 Welcome to Inside Leather History, a fireside chat. I'm Doug O'Keefe, the host of the chats. I produce the fireside chats with Mistress Joanne Gaddy. I'm in London, England at the moment in the studios of Matt Spike, to whom I extend great thanks for the use of these facilities. I also thank Carl Hayden for coming all the way from Dublin to be able to fill these chats for us today in Soho. Today my guest is Nigel Whitfield. And we're going to go ahead and conduct a lovely interview here in beautiful London. Nigel, thank you very much for being here for Inside Leather History, a fireside chat. Tell us a little bit about your growing up in your early family life. I grew up in a town called Winchester, which is in the south of England. My parents were divorced and I had a twin brother. We grew up in a relatively, I wouldn't necessarily say prosperous, but he was up a middle class or merchant class setting. My grandfather owned a private school in the city. My father had been in the Royal Navy before he fled to another country with his third wife. And we were educated privately first at the school that my grandfather owned and then on to boarding school, which is obviously where I get the accent from. And then after that, I moved up to London to university and I never really got around to going home again. So growing up, there was a lot of people around three of my grandparents were teachers, including the grandfather who owned the school, a lot of people who'd been in the services as well. So there was, I suppose, very much that sort of service ethos of doing things, useful things for the community that was around not rammed down people's throats, but it's sort of in the background that everyone did useful things. So tell me a little bit more about that. What sort of things did your family do that was so helpful? Well, the school, obviously, the family ran and my mother's always been involved in things like the WRVS, the Women's Voluntary Service. Even now in her 80s, she volunteers for the local talking newspaper in Winchester, selecting the articles that will be read and helping to copy the USB sticks that are sent out. And other uncles have been involved in things like local amateur dramatics and also outside the school coaching people for the sports, things like that. My grandfather in particular, who bought the school in the 1950s, was also very keen on things like hockey. He worked for a while as the county physical education organizer, helping plan how physical education was taught in schools across Hampshire. So tell us a little bit about your coming out. How did you discover this? How did you discover the gay scene, the leather scene, the kink scene? I think, and in common with many people I've spoken to over the years, that I probably knew I was kinky before I knew or accepted that I was gay because, of course, being a man of about 50, when I was a kid, there weren't very many gay role models around and it wasn't something that was talked about. So there was, let's say, a certain amount of experimentation at boarding school. Nowhere in the, and some people think boarding schools are like a full-on gay orgy all the time, but it was nothing like that. But there was, I suppose, a little bit of bondage and kink. But not actually involving general contact, I suppose. And I'm not gonna say more about that because I don't know who might watch this. And whether or not they still do that sort of thing or not. But so there were some of that. Then at university, I was struggling, I suppose, with acceptance then. I went to Imperial College London and the student prospectus at the time said, if you're gay, the great news is you're coming to London, the bad news is you're coming to Imperial. And I didn't really come out until after I left. It turned out that most of my friends, the guests and my mother knew. She talked about it with my brother and with various other family members. So I didn't really have any problems with acceptance with my family. So that was fairly straightforward and easy. And I came out on the London gay scene. I met some people through chatting to them on the internet, through other things. Some of those first people I met were into kink and leather. And so I was able to talk about that sort of thing. And there were quite a lot more venues back then where you could learn some of that. The Cole home was still quite a leathery place. You had one side of the bar was the more twinkie side and the other side was the scary leather men. And there were a lot of other venues around as well. There was a club night called Sadie Maisie at the London Lesbian Gay Centre. And that was probably some of the first kink nights that I went to. They also used to have, and it's still going now, the SM Gays group that did talks about various aspects of kink and safe play and so on. So that's how I started to get into all that in the mid 90s, I suppose. But let's take a step back without giving me any names. What sorts of activities were you exploring at this boarding school? How did you have any concept on that? Well, it was just things to do with jockstraps and a bit of tying up and whacking someone in the bollocks and things like that. So nothing too extreme, I suppose. I don't know if there wasn't even any mutual masturbation. I know from speaking to other people subsequently who have been to the same school that, yeah, there was a lot more going on in other parts. But I never really discovered that. And we didn't necessarily identify as gay. This was more like a sort of challenge, tie someone up and punch them in the balls and stuff like that. But certainly the beginnings of an interest in kink stuff there. So you mentioned you came out mostly after university time. So tell me about some of the influential places you visited or influential things you experienced that brought you down that leather kink road. I suppose there were venues like the Colhoun that I've mentioned. There was the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. In terms of gay venues, there were nowhere near as many as there are now in London. But there were probably more kinky ones. So there were things like the hoist was just about opening around the 90s sometime. The back street, of course, was only about 10 years old. That was one of the first places that I went to specifically to go to a leather bar. Although there had also been before then the hoist. Not the hoist, sorry. The block in Parkfield Street in Eastlington. And I would say the Sadie Maisie Club at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. And I guess I remember going to there, that would have been about 1991 because I remember taking someone home from there to where I was living in Cricklewood at the time, which puts it firmly in late 91, early 1992. So that's sort of when I started exploring some of this. And of course, although the internet was not widely used back at that time, there were some of us there. And that was something that I was quite involved in in creating some early internet resources for queer people in the UK. But let's take a step back a little bit. What did you enjoy about your discovery of this community? The sex, mostly, I suppose. And just, I suppose, finally being free and constrained from growing up in a very white heterosexual middle-class milieu to now something that was a lot more open and where you could talk about all sorts of things and experience some of them. And I certainly didn't jump straight into the deep end and think, oh my God, I must be fristered before I'm 25 or anything like that. All that stuff up bottom of this business is overrated, frankly. And there are so many other things to do. Such as? Well, you know, applying electricity to one's genitals, for example, wrapping someone up in cling film. Actually, the first time I did any electric play I was about 14, I'd read some horror novel in which someone was tortured with a truck battery and a bucket of water and a copper tube stuck on his dick. And I read that in this horror novel in puberty and thought, oh gosh, that sounds quite fun. So I certainly had interest in stuff like that from quite an early age, even before I'd admitted that I was gay. Were you ever able to replicate that particular scene? Well, I've not tried it with a truck battery, but I have dabbled in things like that. And you know, it's a wonder that I never ended up merely a footnote in some book of autoerotic fatalities. What did you dislike about the scene as you were coming into it? I don't think there was a huge amount that I disliked about it, although these were very political times. And for example, there was a big fuss at various stages, at one stage, the London Lesbian and Gay Center, for example, banned leather. Because a lot of the lesbians who were involved in running it and some of the other gay men felt that all the leather was innately related to fascism. So there was that sort of political aspect of the scene that I didn't all particularly enjoy. And also, there was still then, in the late 80s, early 90s, there was still a lot of misogyny on the scene. There was a gay bar that advertised a bring a fish night to try and get guys to bring female friends with them. And that sort of thing I really didn't like. But fortunately, that, I think, has largely vanished from the scene. So you mentioned that you did a lot of tech work, a lot of computer work for various, shall I say, LGBTQ organizations. Tell us a little bit about that. You created some of the early internet groups. I got involved in just initially just reading stuff on the internet, on Newsnet, which was a sort of global distributed bulletin board. And there was a group on that called SOC.mox, MOTSS, which was the social group for people who were attracted to members of the same sex. And I posted onto that, I guess, sometime, maybe around 89. And back then, the people who had access to that were effectively large universities, some big corporates. And that was about it. This is way before most people had domestic internet. And I posted something on that sort of help. I think I might be gay type message, I think it was. And I got responses from a few people in the UK. And it turned out there were a few of us in the UK and we were chatting on that. And then sometime around 1990 in June, some of us had met up a couple of times in bars in London. And then we created, or I created, an internet emailing list called UKMOTS, which was for UK people to have these discussions. And that we created in 1990, and it ran until about 2002 at its peak in the mid-90s just after home internet had become cheaply available in the UK. We had over 400 members, and there would be like 18 messages on the mailing list a day, covering all sorts of stuff, some relationship things, some just furious flame wars, discussions about whether or not there was a gay agenda in Doctor Who or about law reform, or it covered absolutely anything that people wanted to talk about. And we had social meetups and we marched in the Pride Parade a few times. And that is still one of the things I'm most proud of because there are people who met through that in the early 90s, who came out using it and they met other people through it. And now 20, almost 30 years later, they're still married. My gosh. So I'm really proud of having done that. And that was, as far as I know, there may have been other things, but that was one of the first widely accessible gay resources on the internet in the UK. And then going on from that, we created some other mailings. I set up with a friend, a little group called Digital Diversity, and we had meetings at a pub in Holborn to explain what the internet was to queer people so that they could come along, find out how useful it was. And we set up some other mailing lists. At one stage, we hosted a mailing list for Outrage, which is a UK campaigning group, a one called Euro Queer, which was for campaigners across Europe, and Europos, which was a discussion forum for positive people. And I created all the software for that myself because especially with things like Europos, we wanted to make sure it was as secure as possible so that you couldn't find out if someone was on the list and you couldn't accidentally expose someone very easily. So those were really useful resources. And I took a step back from the day-to-day work on that after about, I think it's seven years or so, and occupied myself with other things and then got more involved in the leather side of things and joined Bluff, volunteered to organise some nights backstreet and eventually ended up running the whole thing. Your, did you have training and experience in the computer tech in order to be able to achieve these things? I studied computing science at Imperial College in London from 86 to 89. So I learnt some stuff there and I've learnt an awful lot since then. I've made my career, although I studied computing science and that's what my degree is, I've made, most of my career has been as a freelance writer about tech for various computer magazines, many of which are a hotbed of filth and depravity. Such as? Or they have been in the past. And there are people who worked for some of the home computer magazines of the 80s in the big 80s computer boom in the UK who are very well known on the BDSM scene and I've had the pleasure to meet some of those and some of them have been my mentors in a professional sense as well. So that's been really interesting and we also used to have a brilliant sub editor who worked production on one of the magazines I worked at, Barbara, the scary SM Dyke. And everyone knew she was a scary lesbian but what we didn't know until she was on some late night Channel 4 chat show was that she also in her spare time wrote Lesbina Rotica. Oh my gosh. So it was a really interesting time to be working and to meet all these amazing people that some of whom had done really crazy things. Tell us more about the tech magazines because that's probably going to be historically significant to somebody watching. Well, these were ordinary computer magazines. They were just ordinary print media and it just happened that an awful lot of people who worked for those were notorious homosexuals. I don't know why so many gay people have gravitated to this but it is quite astonishing the number of people you meet in the tech world who are from a lesbian LGBT background. Well, shifting gears slightly, your brother died in police custody and his tragic death has had a profound influence upon you and it motivates you in many different ways. Tell us about that. Yes, he left a police van through the rear doors while it was in motion in February of 1991. So we were 23 at the time and he died a few days late on the 5th of March when his life support was switched off because he'd been declared brain dead. And this was, and I mentioned before, they're upbringing in that sort of merchant class in Winchester and it is very easy in a lot of countries if you're in that right sort of class and where nothing bad ever happens to you to believe that the right or centre right of politics when they're saying that all these people who get benefits and take things from the state they're all just scrounging and they're out for what they can get and when people get in trouble with the police it's because they've done something wrong. When this happened, my world collided with this other world where the police officers involved have the right not to even answer questions at the inquest into what happened. Wow. And I was unemployed at the time. I was in receipt of state benefits to pay rent and things like that. I missed signing on. You had to sign on once every two weeks to maintain your benefits and say you were looking for work. I missed signing on once while I was in hospital with my mother waiting for my brother's life support to be turned off. And then I missed signing on again when I was back at home in Winchester with her after he died while we were making the arrangements for the funeral. Because I missed signing on twice all my benefits claims were closed automatically. So I lost all my income. Had I not had an understanding landlady and a grandmother who was prepared to write a check to help me out, I could easily have ended up on the streets. And I had to go back into the benefit office in Woolwich in the part of London where I was living at the time and reapply for all my benefits. And I had to sit there thrilling in this form in tears trying to explain I'm sorry I missed signing on twice but my twin brother died. And they said to me, if you had to go to a funeral you're allowed one day off from your job seeking. If you were going to be away for longer you should have filled in a holiday form. And I thought you know some holiday my twin brother just died in police custody. So that was the point at which so many of these things that coming from my background are a given that the police are there to protect you and that anyone who has trouble with the police is probably in trouble making themselves and all these people on benefits are scroungers which you suddenly realize actually no it's not that simple. The main concern of the people in the benefits office was getting me off the books because this was the tail end of the Thatcher era that meant one less figure on the unemployment. That's what they cared about not the fact that this had happened and the way the police inquiry was done it was so lacking in accountability. And also another really sad thing I mentioned it once I was talking to someone who worked as a doorman at one of the gay bars in London who was a black guy and he said that sort of thing's not supposed to happen to you, you're white. And these sorts of things make me realize that so much does happen to people and it's very easy to just ignore it and pretend it's not happening until something happens and gives you this tremendous wake up call that there are people who really do genuinely suffer at the hands of the police and at the hands of the state and that there is racial injustice and that was a massive turning point for me in how I thought about things politically as well as obviously emotionally and I've struggled ever since with depression because it was a pretty gruesome thing to happen. So it has also affected my mental health as well that's something that I manage now. I think it's the best thing to say about that. Fortunately, without too much in the way of drugs. But yes, that did have a massive, massive impact on how I view an awful lot of things. Give me an example of how that changed for you. I think simply in my willingness not to take as granted, when politicians say that, oh, this has happened and it's because of a rabble causing trouble with the police. And you think, well, you know, sometimes it's not. Sometimes the police do things and they can't be challenged. And we've seen some awful things happen since then with, for example, there was a guy called John Charles de Menetes who was shot on the underground because the police thought that he was a terrorist and statements that the police put out about what happened in that were lies and they tried to blame him and they said he was jumping over the barriers and he was wearing a puffer jacket and all this stuff turned out it was lies. And the woman who ran that operation is now the head of all the policing in London which is a fucking disgrace. I know I'm maybe not supposed to use that word on video but it is an absolute disgrace. There was another guy called Ian Tomlinson who was a newspaper vendor and he got caught up in the May Day protest some years back and he came across a policeman who I think is an American tourist who eventually found the video and gave it to the Guardian that showed that whereas the police said, oh, he'd had a heart attack and they were bravely trying to save him and they were pelted with bottles by the protesters. No, he was whacked deliberately by a policeman and the police weren't peddled with bottles by protesters. But the first thing, again, just like Jim Meneses and with Tomlinson and with so many others that I've become so aware of after getting interested in death in custody is the first thing that happens is the press office of the Metropolitan Police in London lies and they lie to try and cover up and they issue statements that they say we were trying to protect this man and people were throwing bottles at us and then someone comes forward with a video, a tourist who happened to see it passing and it turns out that was a complete lie and so never, ever when authority says this is what's happening and I have no idea how my brother came to go from being in the back of a police van to lying on the road with a serious head injury. We have what they said but they wouldn't even answer questions. How are we supposed to know? So that did make me tremendously distrustful of some of these official accounts and not to the extent that I'm some sort of mad conspiracy theorist but very often when the police do things their first instinct is to protect themselves and that happens in the US as well and that's why you've seen things like the Black Lives Matter movement as well so much. Fascinating. Does that parlay into the Leather King community as well or how do you see that in the bigger picture? I think it's just makes me very much aware of the need for social justice and for accountability and that we have to be open to people of all sorts of backgrounds and there are people, different people get disadvantaged in different ways and that's something that we all have to be aware of and we also have to just realize that maybe some awful things have happened to people just because they're not saying them. There may be reasons why someone says I don't like the police or I don't trust you or I don't trust this particular top and you can't force people to talk about it but you do have to listen to people and some people have had awful things and it took years to be able to talk as openly about what happened to my brother and there are still sometimes things that I read or see on television that bring it all crashing back and it's the same with women who've been assaulted who cannot really say anything for ages because they're not sure they'll believe or it's just all too dramatic and so, yeah, I think it applies not just specifically to the other community but to life in general and how I view that. You mentioned politics a moment ago when we were preparing for this interview, you said politicians have, what was your wording? They've chipped away at empathy. Yes. In the last 20 or 30 years and I think this is true in the US as well, it's certainly true in the UK that there has been a systematic chipping away by politicians at the idea that we should feel empathy for each other and that happens when politicians start using phrases like welfare queens, dole scroungers and things like that and so whereas some time ago, the idea behind a welfare system and how you might respond to refugees or people who've come here like the children of the kinder transport or stuff like that is what can we do to help? And there were people who quite willingly in the days of the kinder transport said, yes, we will take in these refugee children and now we have refugee children who've come here who found their way to Calais and then come here and instead you have lots of people looking at pictures of the newspaper and saying, they don't look like their children, they look older, we should examine their teeth to check how old they are and we've gone from saying, how can we help you to what are you trying to get out of us? And I think a lot of politicians have contributed tremendously towards that and this chipping away at empathy in the public sphere is one of the things that has helped cause some politics so much and picked people against each other and if you try and suggest that we do have empathy for people, whether they're gay or they're trans or they're immigrants or whatever then you're a snowflake and all this sort of stuff, trying to do a social justice warrior as if that's a bad thing, what's wrong with saying, yes, there should be social justice, yes, we should live in a world where people as we were saying earlier don't get bankrupted because they've fallen off a ladder and broken their leg. We should care about this sort of stuff but instead it's, oh, maybe people haven't prayed enough, they're not godly enough and or even this, as we're talking now there's been this ridiculous idea about this Saudi journalist who has been very likely killed and dismembered when he visited his own country's consulate and there are people from the right and apologists for the Saudis trying to say, well, you know, he wasn't just a journalist, he took a political stance against the regime and stuff like that as if to make out that somehow, well, if he didn't like the Saudis and he said bad things about the mad crown prince then well, why should we be so surprised? It's almost like he was asking to be dismembered with a bone sore, well, no, it bloody well isn't. A man was killed and all this trying to suggest that oh, well, maybe somehow he was asking for it. It's a bit like saying, oh, well, a woman's wearing a short skirt, she's asking it. No, no one is and we should have empathy for people. We shouldn't listen to all these people trying to say, oh, well, somehow it's their fault, they brought it on themselves. Well, if she hadn't got drunk then that guy wouldn't have tried to have sex with her. Why do you think politics have shifted in that direction? Greed, perhaps, divide and conquer, obviously for a lot of politicians on both side, it has become so tribal and you cannot maintain that lack of consensus and keep that tribalism going if you're capable of showing empathy or if you encourage people to show empathy for the other side, it's far easier to work up your base and keep them energized if you tell them that the Democrats want open borders or the people who want to remain in the EU, they want completely open borders and no controls over immigration and you're all going to be swamped and killed in your bed by mad Muslim and stuff like that. That fires your people up so expressing empathy for anything of the other side, all that consensus politics does not happen and also bring on the alien invasion because almost all the big steps forward in social progress in the Western world in the 20th century have happened in the aftermath of massive, massive disasters like principally the two world wars. Yes. After the first world war, we got better at union rights and we got things like women's suffrage and then after the second world war in Europe, we created the welfare systems and universal healthcare and things like that and people were talking about building homes fit for heroes and that was important and people were willing to go along with that and to nationalize loads of industries in the UK, for example, because we were all pulling through this, putting together to build a better society that we knew we had to do after we'd just gone through these awful wars with millions and millions of people killed and things like the flu epidemic of 1918 as well and we knew that we had to do something better and what we haven't had since, I suppose, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR as a cohesive entity was that common thing that everyone feels in the gay community to an extent, we did have that with HIV that brought people together and that brought often lots of people saying, you know, there were all these lesbians who came out and they helped the gay men and that, again, is an example where a something disastrous happens and it brings people together into a cohesive mold and where is that thing now? There isn't and that's why I say bring on the alien invasion because that is probably about the only thing or a climate cataclysm, by which time, of course, it will be too late to do anything, an alien invasion is probably about the only thing that would be able to bring together all the disparate bits of mankind to say, hang on a minute, we somehow got to get through this and then something, what would come out of that? Maybe if we look at what we achieve in Europe with social housing and welfare and education and health services after the Second World War, think what we could do in the aftermath of an alien invasion but they don't show any sign of turning up soon but something we need has to happen to bring people back together because there has been nothing and so societies have become so much more atomized and lost to that cohesiveness and there is nothing like, that's why politicians love wars, of course, because unless they start going wrong, it's a great way to get everyone together and say, right, bring the whole country together, everyone's behind this thing. People try to do it over things like make America great again or Brexit but that doesn't work because those are very divisive issues and in some ways, they're not making it great, they're making it great or better for a small subsection. You also mentioned that politicians put way too much emphasis on what's in people's past. Oh yeah, it's astonishing that they spend so much time and effort talking about trans issues and equal-agents consent and stuff like that especially right-wing politicians who by and large say we should have a really, really small state, it's just that they seem to want all of it to be in your bedroom and you think, why? This is just insane or people who hold the same time this belief that gay sex is absolutely disgusting and no one in their right minds would want to do it but it's simultaneously so incredibly alluring that if you were even to mention its very existence to teenage boys, they'd be banging away on each other's arses like steam hammers and you can't have both but they are obsessed. They think this is weird and why, who cares what two people do consensually in their own bedroom? But you end up with these ridiculous Sodomly laws that you've had in the US that have been struck down, whether they'll come back with things like Section 28 that we had in the UK that again was a thing that brought lots of people together in the gay community to fight against this because people thought you must not teach in a maintained school, it's more or less the language of the legal bit that the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretend family relationship because they were terrified that if you actually told people that it was all right to have two daddies and stuff like that, that these would be the breakdown of the nuclear family and the end of civilization. What do you know what it hasn't been? Elton John can get married now, I could get married now if I was the marrying kind but I'm not. The world hasn't ended yet, okay, so you've had a few hurricanes but I don't think I'm pretty sure that that is nothing to do with bum sex. It all depends upon whom you ask because some of the religious right think it is. Yes, well, it's weird that they call the religious like because they are religious but they're almost always wrong. Ha ha ha! It's the way I tell them. So what are your thoughts about gays and politics? Well, some people, there are apparently some gays who are right of center and you have the log cabin Republicans in America, we have gay Tories and I don't think anyone understands either of them and the Tories do love to say oh, we're the party that brought in equal marriage but they only did that with Labour votes. Yes, it was a Tory coalition government for example that brought in equal marriage, mostly undoing all the horrific work they'd done on introducing anti-gay legislation during the latter years but more Labour MPs voted for equal marriage than Tory MPs, an awful lot of Tory MPs voted against it and if it had just been down to the Tories we wouldn't have got it and it was really the fact they were in a coalition with the Lib Dems who brought us that. Obviously I am a massive screaming lefty so that does colour my views but I also subscribe to the view which I think was the, I can't remember which feminist said it originally but from the early first wave feminism that the personal is political and sometimes you talk to people and they say to me oh, you're very political aren't you? In a way that makes it clear that they think that's not a good thing but the personal is political when it comes down to things like someone being able to fire you because you're gay to say oh well sorry you can't work here anymore because you've had a sex change things like that these things matter and as someone said I think in the West Wing decisions are made by the people who turn up so you have to turn up and vote and yes you may have different views on privatisation and nationalisation and things like that and you're perfectly entitled to be a capitalist if you want to be personally I've always found it extremely exhaustive I'm really not very good at it and if that's what floats your bag you know I'm, if you're into capitalism you're into fisting fine, just neither of them is really for me there's quite a lot of similar between the two of course I suppose but let's not get too diverted down that politics is important and it's not important just here it's important broadly because every time we send a message that equal marriage is possible here it gives hope to people in other countries when Ireland had their equal marriage referendum that was a massive beacon of hope for so many people especially since it was done through a referendum and seeing that a country that only 30 years or so less than a generation ago most people's view was that he was so enthralled to the Catholic Church and the numbers of young people flying home because in Ireland you can't vote if you're not there and there was this whole thing whole plain loads of people flying back to Ireland specifically to vote so that gay people, their friends had equal rights to get married and that was tremendously uplifting not just for gay people in Ireland but for gay people everywhere to see this sort of thing so being political is important and it does send messages and that's also why now with your latest judge Kavanaugh this is, it's not just what happens about Roe vs Wade and about the Obergefell decision you know if he starts to restrict those and there's a distinct possibility that they will try and do that and say oh well it's going to be pushed back to the States to decide on abortion or to decide on equal marriage that is not just going to be an absolute disaster for American people in the US for women who need healthcare for abortions or for gay people who want to get married there are going to be other countries where there are people who will say well you know what's the point in having equal marriage now because the Americans tried it and it was such a disaster they got rid of it now that's not a true interpretation but that is what the anti-gay marriage people will say and it's the same with abortion as well and so this is why it is important to be politically aware and to speak out for these things we can leave aside all these quibbles about should the state own the means of production or the workers or the capital but there are these fundamental things about human rights that I think it is important to fight for not just in your own country but to recognize the impact that what you do in your own country the beacon that you can be that shining city on a hill to borrow a phrase from I think Ronald Reagan that this is important and we have to be political because even if it's not our life now there's nothing to say that an election here especially if Brexit goes completely mental who knows who could get in and it can be just something in the blink of an eye and attitudes change and people start making someone who ever thought that we would see anti-semitism so rife now that people are claiming that refugees fleeing Central America are somehow all being funded by George Soros and that people marching through London yesterday about Brexit are all funded by George Soros and stuff like that which is the oldest anti-semitic trope in the book that they are there pulling the strings when people talk about the bankers and the financial crash they never talk about Barclays and stuff like that somehow it's always Rothschilds and Goldman Sachs it's always the Jewish sounding ones they mention who would have thought 70 years ago when my grandfather was one of the first people to go into Belsen at the end of the war that all this time later people would this be a resurgence I live near Stanford Hill which is a big Hasidic Jewish community and I follow the local shum room which is the Jewish neighborhood watch on Twitter and every time they're reporting these things people shouting anti-semitic abuse in the streets and people leaving notes with swastikas on the doorsteps of Jewish people in 2018 in London and this sort of thing is why we have to be political and it's not just about gay stuff it is on what people call intersectionality the struggles of all sorts of marginalized groups have so much in common and that's why it is so important you can't just go through life and think oh you know I'm going to drop some E's and take some drugs and get fisted by 23 different people at a party the personal does matter and if you think it's not going to affect you today one day it will that's right I agree shifting gears a bit though I want to draw attention to the shirt you're wearing Bluff, have you hugged a leather man today? tell us about Bluff, what is it? okay Bluff is a leather club possibly I don't know I think it's one of the largest international leather clubs in the world he was founded in 1997 by a gentleman called Leon Jacobs who was a Dutchman who at the time was living in Montreal and not finding quite enough people to have sex with and not enough stuff on the internet that focus on his fetish which was guys in full leather uniforms and breeches so he started Bluff and it has grown so in our 21 years old which means we're legal almost everywhere and we've got about 3,800 members worldwide we provide a website which has the usual things like profiles and messaging so you can chat to people it's also got because it's not just a website this is something that sometimes people say oh Bluff is just an internet club it's not because the other thing is that we have members around the world and many of them volunteer and organize Bluff events in cities around the world so for example in North America every month there is a Bluff event in Montreal, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco we also have other events from time to time in places like Provincetown and Minneapolis and if people want to do them elsewhere they just have to get in touch and we have to try and help facilitate them in Europe we have events regularly in London in Amsterdam, Berlin, in Essen, in Paris some in Manchester we had some in Australia as well last year I think we had possibly our biggest ever about 160 events worldwide all put on by volunteers mostly with no entry fee or nothing more than the bar would usually charge some of those are social events some of them are full dress code events some are things like people marching in pride parades or going to the movies or a meal for example we have an annual meal at the moment in San Francisco the week before Dory Alley so there's loads of different sorts of events and they're all put on by volunteers to get people out there in their gear socializing and that to me is the really important aspect of Bluff it's not the website the website is the thing that helps facilitate this but it's all those events 150 plus a year that people put on to get people to go out in their gear to venues and have a good time and meet and yes maybe some of us have sex or swap knitting recipes or whatever but it gets people out it gets them in their gear and it's all done by volunteers who want to do something for the community and that to me is the really important thing about Bluff what do you say to the people who accuse Bluff of being elitist? I would say that you're wrong the idea behind Bluff is the full leather uniform and I accept that some people do think that is elitist because if you're going to go to Langlitz and buy all the gear and have a leather shirt to go with it and a leather tie then yes that's going to cost you a lot of money but the key to the Bluff dress code is a uniform look now it doesn't have to be an authentic uniform it doesn't have to be Langlitz uniform if you were starting out for example I would say that if you want something that looks like a uniform you get yourself a pair of leather trousers which you can get fairly cheaply especially if you look around on eBay you get yourself a pilot style shirt with the epilex on it, cotton you can get two of those for £10 in the UK from surplus stores, places like that get a leather tie, get a sand brown belt and that's your starter that would be enough to get you into Bluff and it's a nice smart crisp look it looks like it could be a uniform especially if you accessorize it say handguards or whatever all the things that you can then save up and get another little bit you can add a cap and some gloves and a leather jacket and you have something that looks like a uniform and it's not elitist you can get that and that's basically a pair of leather trousers a leather tie and a sand brown belt that's the basic, if you've probably if you've already got a belt to keep your ordinary trousers up just get the shoulder strap bit so you don't even have to spend a huge amount on that you can get the look so I appreciate that are some people who have much more expensive gear and as with every scene there are people who will look down at you because you've got cheaper gear that's not exclusive to Bluff that happens all over you have people who aren't in Bluff and who have spent lots of money on fancy gear you have rubber people who will say well I've got this custom stuff from so and so and you've just got some off the peg stuff and look oh it's so thin you get that from everything you even get the brand snobbery amongst on the gay skinhead scene where people say well that's not a Ben Sherman or a Fred Perry that's not the right shirt so never underestimate the ability of queens of whatever sort to find some reason to look down on others and I accept there are some people in Bluff who are arrogant and look down on people the organisation does not you do not have to spend a fortune and you will find that same attitude in almost every section of the community that you look in and you even find people think that well I'm a real master because I do XYZ he's just plays at it he's not a real say-do-massacist because blah blah he's never he's never had a hook nailed through his scrotum so he can't be a proper say-do-massacist people will always judge and look down and the reason I suppose people think of this with Bluff more is because we have a very recognisable name as a subset of the community and I think a lot of people don't take the time to read the full dress code but rest assured you can join Bluff on a pretty small budget what is your role with Bluff? everything legally speaking I am the director of Bluff Limited which is the not-for-profit company that we set up a couple of years ago to try and give the club an independent existence so that if I get hit by a bus or fall down the incredibly long flight of steps up to this studio then the bills will still get paid on time because it's not coming through my bank account so obviously we have our volunteers in different cities who organise their own events and try and encourage people to promote them and some of them run their own Facebook groups and Twitter accounts to help with that I run the website centrally I approve all membership applications to Bluff regardless of which city they're from I have volunteers who help with the calendar but I can administer any bit of the website I do all the legal stuff which this year has involved an awful lot of time spent with lawyers for reasons that are too tedious to go into but suffice to say I thought when I took over running Bluff I'd get lots more leather sex instead turned out last couple of years I spent a lot of time in planning meetings and with lawyers nowhere near as erotic so I do that I also do all the coding the website I coded myself the apps I coded myself so I do all that and I do media horse stuff like this so I do pretty much everything we do have a proper actual grown-up accountant who does the actual numbers bit because I mostly because I don't know what you can claim against tax and what you can't so we have a grown-up proper accountant who does that and aside from that yeah I basically do the whole lot and it's exhausting have you been able to travel to some of Bluff's international events? within Europe, yes, I hate flying it's unnatural it's absolutely it's even worse than buggery so I tend to travel not as much because my own day job stuff has been very quiet lately so I've not travelled as much as I would like to but anyway you can get to my train trains or boats a plane if it's an absolute emergency but really, honestly, I'd rather not I just have massive panic attacks and it's not pleasant for anyone, anywhere although the last time that happened it did finally get a woman in the row behind to get her horrible child to shut up what advice have you for other groups seeking success? well, I hear the Russians are really good at promoting stuff online for you but what you need, I think, is to keep constantly reminding yourself, are we doing things right? get feedback from people when you can for example, we have now when you delete your Bluff profile there's a multiple choice question where we ask why so if someone then comes back and says they've been harassed by another member which I don't think has happened yet then I can say, well did you not know that you can contact us? we're sorry if this happened but obviously that would suggest that we need to make it clear about what you can do if that happens and so you need that constant feedback but also you need to constantly think about changing and how you do things when I first started writing the first Bluff apps in 2012 quite a few older members thought why are you spending time on that? who wants to use Bluff on your mobile phone? but that is important now and we've got some members that I know who've joined this year specifically because finally I got around to doing the iPhone app and for younger people especially if you want to get them involved they have to be able to access things in the way that they expect and if you're also a traditional old club where to join you have to send in a letter and they send you an application form which you fill in and post back to them with a check well sorry young people aren't going to do that so you have to go where you are which means that's why we have a Facebook presence and we have Twitter presences and we'll probably have to think about Instagram and Kik or whatever the next thing is but you've got to reach out to people where they are if you want to carry on engaging them that doesn't mean you just turn everything else off but you've got to think about how people will find out about this stuff the days when people are going to wait for something in the mail so if you have things like a Twitter feed where you can say go and look at the Bluff events Twitter feed and every week we tweet out on a Tuesday at noon a list of all the events coming up this week and then every event on the day so you get an extra reminder as well and we do similar things on our Facebook page and so on and we have links for each event that make it really easy for people to share so that kind of stuff is important to think about how are people going to spread the word what tools can you provide them with and how are you going to get the money to do all this as well which is obviously a constant struggle I've never liked the idea of charting I think Bluff should be like the NHS free at the point of delivery that does constrain us with funding but I believe that because so much is done by volunteers that we couldn't raise if we charge a membership, a low membership fee although that would cover lots of our costs it wouldn't be enough to recompense all those volunteers as well and so much rather we have a voluntary donation system rather than one person getting rich and still expect you on the volunteers to do something you have very strong opinions about the title holding circuit tell us about that well I may get into trouble with this and let me first say that I know some title holders are wonderful people and lots of them do do tremendous things for the community and in the US when a lot of this sort of started especially in the US where you have no real functioning public health care in the AIDS crisis getting people into the past for title contests was a great way to raise money to help people and that was badly needed but that's not something that we need to do over here and it seems to me sometimes that some of these are more of a beauty contest and we now in the last couple of years started to see this thing where people are standing for a title for something and they'll have a photo shoot done before and they'll be sharing all over social media posters of them saying candidate for Mr Leather East Grinsted or whatever and East Grinsted incidentally is where the biggest cults like the I think the Scientologists and people like that have their UK headquarters but anyway that's completely skit there but worth a Google East Grinsted cults and when you know when people are doing all this stuff before and you think that's a lot of energy that's going into this and I do think I do just wonder why are we picking the prettiest person and putting them on a pedestal and yes some of them then go on to do really really good things some of them don't and partly because I'm fat and old and ugly and I've never won a title obviously I'll put that one out there before someone else says it in the YouTube comments you know there are people who have been doing stuff for years there will be people at events in other cities in all sorts of cities who have been the door guy or the coat check guy for their local leather club and they've turned out every week for years and years and all the people who go out and they'll put the flyers around all the different bars to tell people about this stuff and they do huge amounts of work and no one ever hears of them because they don't stand for a title and I think that I would love you know if I were to suddenly become as rich as the crown prince of Saudi Arabia I would love to have a massive dinner for volunteers and award them all something for doing all the volunteering that is so important that it's the lifeblood of our community put organizing groups like SM Gays who do the talks and people who are doing the talks at those all the mentoring things all these amazing things that people do over and over again without having to have a sash yeah and we should be I wish we should recognize that let's have a competition for the beautiful people with sashes as well if you like but let's please remember all these people who were the lifeblood of so many organizations who sweat their balls off and no one ever really thinks about them and probably doesn't even say thank you as they collect their coat on the way out right what's the biggest misconception about you oh that I'm a nice person I don't know I have no idea oh that I'm unapproachable well if anyone thinks I'm a Tory they're completely wrong on that honestly, I don't know maybe they think I'm taller or thinner I have no idea that's okay Nigel Woodfield I would like to thank you very much for an amazing fireside chat here in London I think I'm fine you know as long as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia doesn't see this then I think I'm gonna be fine