Leatherati Voices

How Big is that Ego in the Window?

Arf Arf!

By Olivier Pratt 

Many years ago, when I first dipped my toe into the Leather pond, my first real lesson was about ego. I didn’t have a single mentor, but rather a close knit group of guys who had managed to survive the first swath of the AIDS scythe. They were good men, kinky men and men who had a real sense of integrity, personal responsibility and ethics.

They had seen death stare at them square in the face and spat back at him. These guys lived rebellion and saw the world in a whole different light. They were the kind of men who created bonds from sex, euphoria and tragedy. They were my guides, my teachers. There were no collars, no Masters, no boys, just the guys, who worked, played and explored life together. They had served in the military together and stayed close long after getting out. They were the men I desperately wanted to be.

I looked up to them because they had been there before me, and I realized that if I wanted to really understand what Leather was about I better listen up. My journey with them wasn’t always great. There was a lot of testing, pain and questioning on my part. I think of it as basic training. The process stripped away a lot of what I thought was real and replaced that with an insatiable desire to search things out for myself, never accept anything, unless I experience it for myself.

The leader of this “fag pack,” we’ll call him Joe, explained to me that there were certain rules we lived by, an unspoken code that everyone followed. There wasn’t the plethora of information like there is today, spouting off this and that, claiming to be the one source of all Leather knowledge and tradition. There was word of mouth, learning by example and if you were lucky like me, you found the right people to help you along the way.

Joe sat me down one evening in the kitchen, pulled out a bottle of Tequila and a ruler, looked me straight in the eye and asked, “What’s the most important thing to remember about our lifestyle?”

Life, Love & Leather; A Reality Crisis

Musings from Under the Green Umbrella: Life, Love & Leather
A Reality Crisis

by Master Olivier Pratt

“Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.” – Oscar Wilde

It’s a late summer day in Oklahoma; the first cold front of full rumbled through last night, stripping the atmosphere of the blistering heat of the summer of 2011. The skies are a deep crisp blue with cloud wisps dancing and skipping away from the strong northerly wind, all just the tattered remnants of nature’s cool swipe over the dry and blistered plains. Nothing stays the same, least of all nature. She’s constantly renewing and molding our lives with the ebbs and flow of our planet, keeping things in balance, no matter the cost. Reality is now. Tomorrow may be completely different.

The idea of this article popped into my head about week ago, I was watching Rachel Maddow and the usual parade of political rhetoric was playing out on the screen. This group was accusing that group of one thing or another, all in the name of justice, equality and the American way. One word was subliminally echoing in my mind. Each time the spin was a little different, a quantum cousin of the prior, but the meaning and inference was the same.