status quo. So they tend to be quirky in lots of ways. Giving a little work together is often a huge challenge because everybody's got an agenda going on. But this was something people came together around and it was a real grassroots effort and great one of the proudest things I didn't do. And after that I moved to New York which was a much more established community. Love it community in Los Angeles was mostly a couple of parties and a couple of white clubs. One or two bars. Larry's the weight essential lender bar which was right across the street from Paramount Street. Oh well. And then that thing on that Lucy and Ricky they showed a view format going on from the studio and there was they where the bar used to be. Anyway and in New York that involved with the leather community that leather S&M community through an organization called GMSMA, Gamel S&M Ankylips. Yes. And through them we have to organize big numbers of S&M leather packaged people nationally for the two marches on Washington. 87 and 93 and for several 94. So bringing the community way out in the open and making it much more comfortable for people through a great square. Tell us more about that. Tell the audience a lot more about GMSMA because I don't know about a lot of people up here. So this was not a sex club. This was an organization based around social education and political. Frankly it was formed by a number of people who had difficulty meeting people in bars and they wanted a non-sexual environment in which you know other people like that. Anybody could join any male picture whether we didn't define what that was. We had some women who were special invitees to be members right but at high point GMSMA would get two to three hundred people every other week who were meeting at the community center in New York. It was the biggest event out of the community center. Part of how we got legitimacy was by helping to pay for the community center. At one point we bought all the folding chairs and put our logo on the back of it. Anyone going to any event in the community center had to see the GMSMA logo on it. So it was originally the community center didn't want to see it because it was the days in which Leather was not something socially acceptable. Even in the bike clubs Kinky people were not socially acceptable. And so that was all. GMSMA was part of not hiding who we are. Right out there in the name it wasn't any you know funny little abbreviation of what it should be. Game LSN activists. Anyway we got several hundred people to meetings regularly, we ran workshops, we ran classes and we would run between three and six hundred members every year. So of course in the AIDS epidemic along with the internet which killed off any of this desirable events. Tell us a little more about the growth of the organization. Tell us more how it impacted the community. Well it provided a place for people who knew they were getting quite fit in somewhere else to fit in here. And what I was keenly interested in is for many of our members this was their entree to the gay community. They had no connection with them. At those days we were still struggling around Saturday being illegal. It wasn't right to marriage, discrimination, all kinds. I remember distinctly when one of the New York Mr. Leather's got fired from his job because his bank sold him on some video games with Mr. Leather. He could do that. And so getting these people out to see themselves as needing to struggle for their right to be who they are was why we did the 87 March in Washington and 1994 and 1994. And it made a huge difference. We had for Stonewall, 25th of New York, we had a couple of thousand people and that's a way of finishing conference the last two days around the time. The late 70s were an amazing time in New York City or at least the time of legend. Tell us some of the things you've experienced Ben and the barge you visited. So of course legends always have this halo of the past. Again smooth off all the rough days. It was an exciting place to be. But it was a very, in many ways very repressed place to be. Some people were comfortable walking around and learning the data. But I had lots of friends who lived in fancy governments in the east side or west side and they would put on a long overcoat to come out of their building and leather because they didn't want their door man to see them anywhere. We were out to try to change that sense of who you could be and I never forget this. One of our crowning accomplishments was the day of Stonewall 25, the New York Times editorial and one of the things they said in that is this is fighting for society where people could be wherever they are even if they dress in leather. We don't mention the times that way and so that to me was we put up with it. And it made a lot easier for people. Now this was not without controversy here. There were big parts of our community who preferred being on the wrong side of the tracks in the dark and thought that the light would destroy the mystique and dark energy if you will. I had not found that to be at all. I had not in the light all of my life never found that to be the kind of sex I would have. Tell us about some of the bars that were in the mineshaft. The mineshaft was the club which was actually in front of the money from a couple of bureaucrats that were in the mineshaft. And the mineshaft crowd was mostly rich entombed people. People come over from New Jersey or from out on the island to do the stuff they couldn't do at home. There were some locals there. But it was more sleaze than anything else. The bath bubbles were popular plays. Not so much hardcore SM. You couldn't see for a second. The lighting was like being inside a dark cave. And so it wasn't really a good way to have taking sex. There were a couple of clubs that were packed. The big bars at the time where I first moved there, there was a killer still up and down in the front of the Christmas tree which was really cool. Then up the Westside Highway, the Gramrod, and then farther up were the Spike and the Eagle. For a long time the Spike and the Eagle were the two dominant bars. They were a short period to get going on the march so you could go back and forth. They got priced out by real estate development which was really cool. There were fun places and they were very social places too. I could go on a Saturday, Saturday, Thursday, Friday, whatever night and run into a lot of people I knew from GMSMA. So it was a social place as well as a place to pick up things. I met my second long-term partner. Let's take a step back though. Bring us back to your introduction to the Leather King community. Well I'd done King for a long time before I got to New York. So in LA I was hanging out in New York. I was 20-something. In San Diego there was one leather bar. So on top of the bar, still near the jukebox. It got there 20 minutes in my estate. And it went to the bar's lot in LA as well. There were leather-pride events in LA, but it was much more visible. There was no organization like GMSMA in LA or it's Avatar, or you're not just playing. GMSMA didn't play. We didn't want it to be open to everyone. So I came to New York, started hanging out at the Spike or the Eagle. Kind of about GMSMA started going to the meetings. Because before the community center existed they were meeting and somebody had an import-export business and it was a large area in the back that we could use for meetings. Since we had meetings there. Small kind of community community. And the move to the center happened, it enabled us to publicize this properly, which we did. So handling some flyers and some old bars and that's where we started to get some of the people. Now the bars continued to be really big and popular until we stayed until the HNB took us home. Really. The combination of HIV, redevelopment, the meeting up online is supposed to be going far. So yeah. And then there was the lore for a while and then we're back to Eagle at a different location. But we never go back in the way of people. There would be hundreds of people. Yeah. You were both involved with GMSMA so tell us what became of that organization, how did it develop, what happened to it? You have to start. Well, it grew very rapidly. So it was a lot of interest for us. Don't forget in this period someone there is where Madonna began wearing VP outfits. So it became more socially acceptable. You could see more people in the street wearing other. So people were comfortable coming out in the light, out of the center wearing their leather. GMSMA did meetings on technical things, you know, how to do tits or fisting and then lifestyle things. What does it mean to be a member of the community, breath play, all kinds of things. I always wanted to be, started Full Sisters East, which was a big fundraising and worked on work with others to form a letter of pride, which for a long time is very unique. But first of all, the leadership of all these organizations and the men got to be very hard by the time. You know, and it's hard to develop leadership. You know, as people like that, it's hard to find people who want to put the work in. I mean, it was a period in New York when somebody I knew on a first-name chat-to-basis was dying every week. And so dramatically affected all of that until now. People began to focus on being here, their health, and it's a lover's help. It's the most of doing anything. How did it finally lie down? Come to an end? That was my doing, so to speak. So Bruce had been chairman and president and suffered for several years and I started getting involved and they were coming up for elections and I got elected to the board. And it was like one of those cartoons where they're like whoever wants to volunteer, step forward and everybody steps back. So I'm standing there, so I ended up being president. The last bit of GMSMA. Again, very active Folsom Streeties with that project, you know, as part of the GMSMA. But the year that I took over, I had, it was really hard to get people to volunteer or get to a leadership position. What was this? I mean, I think, you know, it ended because we won. It accomplished what it set out to do, which made it much more possible for to be themselves in that, in that, other people were not, whatever you would have called, we're not welcome in the boarder committee for a long time. There were huge arguments about the remorseless of the pride parade that we embarrassed some of these people. I'll say a period of time is when we sort of invented, so it used to be leather people. And then there were SM people. And when we're trying to figure out how to broaden this for the marches in Washington, we came up with the Soviet SM leather finish community, so that everybody could be involved. We could have more people. Yes. And so that's what it became. But that was an accomplishment of those days. So I had it with six people on the board that year, and by January I had three. Wow. And, you know, people calling and saying, I can call in for board meetings. I can do them. I know this is an active board, I think, but some of the students to be able to do projects in the workshops and the things. So, um, running up against, again, all these issues, again, the Internet, people meeting, doing other avenues of information. We declared victory in close to our conversation. We accomplished what we set out to do and sort of pulled the plot. What were your feelings over there? Frustrated? Sad? Um, somebody's excited because we've come so far. Here we are, 11 o'clock in the morning, out in leather, walking around on the street, and nobody, nobody, that's not right. So, you know, from that perspective, we're, you know, we accomplished what we needed to do. Was there a disappointment that you couldn't have taken the organization in a different direction and done something or done something different? There was, there was a group that wanted to turn it into a play organization, which was never the intent. So, there was, you know, some people that broke off and started their own thing. You know, a lot of it, a lot of it just seemed to be, once you get to a certain level, everything is sort of, you know, phased. You also have to look at it in the context of what was happening in the broader communities. So, the gay rights movement sort of hit its peak in Stonewall 25. Doesn't mean the issues haven't gone away, but the urgency to do that seems to have faded. The women's movement, the abortion rights movement, all of those sort of get that same downturn at that point. And I don't think the gay rights movement can, can't have a resurgence without those, I mean, reservists as well. Okay. So, you saw it as sort of a larger circle of events and things that were all going on in context. Yeah. Yeah. Gay rights movement has always been heavily dependent on the women's movement for inspiration and for energy. Any of the iconic events you mentioned, uh, marches on Washington, tell us more about them. It's really exciting. So, uh, we're going to, after the Supreme Court block hold on, I forget what it was, some gay rights issue, folks in New York decided to, maybe it's time to march on Washington. They'd been one right before the Bauer's decision to meet. It's 79. Please tell the audience about it. Seven. I can't remember that. I went to that one as a participant, but not that big. But by, by, by 86, it was clear that it needed to be something to do with gay rights under attack. I heard that there would be a meeting in New York from the committee to all of our marches on Washington. And it was typical movement stuff. You know, the first night was that with independent singers going on intensely about a lot. And I said to my friends at GMS, if we go in larger groups, we can probably win a vote to include both leather people, drags and trans people in this event, but it's going to be a fight and we want to make that fight. And they did. And we did. And we found allies among the drag community. We went to the meeting and actually, we actually forced it to a floor vote where the conservative members of the community voted against our community. But we won by maybe five or six percent difference. And we got as consequence a seat in the steering committee so we were part of actually running the march. We decided that if we're going to do that, we're going to pretend that we should have an event as well. So we rented this auditorium on Constitution Avenue and I think it is directly approaching the Smithsonian. It's the apartment of the...coverage department of the auditorium. And we took it up another week, banner out front of it and some leather fetish community conference. And at that point we had maybe a thousand people at the event. But enough to, you know, begin to go forward and try to organize things. What do you think that that accomplished with the marches gives people confidence? First of all, it does have a political effect, right? With politicians, no matter how reaction they are, see, hundreds of thousands of people in the street, they change their position. They better change their minds, but they bend to it. You know, it's just like the civil rights movement. These people didn't stop becoming racist when they passed the Civil Rights Act. They just realized they had an alternative here. But it's the same thing with the gay rights movement. You know, people out in the street, politicians will listen to them. And so it changed that. It changed that. It's enormously invigorating, fortifying, for the confidence of people involved in it. I can do something. I'm not this helpless guy in my apartment by myself. I have brothers and sisters. I have allies. Together we can do something. I am empowered. You know, sexuality in this country, in this society is so repressed that anything that powers people about claiming their sexuality is a good thing. I can't help but wonder, you both work in two of the most iconic cities that dealt with gay worlds. What differences can you see now between San Francisco and New York? You know, for me, San Francisco was, obviously, California, so it's much more laid-back. It's easier going. It's not as I'm going to say it's cohesive, but it's a different kind of cohesive than New York City is. You know, there were events, and there were bars, and there were things, but New York, it was like you had this, and you had specifics, you had the evil that spiked. You had whatever where, you know, when I lived in San Francisco, you know, you do the circle of bars, but it wasn't like a all, you know, encompassing, let's all get together into something kind of situation-wise. New York has always been this country's scrappy part of driving change. Always. All of the movements all of the organization, New York has always been in this country where it happens, which is why so many reactionaries hate New York. That was a lovely place to let great people out there, but it's much more laid-back, and the Leather community there was much more conservative in the Leather community. There were large portions of that community who really liked the wrong side of the track, your outlaws. So, part of organizing for the marchers in Washington, unlike the notion of the SN Leather community, we also were recreated, and I was up there with Redwood Blackwood, St. St. Consensual. And so, the response of the people out west who didn't like the public was unsafe, insane, non-consensual. It was their counter. It was a struggle, and there was a horrible incident. We tried, after between the two marchers on Washington, we tried to build a national coalition of groups, because at that point, there were many groups like GMS, and it was much smaller. And we had this meeting in Dallas, which was a disaster where Californians came with properties for dozens of groups, no one ever heard of, voted to essentially not do anything. I'd like that a Syrian committee for this organization, they created with nobody east of the Mississippi River. What organization did they try to create? Beyond Leather. I think I've heard of it. But what was it, the national? Beyond Vanilla, sorry, beyond Vanilla. Oh, okay. Beyond Vanilla. I think beyond Leather is the name of the event. Yeah, yeah. Beyond Vanilla was the name of the event. We thought that it was funny, we're not even brave enough to letter or sm in the name of one of the Leather. It's fascinating. In a strange way. It's sad. National Leather Association. Talk with us a little bit about that. So I just statement up the founder of the NLA quite well. He was a nice guy, and we worked both together, and at a certain point the folks who were opposed from the more visible public outreach of GMS and a coalesced around the NLA, trying to convince everyone to join the NLA, I suppose to say, in their local organizations. So we had a big, powerful local organization, so one of the reasons we gave that up. So they had their conferences, we'd go to their conferences. I think they still existed in the northwest, maybe, but they never had. They never did much of anything. You've both mentioned Folsom East in New York City. Talk with us about that. What is that? Folsom Street East is a once a year street fair that happens when I was doing it. I think it's really good. It was happening on 28th Street in front of the Eagle, and I think they moved it over a block or two. So it's Folsom Street East became the event that made the organization. So GMSMA started Folsom Street East, and Folsom Street East grew and grew. So I was the president of Folsom Street East after GMSMA closed down. I was the president of Folsom Street East for like five years. The time I started working on it, even before I was running it, I worked on it for a couple of years and fought to get things like a real stage versus the natural flatbed talk. We always did things of the cheap. Our production costs for an event were as close to zero as you could get. All of our point, we did a fundraising event. All of the money went to the beneficiaries. That eventually sort of changed. The philosophy was that we don't take ourselves seriously as this big event. Nobody else is going to take us seriously. So getting a real stage, getting people to perform that, like Sylvia Tosen, she was an amazing dance performer and producer. She killed our top 10 back in the day, and she was this amazing woman that would just give up her time and her talent and helped us get some more credibility within some of that music, world stuff. Crystal Waters had a protege that I get a phone call one day and I was like, it's Crystal Waters on my phone. I'm asking if her protege I can perform in Folsom Street East, like Kaliya. So it's not just drag queens. We're not going to say just, but it's not, the only thing there wasn't drag queens to do things. We instituted an annual event called our Folsom Street's Pipe Meeting Contest, which basically got teams of people and bottoms were in jockstraps, bent over haymills, and smashed pie into their ass. Whoever cleaned their plate first won the contest. So obviously we don't share your chocolate cream, but a good one cream pie. So that's the kind of stuff, to try to take it to something sort of out there and kind of raunchy and still fun. It was, there were fewer and fewer districts in New York where an event like that, the exception, they'd get a bit less fancy condos all the way up. And then the highlight opened over 28th Street while we were doing it one year. And you know people like, what about the children at my event? We've been here for fucking 16 years. You know, that's kind of crazy that gets me. And of course then you get the people that are like, well in San Francisco you can go naked. I'm like, well that's San Francisco, that's not here. Stuff that's very pretty, but you have to put it back in your pants. What do you two think was the greatest challenge that the New York City's faced? And then he still thinks this. Well, the greatest challenge is HIV. Okay. It's decimated. All parts of it. After that, the greatest challenge is, today I think, is getting back the notion of a community which is not just raising money or some politician, independent activity, but that's a natural problem. All our efforts seem now to be electing people who like us as opposed to pressuring the people whether they like us or not. Okay. That is a shit. Yes. How did you see HIV and AIDS impact the city? Well, I buried three of our partners. I said they weren't afraid of dying whenever we used them. You know, just destroy all the institutions that destroyed the public. At what point almost every single person, for example, who did window dressing at the major stores all from Broadway, chorus boards, principals, let it come in. Every part of society. And it sort of feels to me like the world is experiencing. We're at large, we'll be experiencing. A little bit, we'll be experiencing. Everybody is experiencing. That's a very strong correlation. Yeah. Now, what brought you two? Let me know. I'm going to back up. There we go. You met on Recon. We met on Recon. Tell us about that. It was a huck up. It was a huck up. I had moved to New York on the 1st of January, 2000, 2006, 16 years ago. And left an X foot, you know, two suitcases on the block that didn't go, you know, start your life over. And I ended up in this illegal loft. So it was an industrial building where somebody had taken the second floor and turned it into 10 bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and only rented to be a man. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. Found the money. The price list that got me into Manhattan without having to spend $26,000 to try to get an apartment, you know, the first-last security broker, all that crazy. Why the move to New York? I'd always wanted to be in New York. Okay. Um, my background in real life is menswear. Okay. So I had a career in signing, doing signing development for menswear. I worked for, you know, big companies like 19, and designed stuff for, where's Claymore, and I thought, you know, my last job in New York was working for the New York Republic of the menswear life. So this is where I always wanted to be. I always felt like I belonged in New York even before I got to New York. I have sort of this larger-than-life, semi-aggressive personality, shall we say? So, it fits New York really well. I'm really good at, excuse me, push, you know, the tourists on the street. Um, that's why I always wanted to be in that sort of space. And, uh, you know, I just felt like home. I just felt like where I belonged. So, meeting on a recut, how did that come along? You don't really hear much about people. Is there a meeting that he came over? So, I saw him online, and I, we started to correspond online, and I did the chat back and forth. Okay. I was in a date. I'm, I'm not very shy about it, but basically what I think would be fun and interesting. Okay. Anyway, did the AOL thing, you know, before it was recut? Yeah, I was comfortable with it. So, he came over, I tied him up to my gut and radiator, and basically, he was nuts until he was allowed, and he started chasing me. Oh, my goodness. There we have it. There we have it. There we have it. Yes. And you're bent together. Did you mention 16 years? Is that what you're interested in? Um, 18 and a half. Okay, April will be 16, yeah. Why the move to South Florida? Uh, I was working for a big, I was a senior executive of a big corporation, and I've been going through changes. We had a sort of difference in people, and I had to carry out those changes. I just got away and compromised when I covered my ethics and principles. It's only party waves, and they've been in no way. So, I was retired early about six months before my real retired age. I was retired. And I didn't want to stay in New York. I wanted to be somewhere to be outside more. New York is a great place to be. If you're working and busy every day, but I don't think it would be great. And I think it would be a great place to retire. Is there any options? Myer Island, Manhattan, we'd already had a condo down here for many, many years. Oh, I see. We knew the area, so let's hope we won't. The area needs to keep all the way on the land. It's comfortable, it's easy to get around. How much have you found the scene here? Tell us a little bit about South Florida. Let me see. Challenger. Also, um, you know, for me, it was hard coming down here and sort of, I knew where I belonged in New York. You know, I knew what my role was. I knew what I was doing. And I come down here and I, I felt lost. Interesting. Um, it's not a lot of community activities. It's not a lot of community activity. I mean, there's, there was only, only this bar and leatherworks. Okay. And I had done some volunteering with the Random Men's Brotherhood that puts on the leather mask ball every year, which is now in conjunction with Penguin. Oh, I see. Okay. And, you know, try to, try to help with that for a couple of years. And again, we had some challenges. For me, this is one of those, for being such a small pod, and there's a whole lot of attitude. Interesting. Okay. That's just maybe my perception of it. This place is very dominated by the visitors, whether they're for a winter or just for a week. And what I've discovered is that people may be kicking where they live, coming down here, down here, and they want to be by the pool, by the ocean, be drinking, not interested in taking this thing. So, there is, in New York, we have a lot of visitors, lots of international people on my entry. We get entertained, you know, on my entry. Here, very few. Fascinating. Do you think that it is, or rather, let me rephrase that, is it something you think could be built up a little more or something that you think could somehow affect? We're going to get a retire. Not to build new things, anything but to retire. Interesting. I mean, I think there's always an opportunity to more outreach and to more connecting across levels. You know, for a while there, I was helping organize through during the Wolfman Center Gay Pride event South Florida Leather Coalition. Yes, tell us more about that. That was just a flow. This is the flow number eight that it was the name we came up with. But it got the gay men, the lesbians, the pansexuals, whoever didn't fit into the umbrella of something else. And I think with three years, we did that and rents in a flow and got everybody out in full leather or rubber or do whatever and made our statement that we're here. And the intersexual groups tried to do another Pride night down here. Didn't go anywhere. One or two of them. I called and actually spoke a lot. But the gay men didn't show up for that Pride. Interesting. Now, do you feel that there's some way for you to connect with people that would give you a more stronger community sense? When we come here, meet people sometimes, I get to tell you though that I used to pick up people regularly in parts of New York. I've never picked up or picked up by anybody. I don't know. I think it's difficult. I think again, you set up the factors of... Well, you've got a couple of things to do. You've got the internet, right, where people meet. Also, we have younger friends now that we've made through our larger friends. And I know all kinds of people. There's likely to go to Monas or Monkey Bar or the Street Bars as they already come here. You don't feel that same need. What would that need to be? Just to be aware of people exactly like that. Oh, okay. People can't throw around a diverse group of people. Okay. So you're basically depicting some part of the overall shift in. Yeah. Social... Yeah. Absolutely, I think that's a pretty true question actually. Yeah, yeah. Now... I think that here is probably one of the last places that there's a defined gay conflict like both of that. In both cities, there's a broken army there. There's anything like that in New York in it, though. Both cities, I don't know what's happened to Boys Town that you have. It's not like this. Yeah. Yeah, so this is the last place for it. And you can argue whether it's good or bad that we're now more integrated into. But what if you could say that about Palm Springs in that case? It's small and relatively isolated. A lot of population comes there for this and that. And other people hang out there all year round is relatively limited in a sense, so brutal it is. But that could be, you know, one of the reasons. I mean, there's a little bit of a year, there's a little bit of a hate crime. But in almost every city, there used to be a more defined neighborhood where people lived. That's broken down a lot. Apart because there's not the greatest of lots of places, you know, so you feel the need. I mean, there were times in San Francisco and New York where you could spend your day at only gay, it's only gay kinky establishments. That's as far as restaurants and coffee shops, bookstores. Yeah. Now, somewhere, someday, someone is going to watch this video and they're going to say, I want to go live in Fort Lauderdale. What have you to say to them? I love it here. I think it would be outside 330 days a year, whatever it is. I love the pool. I love the skinny thing in my pool. I love the casualness of living here. I mean, I love that I can be whoever I want here. One of the nice things about living in Broward County, general, is almost anywhere we go, we see other gay people. That's it. But what challenges do you have living here as opposed to other big cities? Restaurants, culture. No, so like when we lived in New York, I mean, there's a resilient, amazing restaurant in New York that you could get anything you wanted delivered. You know, you could get ice cream sundaes from that, you know, ice cream shop around the corner delivered. Where here, my biggest challenge was, like I said, it is very, very late now. It's very casual. It is, the sense of urgency is practically not as assumed. So for some people, that's great. It took me a year to stop and piss off. I wasn't living in Broward County anymore. Until like, 1 February or something, and I'm laying naked in the pool, there's pods going by in the palm trees, and I was like, okay, do we get the funk over here? You know, but with some research, some trial and error, we found some nice restaurants that we were able to like and subscribe, you know, to a couple of things that come through Broward Cross America, and stuff like that, some of these series that happened. So if you spend the time and look for it, you can find it. You know, we still go back to New York for theater clubs, and it's much, obviously, much different now than what we live in there. We're living in a tourist area, right? And some restaurants, a lot of their business are tourists, so they don't really care what your food or service is like. So you're not coming back. You're there for a wine shot. And so it's not like they're trying to cultivate a lot of locals here. Anything that tourists patronize here, the standards are usually not very high because they don't expect it to even be business. But if someone were moving here and they want to get involved in your local leather scene, what advice do you offer someone like that? Well, first of all, define for you what the local leather scene is. That's for you to tell us. If the scene is this bar and that bar down there and, you know, go to those bars, all the events, and tonight is big dance here, a lot of people here. Yeah. And force dress code back here, one night, third, seven in the month. And legal, there's all kinds of parties. Go to those things, of course. Of course, there's code in August, though, it's kind of a challenge. But community beyond bars, and a lot of the community centers around leather works, they have some events there. Classes, they have classes, but there's not much community. There are a few organizations. Onyx is here, Minutes, Artists, Artists, they get a little told around. They're contested, so is that kind of stuff? But if you want to be in a fiery, where you meet people socially, not necessarily essentially competitive, there aren't a lot of right views. I can't help but then beg the question, why do you see me? What's your score? With days like today, in New York, it was 12 degrees there, or whatever, so on the ground. A year, it's 76 going up to 80, like to be in the pool, is it? We found our own niche. We found that Outlaw works for us, and we have our playroom at home, and we spend a lot of time enjoying that. So don't need a whole lot of outside, so to speak. And we find people that we like, and they come back repeatedly over and over, and they're staying with us right now. Yeah, I know. How do you two want to be remembered by the community? You know, I think one of my biggest accomplishments in community deals with Folsom Street East, I got it into a legitimate 501c3 status, where before it was all started being run under the table, and yes, money was being donated to the center, and NCSF, National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, for that I told you, I was important back for two years, too. Please tell the audience a little bit about that, for National Coalition. National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. It's basically an organization that fights for your right to express yourself sexually, however you want to. Okay. I was out while on the board, and then after I stepped down and did a lot of work around consent. Consent counts is one of their major platforms. I am a rape survivor. I was drugged and raped when I was in New York City, and turned something that was really awful into something really positive. You know, so you talk about consent, you talk about intimidation, you talk about it, and I'm 6'4", and I stand up and I'm like, what the fuck is your problem? It's either, oh my god, or it's like, hi, daddy. Those are the two options that she's heard again. But they do workshops, they do outreach. They have done American rapes on different types of things across all bubbles, they're not just gay men, but you know, lesbian, and sexual, straight, across all platforms, so to speak. It's kind of done a lot of really good work, the DSM for living through the war, which is sort of a deterioration of what's psychologists and their misuse to determine stuff, the DSM was taken to a fetish, not a... Not an illness. Not a illness, threw a lot of work through this organization, and it's good to work. So, and a lot of really great work. But you still look really good in it? Loosely. But DSM is one of the spin-offs of the DSM. But I want to be a member of this race that's sent you out.