 Hello everyone and welcome to Inside Leather History, a fireside chat. I'm Doug O'Keefe and I am the host and the co-producer of these chats with Mistress Joanne Gatti. The fireside chats are a program of the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago. Today our guest is Hardy Haberman. Hi Hardy, how are you? Hi, doing fine, how are you doing Doug? I'm great, thank you for being on the chats with me today. So I just wanted to go ahead and start right where I normally start with all of my guests. Tell us a little bit about your childhood because you told me you grew up by religious. What does that mean? Yeah, my family, my mom was a Christian sort of and my dad was Jewish. And when they married, my mom converted to Judaism because that's what you had to do to marry a Jew. But she brought a lot of her traditions with her and my dad liked that. We sort of had a secular Christmas every year. Well, he had a Christmas tree because he liked the Christmas tree. And but we had Hanukkah candles too. So it was a little of both. It was an interesting mix and I think it gave me a nice perspective on things. I went to the temple, we were reform Jews. I got Bar Mitzvahd and so that was sort of my early years. Well, you said it gave you an interesting perspective. What perspective did it give you? Well, having relatives that were Christian and relatives that were Jewish, it was kind of neat because it gave me a chance to get a little taste of both, the way both cultures worked. And I say cultures because there's a difference in the culture to an extent, probably more than there is now. My grandmother on my father's side was, she was a conservative Jew. That means as in the denomination, not her political beliefs. She spoke Yiddish. She was from Prussia and had come to this country back when there was a Prussia. And so she had immigrated a long time ago. She was definitely an old world Jew. She was a cook, she had a restaurant and cooked kosher food, except she cooked bacon for my dad because my dad really liked bacon. So we used to say when we'd have a Passover every year, we'd call it a Trace Seder because it was sort of our own take on the Seder. So. And where were you living at this time? I was living in Dallas. I've lived in Dallas all my life with a section of a brief time, about a year and a half when I lived in Mexico City. But my grandmother lived in Dallas and my grandmother on my mom's side was a more of an old Southern style woman. She was her husband, my grandfather was a blacksmith. And I knew him briefly. He died when I was about 10, I guess. So he was illiterate, functionally illiterate, but he was a polymath. He was very sharp mathematically. And my grandmother on my mom's side, she tutored people in calculus. So she looked like a farm woman. She raised chickens in her backyard, but she also was very smart. So it was a neat, it was a kind of an interesting, interesting duality that went on there. But in those days, how was a Jewish family received in Dallas? In Dallas, not a problem. The Jewish community in Dallas built a lot of the city. All the stores downtown are a great number of them. The big department stores like Neiman Marcus, there was a department store called Sanger Harris, or Sangers, which was the Sanger Brothers Jewish family. Jews were integrated into the fabric of Dallas pretty well. There was definitely some prejudice, but it was not, I never noticed it when I was a kid. Now, we didn't live in the area of the town that people call the chud, which was sort of Preston Hollow, which is where the Orthodox synagogue was. People lived really close to that so they could walk on Sabbath. We lived in Northeast Dallas in a relatively new development, not too far out to be called a suburb, we were inside the city. But it was a 1950s kind of childhood. Well, as time went on, one of the things that you mentioned was that you were a magician. Yes, yes. So tell us about that. Well, I was fascinated with magic as a kid. There was a shop here in Dallas called Magic Land. And I used to go down and hang out there downtown. And that was where a magician named Mark Wilson who used to have a TV show here and eventually ended up on CBS with a TV show called Magic Circus. He was the guy behind the counter demonstrating magic and selling magic. And I bought my first magic trick from him when he was on TV and it was a cut and restored rope. And it was a great trick, but the rope got shorter every time you did it. Okay. So you then you begin to learn what's behind magic and it's good and I liked it. It gave me confidence. I was a shy kid, I was still pretty shy, but the fact that I could use the magic tricks gave me enough confidence to feel confident. And it gave me a chance to present in front of people. And I use a lot of the techniques that I learned doing magic in my presentations when I do cake presentations, leather presentations, just ways of dealing with the audience and working with a group of people and connecting with it. Can you give me an example? I used to do a lot of magic tricks that required volunteers. And so when you bring somebody up from the audience, you have to understand, you don't want to humiliate them. So you have to assure them that everything's gonna be fine and you learn to work with them and you will try to get out of them genuine reactions while you're trying to get them to do what you want to do. And you have to give them the chance to be the star because the person from the audience should never be the butt of a joke. If anything, they should be the one who pulls a joke on you. And you can, for me, that's a good performance that you make the volunteer the star. And so that's kind of what I keep with me. And I do that still when I do presentations. Doesn't always work, but most of the time. When was the last time you did a magic trick? You wanna see one? Sure, yes. I don't know if you remember, but Oreos put out the multi-colored, the rainbow Oreos for Gay Pride. Yes. And I work at my church a part time and I was up to the office one day and there were these cases of Oreos. And I said, what are all the Oreos doing here? And they said, well, somebody, some member of the church saw that they were trying to boycott Oreos. So in support, they went out and bought cases of them and they just dumped them here. So we had Oreos all over the place. But one of the things that I like about them is, you know, it gets a regular Oreo. Okay. But my favorite is this kind where it has really has the double stuffed Oreo. And that's really the good one, just so you know. Yes. So aren't you something? Hey, it happens. And the story about the Oreos is true. There were cases of them around the church for weeks. I believe it. But who was Professor Tweety Fuffer? You would bring that up. Professor Tweety Fuffer, Tweety Fuffer. Oh, Fuffer, okay. Professor Tweety Fuffer was a character on the Bozo show. And I was that character. I had friends of mine who worked on the show. And in fact, one of them was a magician friend of mine, Paul Osborn, he was the ringmaster. Okay. And he knew I liked doing characters and he also knew I wanted to get into television. And it was at a local TV station. At that time it was owned by Doubleday, the publisher. They were trying to get into television. So we were their flagship station. And I came down and I was Professor Tweety Fuffer which sort of a Viennese comic with a, you know, top hat and, you know, shaggy hair and big nose and all that kind of silliness. And he had a voice, he talked like this. Oh my goodness. It was a strange kind of, you know, Viennese comic thing. And that was a lot of fun to do. And I did that at four o'clock when the Bozo show came on. And the rest of the day I ran camera. So that's when I dropped out of college because I actually got a job in television. It was like, that's what I was going to college for. I wanted to be at communications. Although I majored in philosophy, go figure. And, but I really wanted to get into TV and I got a chance to get into television. So that's what I did is I, you know, began working on the Bozo show. And then we began doing production and I learned how to do videotape production and switching and, you know, lighting and all that kind of stuff by actually doing it in live television. How did you get into that work? Dumb luck. I'd been, I'd always made movies when I was a kid. I made, you know, little Super 8 movies. And I was always interested in motion picture photography and directing. In fact, the first time I really knew I wanted to do movies is my parents took me to see the 10 Commandments. This was back in 1956, I guess. And I was just blown away. Not so much by the story, but by the scope of the movie. So I wrote Cecil B. DeMille and told him what I liked about it. And he wrote me back. I still have a copy. I've got his letter somewhere around here. I need to frame it. It was on Paramount Stationery and had his, you know, signature, his little horse with a spear carrier that was his sort of sig. And he said, dear master Haberman, which is like, you know, that's what you called kids back in those days. Yeah. Now you say, dear master Haberman, people think, you know, you need to be wearing one of these and have a slave. But it was really exciting for me. And I'm sure he sent back dozens of letters like that. Probably had people sign them for him. But I envisioned myself, you know, doing film work someday. And I ended up doing it. I didn't do motion picture films, but I did commercials, lots and lots of commercials. And after I left the Channel 39, the television station, I went to work at Tracy Lock Advertising. And they wanted me because I knew about the video stuff. Well, tell me about some of the production that you made, some of the commercials or whatever. Well, Tracy Lock, I did work on some of the Doritos ads with Avery Shriver. I don't know if you remember any of those. No. He used to make a big crunch and things would fall apart or whatever. And the first gig that I actually did involving that was, turns out that the crunch sound effect that they used was an apple crunch. And we decided that was a bad idea since that was not truth in advertising. So I got a case of Doritos and went into a recording studio and spent an afternoon crunching Doritos to get the perfect sound effect. And then we went back and dubbed it into all the commercials. So it was really a Dorito crunch. Wow. Tell us a bit about your coming out. Well, I came out as gay, I guess, or bisexual or whatever. I don't remember what I told my mother at the time. But when I was 18. And my dad had died that fall. And so just my mom and I were pretty close. And I said, you know, I think I'm gay. And after she stopped crying because she wasn't going to have grandkids, she became very supportive. Oh, good. She ended up joining the startup of P-Flag here in Dallas. She never did anything by half measure. So she jumped in with both feet. And I came out to her and I came up with my family. And they were all very supportive, which is great. Not long after I came out, I guess about two years after I came out, I began dating a woman that I'd met while I was working in television. And we ended up living together for a couple of years. And she said, you still like guys though, right? You really like guys. I said, yeah. And she said, maybe you need your own apartment. You know, you're going to feel. So we parted ways amicably. I still know her. We still stay in contact on Facebook and everything. Oh, crazy. But she was correct. And I got my own place. I moved downstairs in the same apartment building. You know, we stayed in touch, but it was a good decision. You know, my affectional preference is for men and always has been. I mean, sexually probably, I've had sex with women. I've had sex with men. So I guess it would make me technically bisexual, but my affectional preference is for men. So that's why I say I'm queer. When you say your mother jumped in with both feet, how did she do that? Well, joining PFLAG or helping to start PFLAG and Dallas is one thing. And then she began setting me up with people, which was terrible because she had no idea my taste. And the only people she knew that were gay were hairdressers and people who were very nilly. And she worked in advertising also. And she had a couple of designers that she tried to set me up with. And we went out on a date and we both realized this was a really bad idea. We've got to stop. We've got to stop Carlita from doing this. So, but yeah, that was part of it. That was part of the difficult part of it, yeah. That first year when I came out, I was going away to college. I went to college at Baylor University in down in Waco. And it's a Baptist University, which seems like a really weird place for me. But since my dad was a teacher at Baylor Dental College here in Dallas, when he died, I got a freebie scholarship. Oh, we didn't have a lot of money. And it was like, well, this is a good deal. I'll do that. And so I was the Jew at Baylor. And it was interesting because I was like the class project for the theological seminary. And I would get witnessed about once a week. And it really gave me a good taste of what I didn't want in a religion. And what is that? I'm not big on proselytizing. And I'm definitely not big on people who want to convince me that I need to have my own personal savior. I don't believe that there's a get out of jail free card in life. I don't believe, I can just say, I believe in Jesus and everything's great. I go to heaven no matter what I did or no matter what I do. That is the kind of religion that I didn't like. Okay. So how were you introduced into the leather community? Ah, the leather community. Well, I got very active politically. I, in the 70s, I became part of the Dallas Gay Political Caucus, which later became the Dallas Gay Alliance. I got very politically involved because I didn't like what was going on, especially in Texas and especially in Dallas. And ended up becoming deeply involved in that. And you go to the board meetings or to meetings with people I worked with and the guys I was attracted to were more masculine. They weren't the, you know, they were not the stereotypical Nellie gays, they were guys. And when I say guys, I mean stereotypical guys. Okay, that's, I'm throwing broad strokes here. But I liked that. And so, they wore leather. They oftentimes wear leather jackets when they come to meetings. And it wasn't anything like you'd see in leather today where everybody's, you know, high leather with vests and caps and all that shit, but they had, you know, they looked different. They looked masculine. Yeah. So I asked them, where do you hang out? I never see you at the discos or the dance bars. And they kind of laughed. I said, well, we don't go there. We go down to this place called Sundance Kids. Okay. I said, okay. And I asked around some other friends and said, what about Sundance Kids? And they went, oh, don't go there. That's dangerous. Which immediately made me know that's where I wanted to go. So I went to an Army Navy store and I bought my first leather jacket, leather motorcycle jacket, you know, an Army surplus. And then went and hung out in the parking lot of Sundance Kids. At that time, they had a dormant and a dress code and you had to pass the dormant before you get in. Okay. And this place was off the beaten track. It wasn't in the main, it wasn't really in the Gabor hood. It was sort of adjacent to that. It was on sort of a CD street. There was a country Western bar next to it across the parking lot. And it was a gay country Western bar, but a totally different crowd. Although I later I found out that they went back and forth all the time. So, and I'd been there before. So I sat in the parking lot on the country Western side and watched the door of Sundance Kids and watch these guys go in and out. And these are the kind of guys I wanted to meet and that I wanted to have sex with. And I was still afraid to go in. And after several weeks of just showing up at the parking lot and watching, I figured it's now or never, you gotta go do this. So I got out of my car and went up to the door. The doorman nodded to me and just let me right in. And it's like, wow, I fooled him. So I went in, I went up to the bartender and I said, so what do you have? And I said, it's like a martini up dirty with two olives. And he just looked at me and he said, you want a beer? I said, no, no, martini up a bootles if you have it and a dirty with two olives. He said, trust me, you want a beer? So I took the beer and I walked over and stood by the wall and I realized he gave me the best advice I ever had coming into that bar. If I'd been standing there with my little martini glass and two olives sipping my martini, I would look like a dilettante and people would figure I was a tourist. I would have been right, but I'd never have anybody talk to me because it's like, oh, who's that fucker? And instead I just stood by the wall and watched. And I came back a couple of weeks, just kind of hang out, just stand by the wall, watch the crowd and eventually people talked to me. And I met the guy who owned the leather shop or ran the leather shop in the bar. It was a pretty rough bar. It had, you know, it was the sawdust on the floor and at two levels, the upper level was sawdust on the floor and then you go down a few stairs, they'd be a lower level. And that part was packed gravel. I mean, it was really rough. And there was a leather shop down there and that's where I bought my first harness and I bought some other stuff and the guy would explain what goes on and I'd say, well, what's that for? And he'd tell me about it. I'd say, well, what about this guy over here? What's his deal? And so I began getting insight just by talking to the guy in the leather shop. You know, he became sort of a friend. Okay. And eventually other people, I began meeting other people and they sort of, you know, sort of let me in on what went on. And that was a big change. And that was sort of how I, that was sort of my first getting into it. The real, what I would consider the baptism the first time I ever really played with anybody other than just having sex. There was a guy whose name was, can I use his name? I guess I can. Was Master Hadley. I was over at Hadley's apartment and he was in the bedroom having sex with a guy that I knew. And I kind of tagged along because this was the seventies and that's what you did. And I was talking with slave one and looking at this photo album that was on their coffee table. Now, you know, contrary to what people believe Leatherman don't live in leather houses. His apartment was very high gay. It was very, you know, just the right to the love J all over the place. Very nicely decorated. Okay. And, you know, track lighting the whole thing. And so I'm looking at this photo album and it was of an event called Inferno. And at the time I had never been there known it knew about Inferno. That's an event put on by the Chicago Hellfire Club every year, sort of their yearly run. Yes. It's a secret location. Essentially a resort, but it's a secret location. And there are pictures of people doing stuff that I didn't even know you could do. Let's ask. Well, there was a one, I remember one picture of them with a guy totally mummified with just a little holes for his and he was like mummified and hanging upside down like face down from this suspension record. I'm going, can you do that? And oh yeah, really? Yeah. And while I'm talking to him, I've got this, there's a chrome ball on the table. You know, like an object of something. Oh, some kind of play with this. And I say, what is this? And he said, oh, that goes in my ass. And I said, no. He said, yeah, you want to see? Within about 30 minutes, I was pushing this ball in and out of his ass and he was popping it up and putting it in and my hand went in there. And it was like that was the first time I ever fisted anybody. Wow. And like, this is really cool. And so that was sort of the way I got into it, so to speak. And at that time, of course, in the 70s, for some reason, fisting was the big thing. You know, things go through phases. Fisting was what it was about. And so that was the big deal. It was years later that I actually really got a chance to experience it from the receiver end, but that was my first time doing it. So it was cool. It was very cool and eye-opening. Taking a brief step back, you said you were, the moment that you were told it was a dangerous place to go, what about it excited you? Because clearly there was something there that defied whatever the other people were warning you about. Well, when they said dangerous, I knew they didn't mean like you're getting killed, but they meant it was a rough bar. And I liked the idea of masculine men. And the guys who told me it was dangerous were people that were definitely not in masculine. Oh, okay. But the perceived danger was part of the fun. You know, the whole leather thing is, I think a lot of the reason that the leather community started wearing leather, like when the motorcycle club started back after the war, after the war war, they wore leather and they rode motorcycles. Well, you wear leather when you ride motorcycles, but also people don't fuck with you, you know? If you look tough and you walk into a town or somewhere into a store and you're in a motorcycle jacket and you got one of these hats on and you look and the dark and the glasses and the whole thing, people just go, oh, say the fuck away from him, which is perfect. Because they didn't want people to screw them. It's sort of protection, you know, it's leather armor. And I think that's part of the reason why that was so attractive. So that's kind of where that all came about. And that's why I like the danger aspect of it. I like the roughness of it. Yes. I want to take a quick step back so that we don't overlook something here that I think is important. And that was the first march on Washington in 1979. Yeah, tell us about that. There was, we got, I was involved with the Dallas Gay Alliance at the time. And some friends of mine were, brought these flyers and they said, hey, you look, Cleve Jones and these guys on the West Coast are going to do this march in Washington. It's going to be the biggest party in the world. We're going to have a million queers in Washington. It's going to be fantastic. And I thought, well, this sounds like a lot of fun. And it's something we need to do. Yes. It was, you know, I was very involved in being active. So I got involved in the organizing of that from the, for the Dallas contingent of it, Texas contingent. And in fact, we had a hotline that you could call and that phone was in my house, was in my apartment. It had an answering machine on it. Cause you know, that was high tech at that time. And you'd call and it would give you the information about the march and what to be in, where to be in all that. So I would update that. And that's what I took care of. I took care of the hotline. And then we'd go out and we'd sell buttons every weekend and another friend of mine, she was a designer and she designed the logos that we used for Dallas. And we printed up these little sheets with the logo on it. And I got a button maker and she got a button maker and we'd sit there in the evenings and make buttons, homemade button maker. And we'd go sell the buttons for two or three bucks or whatever and that would help fund the work that we were doing from March on Washington. And we chartered another friend who was involved had a travel bureau. He chartered a 727 or 737, 727 at that time. And we filled it. And we were headed to Washington DC. We had the reservations at the Holiday Inn in downtown DC and the weather fucked us up. We couldn't get there and we had to stop over in Houston. So we couldn't go back to Dallas cause the weather came in and we ended up, we couldn't get in Washington cause it was socked in. So we ended up stopping in Houston and we stayed at the airport hotel in Houston and took over the club upstairs and made it into a disco for the night. And all the flight attendants came up and partied with us. And then the next day we took off from Houston. And of course, since we all knew the shtick we all did the flight attendants see demo and hear the exits over the wings. We played along with that. It was great. So the whole plane, the Dallas delegation showed up on force the first day of the March. And it was very cool. I've still got a few pictures of it. It was a lot of fun, but it was also very poignant in that being in the nation's capital, it does affect you. It's a, if you don't go there often and you go there just once in a while, it's overwhelming. It's beautiful. It feels like government, but it also makes you feel very American and it feels very representative. And to be on the mall and to march up to the Washington monument where they had a stage set up and to hear all these speakers, Alan Ginsburg spoke. Robin Tyler was one of the organizers. She's a lesbian comedian. She was fantastic. A lot of Tom Robinson band played. All these people who were just sort of nascent out LGBT people were there. And it was such a wonderful bonding experience. We went and we did a lobby day on Monday with our state representatives. But just being on in force and having the news media see us was very affirming. I went back in 1990, the March on Washington in 1990. Okay. In 1990, when was it? The last 1980, 1995, I think was the last. No, it was later than that. Well, there was a big one in 2000. 2000, that was the one. Yeah. I was there for that. Yeah, I was there in 2000. I went back for that. And it felt a lot of the same way. There were leather contingents then. In the first March on Washington, there really wasn't a leather contingent. Although I wore my leather jacket and we all hung out, but it was too hot to wear a lot of leather. And at that time, leather was sort of like, we don't want to scare the muggles. Don't, we're trying to look like everybody else. But by the time 2000 came around, we all marched under the leather flag and wore our leather and the whole deal. In fact, I had to meet John Oliver. He was interviewing people around that time. So that was one of the cool things about it. But yeah, those marches were, they really energizing. And if people had never done it, it was energizing. And when I came back from the first March on Washington, I got asked to speak places all over the place at different clubs because they wanted to hear what it was about. And when you tell them about it, it was hard to put it into words. But the energy that you got from that was so affirming that it made it okay. And it made it, it lets you know that you were doing something. We didn't get enough done, but at least something got done. And that was a big deal. In fact, CBS did a thing called K Politics, K Power, I think. And they showed scenes from the March on Washington. It was not a particularly good documentary as far as putting a good light on the LGBT community because it was a little bit scary for the straight community. But at least it gave us visibility. And when people are visible, they're harder to ignore. Yes. That's why I wear leather when I go to my church. You know, when you're visible, people can't pretend you're not there. Yes. And so you have to be out. And I've always been out. Once I came out, I didn't really hide much. I mean, there's a little wishy-washiness in there, but most of the time I've been completely out. Let's go back to SM a little bit though. You said you experienced your first fisting session by putting a ball of somebody's ass, but how did that evolve for you into other activities? I began to learn a little bit about what people enjoyed. And I like to bring, I like seeing people have a peak experience. You know, I like to get people to that place where they're just going. And the animal energy, that primal energy, especially with fisting or with flogging or with anything that's cathartic is just attractive to me. And I love it. And I love hearing the moans and the sounds. That's all, you know, aphrodisiac for me. You know, it's not, I never took a class. I did later, I took classes, but I never took a class on how to do something. You learned by doing it and you learned by watching others. And I watched a lot. There were several people who I really enjoyed watching. Just was like, wow, that's really cool. And there was a bar down near where Sundance Kids used to be called The Brick. And it had a, they did a thing called a living art show every year. And the great thing about it was people would do these wonderful bondage sculptures. And one of the things that David did is he had a guy mummified, hanging up above the bar on his rack. And so there's just this mummy up there. You can see him breathing. And there were little red lights that kept going on and off. And I said, David, what is the red light? Is that like a breath monitor? He said, no, that's a TENS unit in his ass. And it was like, okay, this is good. So this guy was having a scene up there and just there. And he was monitoring and he gave him water and check on it. But it was, it was one of those, one of those things like, ah, and unless somebody knew what was going on, they'd never know that there was a scene going on with an electric butt plug in this guy. They would just think, oh, he's just up there and that's his hard Peter or something. So those are the kind of things I learned. And I loved that kind of the deviousness of it and the ingenuity of it. And, you know, part of the fun of SM is the toys. And I love collecting toys. So that's great. What's your favorite toy? The one that I use the most consistent is that my floggers. Oh, okay. I've got some floggers that I've had for 30 years, I guess, one was made by a friend of mine and his wife. They started making floggers. And then the other one was made by Jeanette Hartwood back when she was still actually making the floggers. And they both made them for me. They've got these marvelous turks head knots on them. They're weighted just right. They balance perfectly. They've got like 27, 28 falls. And when I hang them on my waist, they come down just to the top of my boot. You know, they're meant for, they're meant for the way I play. How do you play? I learned to flog just doing it and watching other people do it. And I really got a chance to, where I really found a style. I was at Inferno one year and this is probably 25 years ago. And Brian Dawson was there. And he taught a brief little class on flogging. And that was an eye opener for me again because the way he flogged was totally different than me. He worked from the side. So that when, you know, he stood, if the person standing here, he stood here. So his swing brought it across the back, all the trails went across the back at once. So this is great, fuddy slap. And I tried to learn it. And I felt so clumsy because I was used to standing from behind and doing the whole, you know, direct straight up. I learned it with a lot of persistence. In fact, I almost gave up. And another friend said, no, you got to keep working at this. It's not easy. And I got the style down and he does this kind of over the head wind up so you can get this wonderful hard swing. And that's the style. That's the way I flogged. But what I do is I try to start off slow, bring people to a place where they really enjoy it. You know, I'll hold the tresses and slap them against their back to get some use to it. And I build up very slowly and I do it sensually. And I whisper in their ears and I talk dirty to them and I'll stroke their back and caress them. And then I'll mix this soft caressing with a bam and build up again and try to get them to the point where they're just writhing in sensation. I don't think of it as pain. I think of it as intense sensation. And we play this game. We go up and down and up and down so that when they're done, they're exhausted but they're happy and they've had a great time and they're sexually excited. And I am, I'm exhausted, I'm happy. We're both high and that's the way I like to play. I like to make sure that they're in a place I want them to be and at the same time, I can monitor and make sure they're going the right way they want to go. I used to use regular safe words, you know, red, green, whatever, but I found it works better. If I tell them, as long as we're having fun, you call me sir. If you need to talk, you call me Hardy. And we can sit at the scene and we can talk and things can change. And that's why I want you to have that freedom to tell me, you know, while we're playing. So I'll, you know, play for a while and I'll whisper in the air, is that getting you excited, boy, or is that making you wet girl? And if they go, yes, sir, it's like, okay, we're on the right track. If they go Hardy, it's like, yes. And we talk and I change and adapt to whatever's going on. The problem was read to me and I don't say don't play with safe words. I say you play the way you want to play. But the problem is like red and green is it's very black and white and it just puts it into things and you may want to change something. You just don't want it to stop, you know? It's like, I'm enjoying this, but you're hitting the one spot there. It's just really making me crazy. Can you go a little lower or can you do this? Or can you, you know, whatever, but we need to have that freedom to communicate. So I think any scene is continual negotiation and communication through the whole scene. And you need to be able to do that. And I try to give people permission to continue to negotiate and talk to me and to continue to let me know how things are going. Cause otherwise I'm flying blind. I know nothing. Yes, absolutely. But you said when you were coming out and into the scene that people were wrong, sure you're that. Oh yeah. What was the scene by that? Well, a lot of piss play, a lot of piss. You know, it was a, if you got a new pair of boots, all your club brothers would come around and piss on your boots. If you got a new motorcycle, it got initiated by being pissed on. Oh my. If you, and like a place like the Sundance Kids, it had a dirt floor. So, you know, that went on in the bar, not anymore, but it did then. There were people that were human toilets and they really loved piss. And so when you go to the bathroom, there'd be the trough and then there'd be a guy sitting on his knees over here with his mouth open and it was like, okay. And that to me was really, really hot. You know, armpits, you know, I like the smell of, you know, nuzzling somebody's armpit is just a complete turn on to me. And that's a little raunchier than some people like. Yeah, yeah. You know, I've never been into scat or the brown hanky or any of that, but there was a lot more of that that went on. Now, a lot of that changed, of course, with AIDS and HIV and we took precautions and we didn't have fluid exchange and so forth. And that was the good thing, right thing to do. I just, I like, I like it a little more edgy. But in speaking of HIV, you must have seen that devastate the community. Talk with us a little bit about that. Here it hit the leather community really hard and really fast. The first people I knew that came down with it were in the leather community or were leather men. We really weren't a community. We were sort of a subculture at the time. Yes. And I remember seeing a guy that I hadn't seen in months and I saw him on the street and he was always one of these people that just looked hunky and, you know, virile and he had a cane and he looked just rail thin and was hobbling down the street and he had blotches on him and it scared the shit out. He had Kaposi's sarcoma. He had had wasting, he got it bad. I mean, he had the, you know, this is before any treatments were going on. But it didn't even look like the person that I knew. I was too scared to come up and even talk and I feel ashamed of that now because it was like seeing a specter. And that, and it scared me. I had met a boy at that time and we were in a relationship and we sort of moved out to North Dallas and hit away. You know, we kind of hit out from the leather scene which is unfortunate. But I know that a lot of leather men were sick and the medical system was not prepared for it. The nurses and the nursing staff, most of them, not all of them, but most of them were scared of it. Yes. And so they would do things like there'd be somebody, in fact, I knew people who were in the hospital in very poor shape and they wouldn't even bring the food in the door to them. They put it outside the door. So we had to go and take it into them. And a lot of our lesbian friends stepped up. The leather dykes stepped up and they began to take care of people in the hospital when the hospitals wouldn't. Now, luckily we got the hospital pretty educated, pretty fast and that changed. But at first it was ugly. A friend of mine who I worked with in television who was also a leather man who was one of the leather men who was sort of my mentors, I had lost touch with him and when I came, I heard he was in the hospital. So I went to visit him and he was this big, virile guy, kind of a little bit overweight, kind of a bear. He looked like a child. I didn't even recognize him and he said, it's me. And it's like, oh my God, it's you. And so we hugged and I hung out with him. He had lost his lover about six months before and that's the last time I saw him. And he looked okay then. And when I saw him this time, he was like totally gaunt and died within another couple of months. It was, I don't wanna go through that again. I feel like we've kind of been through it again with COVID. Yeah. I've had at least three or four people that I know or I'm close to who've died of COVID and it feels way too familiar. Yes. And it makes me wanna scream. That's one reason that I'm so glad that we got rid of the he who shall not be named who was occupying the White House. He might as well have been Reagan. Reagan wouldn't even say the word AIDS for years. Anyway, time for that. But you mentioned mentoring a moment ago. What are your thoughts on mentoring in the community? It feels artificial to me. Oh, okay. I like informal mentoring where somebody will say, I really like what you do. Can you show me how to do that? Yeah. Or somebody wants to become your friend and hang out with you and they wanna see how you play. They don't have any interest other than they just wanna kind of get the lay of the land and know the ropes. I'm always happy to do that. I guess I don't like the commitment of taking on formal mentorship. So I swear of commitment on my part. I have, I'm in a committed relationship. That's as much commitment as I need. And, you know, I'm committed to a lot of things. And that's one of the things I don't really have time for. But I enjoy doing it. I don't know what people would learn from me, but I'm always glad when it flattered, when they say, hey, I wanna see how you do this from what you do or tell me about, you know, how you feel about things like that. So that's, you know, that's... Well, like you said, mentoring doesn't have to be something formal. If you're able to teach someone something that constitutes mentoring. Yeah, and I do that. I do, you know, I do classes for different subjects and PDSM and leather. And I think that's where I get my mentorship, you know, kicks from is doing that. It just feels more natural to me. And that's just me. But taking a bit of a step to the side here, when we prepared for this chat, you said that you've been in sobriety since 1986. So tell us about that. Well, I was doing my taxes and was coming up, I didn't have the money to pay my taxes, but why not? And so I looked at my bank account and I see all these $100 withdrawals. $100, $100, $100. Oh, I bought cocaine with that. I bought cocaine with that. I bought cocaine with that. Oh, no. Oh, that was all cocaine. And then I added it up for the year and I came up with $35,000 of cocaine. And it's like, I think I have a problem. Oh, my gosh. Now, I didn't do it all because we had fabulous parties. We did have fabulous parties and there would always be cocaine and there would always be lots of liquor. You know, we'd have the big promotional size bottles and we'd go through all that on a weekend and the next week could be, you know, get ready for another one. I call that the ABFAB days. So I stopped using, I had actually stopped using cocaine and alcohol when about two months after my ex sobered up. Okay. I was in March. Actually, he sobered up certainly after a Halloween party we had. And in March, I gave everything up just because in solidarity and I felt better. And then I got into cocaine anonymous for a while and went to narcotics anonymous for a while but Alanon was still my primary program but it's all the same steps. Yes. And it really worked. And that was in 86 and it works if you work it, you know, they say that and it's true. And I didn't had no idea I was an addict until I started looking at the behaviors and the bank account. And it's like, I don't think there's something wrong here. You know, that explains why when I stopped using cocaine I felt so shitty because I was going through withdrawal. You know, and didn't even realize it. And so I'm lucky in that respect. But I, and then I gave up cigarettes about three years later which helped a great deal. And the only thing I had left was coffee, which is okay. Now I drink decaf because of my heart so I've like got nothing except, you know, placebo coffee but it's okay. Yes. And I've been very happy about it. My ex and I didn't part ways on the best of terms but the one thing I'm grateful for is that I got into recovery because of him. And that's, you know, it's part of my story and will always be part of my story. But I would be remiss if I didn't bring up your writing. Oh, it was a little bit about that. Yeah, I write the first, I've always written but the first book I wrote was essentially pulled from a collection of my collections of my passouts and my handouts for my classes, my CBG classes. And I combined that with stories of stuff that I had done and I changed the names, you know, so it's the innocent, look, less guilty. And so I wrote, I was encouraged by a guy who owned a leather shop here in town, I got him Johnny Gray. He said, you should do a book. So I got in touch with Greenery Press who did a lot of the kink books at the time. And I submitted a manuscript to her, to Janet Hardy who was a publisher. And she said, this is kind of unlegible. I want to get a editor with you. I said, okay, so I signed a publishing contract and I got an editor and we put together Family Jewels which was the first book. And it's still what Johnny told me, he said, you know, you write a kink book about CBT or a how-to book, it'll sell forever. And I never expected to make any money on it. And I really haven't made much money on it but the book is still in print and still sells. Right. And every year I get a little royalty check from the people that ended up buying Greenery Press. It's not much, but you know, it's nice to be able to say, yeah, I'm a professional author. Look, here's my royalty check. Yeah. And then I wrote another book, More Family Jewels and then one called Playing with Pain which is more about pain scenes which is what I really like. And then I had a lot of people say, well, what about your, how do you, how do you reconcile being Christian with what you do? And so I wrote a book called Soul of a Second Skin. It's not new that physical experiences lead to a spiritual enlightenment. I mean, the Cathars back in the ancient Gaul were a sect of Christians who did self-flagellation. And that's where you get the word cathartic is from their work, you know, the flagellants, the penitents who, you know, do the stations of the cross as a spiritual experience. They're doing physical things which bring them to a heightened emotional state in the far Eastern cultures in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, wherever. They do these same kinds of things. They do physical experiences that lead to a spiritual enlightenment. And that worked for me because that's exactly what I was having. That's what was going on with me. For a top or a bottom standpoint, it doesn't matter, you still get to the same place. And so that I thought, wow, isn't that neat? I'm having a spiritual experience. You know, I know a lot of people who get that but they feel bad about it because they think, how could God approve this? This is bad, you know, this internalized kinkophobia. And to me, I don't think that works for me. I try to, you know, I talk to people, I talk about compartmentalizing my life. I had, you know, here's my political life and here's my sexual life and here's my work life and here's this. And if you try to keep them all separate, eventually you're gonna screw up and things are gonna get mixed up. And you know, it's like trying to tell a lie. You're telling a lie to yourself. And so I said, I can embrace who I am. And so that to me is important. And that's why I wrote that book is I wanted to let other people know that. And luckily it was very well accepted. And then I wrote the last one that I wrote was a meditation book for leather people. And it's got me really, people really like it. Well, before we conclude, what's the biggest misconception about you? That I'm very gregarious and outgoing. You're not? No, I'm incredibly shy. Like I said, I use magic as a kid to overcome the shyness. If you put me in a room of people and I don't know anybody, I'll leave that room without knowing anybody. Wow. I'm not very gregarious. Luckily my reputation perceived me in some cases and I've ended up meeting a lot of people. So I can always cluster with somebody that I know and then we can go, you know, spread from there. But yeah, I'm really very shy. In fact, a lot of people think that I have this crazy wild, you know, dungeon sex life all the time. And I tell them, I tell them, you know, the boy and I, we've got a cat, we've got a house, we're couch potatoes. We watched Star Trek, you know, we're geeks. Nothing like what you would expect. And it's not nearly as romantic, but you know, don't just don't tell anybody that. Well, Hardy Haberman, I would like to thank you for an amazing fireside jazz. It's been great fun.