Houston NLA Keynote
Kinky cybersapce has been humming with news about and reactions to another keynote speech delivered by Guy Baldwin.
This keynote was delivered on April 17, 2011 at the 20th anniversary celebration of the Houston chapter of the NLA (National Leather Association), themed “Uncommon Integrity is Our Common Pursuit.” The event also marked the 25th anniversary of NLA-International.
In this speech Guy expands on a theme that he introduced in his Leather Leadership Conference keynote speech, specifically coming out of the kink closet as a way to be a fully integrated kink personality.
The full video, in 3 parts, and the transcript are now available on Leatherati. Thanks to Mike Skiff at Third Rail Media for providing the video and for Guy Baldwin for permission to publish the speech.
Watch and read after the jump
Keynote part 1
Keynote part 2
Keynote part 3
Full Transcript
Greetings, everyone, and my thanks to the organizers, who were kind enough to imagine that I might have something of value to say to you on this particularly fine Sunday morning.
I must, of course, begin my remarks with a salute to the NLA Houston chapter on the occasion of its 20th Anniversary. Quite an achievement, indeed.
This is also, of course, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the National Leather Association, back in 1986, in Seattle.
As I was reflecting on my own history with the NLA, I actually remembered the phone call I got from Tony DeBlase, who was at that time the editor of Drummer magazine, and who was also the educational program director for the second “Living in Leather.”
Tony had called to encourage me to fly up to Seattle and teach classes there, and he was also anxious for me to meet the core founders of this new organization he was very enthusiastic about: the National Leather Association.
Tony was a good friend so I was willing to help him out. I flew up, taught three or four classes at LIL, and met the core group that had organized this thing called the NLA.
Thus began what would prove to be a long association with the group. Later I became the third Mr. National Leather Association in 1989, and then won the International Mr. Leather title a few weeks later.
That win gave me many speaking opportunities in the twenty-eight cities I visited that year – speaking opportunities which I used to bring attention to the NLA itself.
The NLA was also getting good press in the lifestyle publications of the day, and so it wasn’t long before NLA chapters were springing up from coast to coast.
I want you all to know that Steve Maidhof was the spark plug that ignited the NLA. Steve had been a contestant at International Mr. Leather in Chicago in 1986. He competed in that contest as Mr. Washington State Leather and was sponsored by the J & L Saloon, a gay men’s leather bar in Seattle, Washington.
Steve didn’t win the IML competition that year, but he was sufficiently inspired by what happened to him as a contestant that he returned to Seattle resolved to infect other influential people there with his vision – which was to forge a national network of local organizations to support kinky people of all orientations.
Such a thing had never existed before.
Yes, The Eulenspiegel Society had been around since 1971 and was founded as an officially pansexual organization, by a straight man, but in New York.
And yes, the Society of Janus had been around since 1974, and it too was officially a pansexual organization, founded by a straight woman, but in San Francisco.
So it’s worth asking: what possessed Steve Maidhof – a gay man -- to return to Seattle from his IML experience in Chicago to spark-plug the formation of the National Leather Association?
After all, In 1986 there were over 150 gay motorcycle clubs in the U.S. alone – several of them in the Seattle-Tacoma area. And by 1986 every major city had at least two bars where gay leathermen were welcome, including Seattle of course.
And because Steve had won the Mr. Washington State Leather title, it’s safe to assume that he must have been reasonably well-connected to the gay male leather fraternity there in Seattle. I can certainly tell you that Steve wasn’t a bad-looking guy. I’m very sure that on any given weekend he’d have had no trouble finding a good time for himself.
What was in it for Steve Maidhof? For that matter, what was in it for any of the gay leathermen who were in that core founders’ group?
Well, since almost nothing of their personal papers survives – because two particular gay men hadn’t yet founded the Leather Archives & Museum, where such personal papers might have ended up – the correct answer must be: We don’t know. We can’t know what he thought was in it for himself. I know that I never asked him.
The closest I can come to anything like an educated guess about what might have motivated Steve to spark-plug the NLA must come from my own experience with the Society of Janus, which I was involved with since 1974 when I was twenty-eight years old.
The Society of Janus was begun and run by a het woman named Cynthia Slater. In 1972 or -3 she ran a two-line ad in the classified section of a counter-culture, leftist, sort of bohemian-type newspaper called the Berkeley Barb, of Berkeley, California, fame.
While waiting for a haircut in a San Francisco barber shop, I picked up a tattered copy of the Berkeley Barb to see if the classified ads had anything racy in them or not. Buried in the back of the Barb, I saw the ad which read something like, “Meeting in SF for S and M and B and D fans. Call –” and a phone number.
I called the number and spoke to a husky-voiced woman who interviewed me some over the phone, after which she gave me an address in a suburban part of San Francisco. On the appointed evening, I arrived for the meeting and walked into a big, fairly empty living room in which were seated – with their backs to the wall – about twelve men and eight women, none of whom seemed gay to me.
As it turned out, I was the first gay man ever to respond to the ad that Cynthia had placed. This was the fourth such meeting she’d ever held.
Everyone there seemed very nervous. I later found out that many of them had feared they might be arrested for attending such a meeting for “fans,” and some weren’t at all certain that the ad in the Barb wasn’t a trap devised by the vice squad – in San Francisco, for god’s sake, in 1973. A city that had a long reputation as one of the bawdiest of all US cities. People were that scared.
Anyway, we were all asked to introduce ourselves, with or without a name, and say as much as we wished about why we had chosen to come to the meeting. Cynthia went first and was the only person to give her first name. I was the only person to give my first and last name – something that others there found shocking.
It quickly became evident that I knew way more about BDSM than anyone in the room, so the evening quickly turned into an “Ask Guy About Anything Kinky” night. I stayed after the meeting ended, and Cynthia and I began to brainstorm a possible series of workshops we might offer the people who’d left contact information.
Long story short, I soon introduced a bunch of my gay BDSM buddies to Cynthia and we became the first core faculty for the Society of Janus: Jim Kane, Skip Aiken, Don Miesen, John Pfleiderer, myself and a few others. Soon after, we added some BDSM women I knew: Pat Califia, Gayle, and Dossie Easton, among others. Some of these, myself included, became the first Board of Directors for the SoJ in 1974, when it had become too big for Cynthia to manage effectively.
I knew that group very well. And one thing we all had in common was our desire to share the gay wealth of BDSM knowledge with the het people in Janus – who were, quite frankly, starved for the information that we all took pretty much for granted as “business as usual.”
I’ve got to believe the same things motivated Steve Maidhof and the other gay men he inspired in the establishment of the NLA.
Now, what you probably do not know is that I’m a guy whose Italian Catholic mother threw me out of the house a week after I graduated from high school, saying, “Don’t want any homo-sexual livin’ under my roof – you’ve got a week to pack your things and get out.”
And so, quite naturally, I fled into the welcoming arms of gay male culture at age 18, and by age 19 I’d found my family of choice among my gay male leather and BDSM brothers in nearby Denver. Like them, I worked in disguise in the straight world by day – in my case, as a brakeman for the Union Pacific Rail Road. But by night, and on weekends, I was a leather teenager with lots of older brothers. The year was 1965.
So none of you will be surprised to learn that nine years later, when I’d stumbled upon a group of straight men and women who not only approved of me for being exactly who and what I am (and was back then, only younger of course) – well, it felt just great to be wanted, and valued, and respected by straight men and women, for the knowledge and insight I could give them. Suddenly, I had value in the straight world.
But. There is another way to see the sequence of events I’ve just shared with you.
I’ve thought about it a lot, and although it’s true that I have a generous nature, and am a survivor of the human potential movement of the 1960s, what’s also true is that my own shame about being “different” was – and has been for a long time – in search of enough approval to either make the shame go away or to make it not matter.
The really short version of that is that I’ve come to suspect that I tried for too long to trade information for respect, specifically with the straight world.
You’d think that a smart psychotherapist might have figured this out about himself when he was in graduate school, but you’d be wrong. Shame, shame about being different, as it turns out, is capable of making us do some very strange things.
For example, I’ve wondered why kinky gay men just basically do not use what we call “scene names,” but surprising numbers of het folks still do.
When I ask why, I get answers like, “Well, I have children or family who don’t know what I’m into.”
Or, “Well, I have a professional job, or a license with the state.”
And I have to remind you that gay men have children and families and jobs and licenses, too.
I’m a psychotherapist licensed in the State of California since 1983. And while I have no children of my own, I do have nieces and nephews, and I have never used a scene name, and I have never been struck by professional lightning – even after winning the Mr. NLA and International Mr. Leather titles, which back when the Earth was cooling put me on the cover of Drummer magazine, by the way. Distributed in 34 states.
(Yes, as the old lady in Titanic said, “Wasn’t I a dish?”)
As many of you are likely to know, last weekend I attended the Leather Leadership Conference, which was held in my home city, Los Angeles.
I was honored to be their keynote speaker this year; but I must tell you, I was surprised by how many het folks there were hiding behind scene names, yet whose very presence there suggests a serious interest in leadership.
My buddy, Madoc, asked the question best, “How do you lead from inside a closet?”
It’s time to remind everyone that the people who founded the organization that you’re members of were all out and proud of themselves. None of them used a scene name. None of them.
None of the founders of Janus and none of the kinky gay men and lesbians who first formed these organizations used scene names either. I read their names to you earlier. And that was true for the Society of Janus back in ’74, and for the NLA back in ’86, too.
I don’t know why any specific gay man or lesbian (or het folks for that matter) offers to serve in these organizations without using a scene name; you’ll have to ask them yourselves if you want the answers.
But what I do know with some degree of confidence is that all of us have made ourselves available as role models for being out and proud because of our differences – because, if you will, of our “Uncommon Integrity.”
Many things have changed in my lifetime:
- There used to be nine planets, but no longer
- We had twelve signs of the Zodiac (now thirteen)
- Homosexuality began to peek its way into PG-13 movies
- In 1981, the first Indiana Jones film: early on, the last boy out of Dr. Jones’ classroom rushes out, eyes looking at the floor, but he musters the courage to put an apple on hot Harrison Ford’s desk
- 1993: early in The Pelican Brief we find a law school discussion of the Bowers v. Hardwick decision of the Supreme Court
- Cut to 2010 at Christmas season: the ad for Jared Jewelers proclaims that their chocolate diamonds are “anything but vanilla”
- Lady Gaga calls her new hit, “Born This Way”
- In Web Soup 3 we find video clips of college boys in various ball-torture stunts ala rites of passage
- At the last Academy Awards, at least two same sex relationships were acknowledged in acceptance speeches; we saw the co-hosts cross-dressed; and the word “Master” found its way into another acceptance speech.
My friends, the world is simply not as dangerous a place as those who hide might have you believe.
Gay men can tell you the dangers of hiding out of habit.
Like it or not, at some level, we are all of us parents. At the very least, we are the parents of the next generation of kink-oid people, and we owe them the best that’s in us.
We all know that these days, anyone can get any question answered online about anything to do with any kind of sex whatsoever. But eventually, some percentage of young people who begin to think that they might be kinky will need places where they’ll be able to meet other kinky people in face-to-face situations.
And what, exactly, do you want those young searchers to be confronted with when they do show up in brick-and-mortar places?
What sort of atmosphere do you want to create for them to learn about the amazing sexuality, the transformational erotic ecstasies that we know how to conjure and manage? How do you want them to feel about themselves?
Is it worth it to you that they learn in a better environment than you first found? Dare I say it: an environment in which “Uncommon Integrity” is the rule and not the exception?
Let me remind you that the words integrity and integrate are related.
In psychology, we speak of an “integrated personality,” and by that we mean that all the parts of one’s self fit together and mesh smoothly with all the other parts.
We mean that no part of the self is exiled.
We mean that all parts of the self welcome all the other parts.
We mean that none of the parts of the self is at war with any other part.
If all the het world wanted from us, from gay men, was information about the magic of BDSM and the techniques and tools to conjure that magic, only to withdraw back into a hidey-place of secrecy and fear – well, then the most hard-won lessons and values of gay men have gone to waste.
As I said last week in Los Angeles, “The brave may not live forever, but the ashamed do not live at all.”
You know, these days, I’m often asked, “How can we attract more gay men into our clubs and organizations?” The clear implication is that there once was a time when gay men in particular were more evident in the NLA chapters than is now the case, which I’m certain is true.
In truth, I don’t think gay men will be coming back into these organizations.
In fact, I think that the feeling among most gay men today – and this is just my opinion – I think the feeling is that we’ve given the het world the best that’s in us for more than twenty years now, and it’s time for us to spend our time and energy looking after ourselves once again.
The het world has absorbed all the information it can, by now. We have done our best for you, and now it’s time for us.
Time for us to re-build the bonds of brotherhood which HIV came and shattered.
Time for us to focus on socializing our young kinklings in the ritual mating-dances that are particular to our world of male-hood.
Time for us to give our undivided attention to the preservation of our own institutions, and strengthen The Ties That Bind our own special tribal culture together.
Is there anyone here who has never heard the expression, “Birds of a feather…” etc.?
It’s common knowledge that rich people prefer to live around other rich people, that black people tend to prefer to live near other black people of the same class, that gay people often prefer to live in gay neighborhoods, and that foreigners like to live around others of the same nationality. We know that some religious communities function that way, too.
Why is that? It’s because people like to be around others who reflect the same values back to themselves.
And so, in that spirit, it’s time for you to welcome back all the people who felt uncomfortable around gay men and (to a lesser extent, I think) lesbians. They need what you’ve learned from us, and I hope you’ll do your best to take care of them as your own brothers and sisters, too.
It’s time for us to pull ourselves back together – and let you sink or swim.
My point is that my explanation for the trend that we’ve seen in so many BDSM organizations all across the nation is that I think it just might be time for gay men to go home, to each other, and to look after our own young.
If we’re lucky, it won’t be too late to give them our full attention now and hopefully have equal or even better success at teaching “Uncommon Integrity.”
Thank you for your time and attention.
© 2011 Guy Baldwin, M.S.
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