The fabric of our memories: Leather,kinship,and queer material history

Prologue

It is still light outside as I enter the dark and crowded Hippo, Baltimore’s premier gay club. People sit at their reserved tables, scattered across the dance floor, or stand around in small groups, spreading out to the edges of the large main space. Many are sipping cocktails, some exchange kisses and hugs, bodies holding each other tight or quietly exchanging touches, while others roam around the room looking for a friend or a place to settle into. I buy a beer and decide to check out the other space, where a silent auction is taking place. The pool tables are covered with gay porn in various media formats, kinky toys, and booze, all of which are subjected to casual scrutiny by the slowly accruing crowd.

When I hear music coming from the main space, I quickly make my way back to see the first performer take the stage. She delivers a fierce drag rendition of an already spectacular stadium rock song, her shiny purple Mohawk reflecting the multicolored disco lighting of the Hippo. I watch her alternate between dancing frantically and collecting the dollar bills from the hands of her admirers—who are lined up single file in front of her—in a most gracious manner. Over the next few hours, this scene would repeat itself many times, as drag performers, belly dancers, and crooners traded their place in the spotlight, the crowd quickly multiplied, new drinks were bought, more dollar bills were tucked into pockets and cleavages, the temperature rose, and the atmosphere grew dense with innuendo, laughter, and more physical expressions of public intimacy. Intermittently, people were encouraged to socialize, buy raffle tickets and charity cupcakes, pay tribute to community members who had passed away, honor those whose lives continued to make a difference, and to get their leather gear serviced by the community bootblacks in attendance.

Leather and kink are the common denominators here. Leather, especially, functions as an attractor around which countless efforts gravitate and materialize. These efforts are built on the intimate networks of those who identify as “leatherfolk,” which provide the infrastructure for the comic and financial relief realized at events like this one.

The evening closes with a glorious performance by John, ¹ organizer of tonight’s initiative, who gives Cher a run for her money, wishing she could turn back time. After the song has ended, many words of gratitude and praise are spoken, tears flow, and as people gather for more hugs and group pictures around the stage I slowly begin to make my way toward the exit.

About halfway through the crowd, I stop to take some final pictures and suddenly feel overcome by a feeling of joyous solidarity with everyone around me—an odd sensation given that I only recently became acquainted with a handful of people present here tonight. While I do not share its history or collective memory, there is something incredibly invigorating and contagious about the fervor with which the leather community stakes out a visible presence for its lifestyle and traditions, thereby staging a carefully nurtured continuity between the past, the present, and the future. I walk past John, who sports a big Cher wig and an even bigger smile, and briefly eavesdrop on his conversation. Despite the evening’s performative display of retrospection, there is no turning back time tonight; it appears that John and his friends are already planning their next event.

Introduction: memory, materiality, and maintenance

This essay provides three ethnographic sketches that together develop an account of memory’s imbrication with the object-oriented forces constitutive of intimacy and ritual, in order to demonstrate how the particular materiality of leather, as a mnemonic technology, organizes the practices of maintenance, care, and commemoration that are of vital importance to the survival of Baltimore’s gay leather community. This particular community is socially and historically circumscribed by the rituals, traditions, and club-based infrastructures that connect it to the larger culture of gay leather, while simultaneously distinguishing itself through its regional vernacular. I initially befriended two members of the community at the start of a research project that aimed to investigate how we might reassess the notion of citizenship through the lens of what, unless properly sanitized, has to remain beyond its boundaries: the variegated nonheteronormative intimacies integral to different collectivities provisionally assembled under the umbrella of the Baltimore lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) community. ²

Looking to expand my nascent network, I accepted their invitation to attend the festivities surrounding the Mr. Maryland Leather contest that is traditionally held in Baltimore each November. It was during this weekend that I first learned about the rich traditions of the gay leather community, which are preserved and revitalized by dozens of ritual practices, ceremonial performances, and protocols that delineate social etiquette, kinship relations, contest regulations, and dress codes for different settings and occasions. Over the months that followed, I came to know many more community members, who showed me how this assemblage of protocols and ceremonial display—which can come off as rigidly formal and authoritarian—not only functions to disseminate a body of knowledge about gay leather history, but also aims to instill a sense of honor and an avowed commitment to serve those in need.

There is a lot of need in Baltimore, a city that has suffered widespread attrition and impoverishment in the wake of rapid deindustrialization during the 1960s, particularly among its African American and sexually marginalized residents who, since the 1980s, have also been disproportionately affected by the destructive chronicity of HIV/AIDS (Van Doorn, 2012, 2013c). These populations have had to create their own—often informal, yet no less enduring—practices of care and support, in an attempt to counter the disintegration of their communities and neighborhoods. While the services provided by Baltimore’s gay leather clubs primarily attempt to meet the financial, social, and health-related needs of its contiguous BDSM, ³ kink, and fetish communities, the horizon of their fundraising activities increasingly reaches beyond these confines to include initiatives that help other dispossessed minorities to keep their heads above water.

What I want to highlight in this article is how these ongoing practices of self-preservation and other-directed care are entangled with the fabric of leather, which forms a mnemonic technology that mediates between intimate experience and collective memory, thereby enabling leathermen to develop affective attachments to both the past and the future of their shared form of life. I use the term “form-of-life” here to signify an affiliation with Giorgio Agamben’s (2000) notion of “form-of-life,” which expresses a concern with and care for the inextricability of life and its form—or the particular ways we collectively imbue life with idiosyncratic meaning and value, thus connecting the biological “fact” of life to the historical and political “act” of living together. As such, my aim is to attend to the relation between memory and materiality, asking how the material qualities of leather, as treated animal skin, evoke, store, and shape memories and, vice versa, how such memories imbue leather items with emotional, cultural, and political values.

The essay is divided into three sections. Section “The gift of leather,” addresses the parallel circulation of leather items and communal memories, conceiving of leather as a shape-shifting object that accumulates value and power as it is gifted in intimate relationships between (generations of) leathermen. Focusing on John’s life, introduced in the prologue above, it also develops an understanding of the tight relay between the textured fabric of leather, ritualized memory practices, and ethico-political efforts to build support structures and cultivate capacities. Section “The value of leather,” examines the value of ritual within the leather community as a means to create a measure of continuity and cohesion in its frequently ruptured history. It introduces Jerry, a leatherman who is exceptionally driven by what he perceives to be his civic duty to preserve the traditions of his community through ritual practices that each time reaffirm the connection between leather history and its future, serving as an aspirational horizon. Section “The endurance of leather,” closes the essay by turning to the material preservation of leather, a task carried out with immense dedication by the community bootblacks. The central figure here is Celia, a bootblack who is part of a minority group of women and (transgender) men engaged in the leather lifestyle. In this last section, I reiterate the value of affirmation as reparativity, mobilizing a conception of survival that highlights the determination with which the Baltimore leather community strives toward a more inhabitable future. Their hopeful yet precarious struggle is propelled by the many devoted community members who continue to (re)collect, maintain, and repair the material history of gay leather.

One final comment regarding methodology is in order: while my ethnographic account draws on the personal experiences of my informants as they narrated them to me over the course of my fieldwork, my abovementioned aim in this article also necessitates that I move beyond these narratives about leather in order to examine what I will call the “political ontology” of leather. As Didier Fassin (2014) has argued with respect to the challenge of approaching the truth of lives under study, ethnographers “bring together biographies and history, storytelling and political economy, the text of the narratives they collect and the context in which they are inserted, the empirical facts they observe and the theoretical frames with which they interpret them” (p. 47). I read his comment as addressing both the multiscalar complexity of life and the responsibility we as ethnographers have to do justice to this complexity as well as to our informants’ experiences thereof. In this particular study, I show how it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle the culture and history of leather from leather as a material artifact, which likewise problematizes any effort to neatly distinguish between narrative truth and matters of ontology. In fact, my informants have provided me with a way into thinking about the political ontology of leather as originating neither in its substance nor in the discursive meanings attributed to it, but rather on the threshold between matter and memory, acquiring its multivalent form and value only through its ongoing articulation with gay leather history.

The gift of leather

Some weeks after the event at the Hippo, I meet John at a café in Baltimore’s gayborhood, Mt. Vernon. John was one of the founding members of what, in the late 1970s, was still referred to as the city’s gay community and has been a leatherman since the early 1990s—although he remembers that his attraction to leather already materialized in early childhood. He is a little hesitant at first, eating his meal and sipping his tea, but after the initial awkwardness of talking to someone you recently met about the details of your intimate life while your words are being recorded, the conversation slips into a more comfortable zone. When I ask him what he finds special about leather, he says that he loves the way it feels and smells on him. Worn-in leather is much better than new leather, which, he contends, has no history.

It is all about the history of leather, of the material itself as well as the culture around it: the tradition, the service, and the community. There’s this leather jacket he owns and that some bootblacks cannot wait to clean, but he won’t let them near it. All the specks of paint and scratches on the jacket; he can tell you exactly where he got them, when, and with whom. New leather is alright, but for him personally, a piece of used leather, a piece of leather that someone else has worn, has touched, has walked their walk in, just means so much more.

Leather is able to at least partially absorb, accumulate, and preserve the embodied experiences of those who have come before him, some of whom have passed away, bearing the traces of their idiosyncratic paths and animating a sense of collective belonging. I am reminded here of Peter Stallybrass’ (1993) reflections on the power of cloth to bind people in “networks of obligation,” which he associates with “two almost contradictory aspects of its materiality: its ability to be permeated and transformed by maker and wearer alike; its ability to endure over time” (p. 38). As such, he suggests that cloth is not only closely connected to memory but in fact “is a kind of memory” (p. 38, italics in original).

That the same is true for leather, a fabric generally more obdurate than cloth, is vividly illustrated by John’s lament:

I have a pair of leather boots, I am the second owner, I know the man who they belonged to and I miss him dearly to this day. I just had them re-soled. I was upset that I couldn’t have the new sole put on top of the sole that was there because I didn’t want to lose that energy.

Losing the original soles of the boots was upsetting to John because it felt like losing part of the soul of their original owner, whose energy lingers in the materiality of the pair of boots he gave him. It not only meant the deterioration of the physical source of his personal memories connecting him to his friend, but also raised the specter of a more general erosion of the collective history that binds together the leather community, which is materialized in the great number of leather items that are passed on between leathermen who thereby “trace the connections of love across the boundaries of absence, of death” (Stallybrass, 1993: 45).

John feels very safe in his leather. It is like a blanket, or that old t-shirt:

It’s like […] that same kind of feeling, like when you put it on, there are times that I am standing there and everything belongs to me, because it’s mine, but my boots belonged to so and so, my pants belonged to so and so, ok I bought the belt, but my shirt belonged to so and so. I am not alone. I have something that belonged to three of my friends on me. It’s a sense of history, again, and a sense of feeling their energy.

What enables leather to conduce this ambient sense of ghostly energetic presence is its capacity for absorption, which functions not only metaphorically but also literally, when it absorbs the sweat produced by the friction of human and animal skin during leathersex. As John asserts, “Sweating in leather adds to this animal that’s on your skin, that hide, it adds to the smell, to the memories, to the DNA.” The “DNA of leather,” understood as the indefinite outcome of continual “open source” mnemonic inscription, translates into what is called the “leather code”: a historical complex of protocols and rituals that structure the community around the values of honor, tradition, and service. ⁴

To clarify the origins of these values, John explains the military background of the leather community, telling me about the men who started the first gay motorcycle clubs after coming back from WWII, seeking fellowship, familiarity, discipline, and the intimacy of other men. “But why leather?”—I keep insisting. Why not some other fabric to hold together these codes and protocols? He thinks it primarily had a functional, practical origin, in the sense that these men rode motorcycles and wore leather as protection. But besides that “it goes back to the sex.” Sex in leather just feels good. In these moments, listening to John try his best to explain something so tacit and inexplicable, I notice how difficult it is to separate the history from the phenomenology of leather, which are intertwined to the point of being inseparable.

Whereas clubs used to be primarily centered on leathersex and a shared investment in the experimental relationships of power, trust, and vulnerability connected to this practice, the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s radically impacted the gay community and forced leather clubs to assume a more public profile. It initiated the advent of community-oriented care and activism among leathermen, who had to step out of their insular position and join forces with other gay and lesbian groups in order to help the countless sick and dying, as well as those they left behind. It was the moment that their carefully cultivated intimacies became a resource for the development of alternative forms of civic and political engagement, fostering life in the face of the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS, and the biased governmental infrastructures assembled to curtail the virus (Epstein, 1996). The leather code based on honor, service, and tradition proved to be pivotal in the realization of an intensified sense of community, which enabled clubs to persevere and organize a grassroots network of charity initiatives in order to financially assist those who lacked the means of subsistence after becoming infected with HIV. In Baltimore, where the HIV/AIDS crisis continues to compound the socio-economic debilitation of predominantly Black and transgender residents, John has been organizing projects to raise money for the queer, poor, and disabled since the early 1980s. In the mid-1990s, he founded a nonprofit gay leather club that serves the Baltimore-area LGBT communities through fundraising, outreach, and other forms of support. Every year, the club produces a charity gala that brings together performers and audiences from across the LGBTQ spectrum and raises thousands of dollars.

For John, his commitment to his community is closely related to the leather code he lives by, which in turn is inseparable from his love for both the traditions and the materiality associated with leather. To understand this tight relay, it is helpful to conceive of leather as a medium through which intimate attachments are forged. Yet, it is a particular kind of medium, one that not only has the qualities of a fetish but also performs the role of a totem. In his discussion of the relations between totemism, fetishism, and idolatry, W.J.T. Mitchell (2005) notes that totems, as “object-image assemblages” with a close physical and symbolic connection to the animal world, mediate between members of a tribe by organizing kinship structures and social identities (p. 193). In this way, totems are enrolled in a social fabric that they concurrently help to make meaningful and durable.

Meanwhile, fetishism constitutes a more privately oriented and sexually charged object relation in which the materiality of the fetish evokes a desire to caress and possess it—although there is always the risk of becoming possessed by the fetish, whose agency exceeds our grasp despite it being of our own making. Notwithstanding this difference, both fetishes and totems exert their value, power, and vitality through the rituals in which they circulate. In the ritual practices that configure the Baltimore leather community—often referred to as an assembly of tribes—the leather item, as a fetish/totem amalgam, organizes an intricately coded experience that merges intimacy and publicness into a lifestyle constituted by kinship ties, sexual pleasure, and community service. But where, then, does this commitment to serve originate?

One of the most significant rituals in which the leather fetish/totem circulates and acts is the ceremony of passing on, or gifting, a piece of leather from one leatherman to another—often from Sir to boy, or from one generation to the next. In this ritual, leather thus functions not only as a fetish and a totem, but also as a gift. As scholars from Marcel Mauss to Roberto Esposito have emphasized, reciprocation is of vital importance to the act of gift giving, which takes the form of an exchange in which the gift given conjures the obligation to return the favor (Mauss, 2000 [1954]; Esposito, 2010). This dynamic is particularly well captured in Esposito’s fine-grained analysis of the term munus, which constitutes one half of the etymological root of the term “community.” According to Esposito, “the munus indicates only the gift that one gives, not what one receives. All of the munus is projected onto the transitive act of giving” (Esposito, 2010: 5). Consequently, “once someone has accepted the munus, an obligation (onus) has been created to exchange it either in terms of goods or service” (p. 4), which instantiates “a circuit of mutual gift giving” (p. 7). The munus therefore circulates in an ongoing debt cycle. It is a gift that always remains to be given and that one cannot keep for oneself since it belongs to the common, from which one cannot extricate oneself (Esposito, 2010).

This reading of the gift as munus presents a perspective from which to understand how the ritual of gifting leather creates a structure of circulation that generates a persistent obligation to give back to the community, in the form of other-directed care and service. The gifted leather item, which will have to be gifted again, reminds its recipients of the debt they owe to their community, past and present, which has enriched their lives and whose legacy they therefore must continue to reproduce and honor publicly. Yet, what this reading does not offer is an indication of how this sense of obligation, this commitment to repay a perpetually outstanding debt to the community, actually comes to be experienced or taken up by those participating in this selfless “circuit of mutual gift giving.”

To properly grasp the movement by which this ethical sensibility becomes embodied and translated into concrete acts of care, we need to turn from ethics to aesthetics, or to leather’s capacity to absorb and preserve the idiosyncratic material traces of its previous owners, which evoked such strong emotive memories and feelings of belonging in John. In other words, it returns us to leather’s existence as a special kind of medium; a shape-shifting fabric that organizes kinship relations, induces sexual desire/pleasure, and accumulates history as it is passed on between leathermen. It is important to reiterate here that the affective relations that develop with and through leather items are animated by sensual (and sexual) events as much as they are the product of historical knowledge and psychic investment. In fact, these elements collapse in the very prehension of leather’s texture. As Eve Sedgwick (2003) points out, following Renu Bora,

[T]o perceive texture is always, immediately, and de facto to be immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesizing, testing, and re-understanding of how physical properties act and are acted upon over time. To perceive texture is never only to ask or know What is it like? nor even just How does it impinge on me? Textural perception always explores two other questions as well: How did it get that way? and What could I do with it? (p. 13)

As Sedgwick’s words suggest, textural perception is at once sensual, historical, and ethical.

When perceiving a leather item, which is “dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically, materially, it came into being” (Sedgwick, 2003: 14), a leatherman is faced with the question of what to do next (“What could I do with it?”). Yet, in order to acknowledge the agency of the leather item being perceived—which is far from a passive position—I propose to rephrase this ethical question as “What does it want me to do (with it, in it, or in honor of it)?” A gifted pair of leather pants, once sedimented with the sweat, energy, and values of past generations, becomes a thing that wants things: a fetish/totem assemblage that can make a demand on its temporary proprietor (Mitchell, 2005). By calling upon a leatherman’s sensuous, embodied knowledge of tradition and protocol, the pants posit what Alphonso Lingis (1998) has called an “imperative” that compels him to give back to the community in which he is thoroughly embedded and from which he therefore cannot untangle himself (see also Bennett, 2001). This imperative consistently finds its response in the form of an annual cycle of fundraisers, supported by an infrastructure of leather clubs, where the gathered tribes and their associated milieus reach deep into their pockets in a collective attempt at cultivation, maintenance, and repair. These ethical practices of world-making and economic sustenance keep those located on the margins of society from falling through its cracks, which is their unequivocally political force. ⁵

The value of leather

This emphasis on maintenance became particularly salient in my conversations with Jerry. Compared to John, Jerry is a relative newcomer to the leather community, a world that opened up to him in 2006 through a lover who was “in the lifestyle.” By 2008, they had stopped dating but were still very close, so when the now ex-lover—who identifies as a boy—asked him to participate in an upcoming leather contest as his Sir, he wanted to give it a shot. They ended up winning the contest, after which he was “pushed into the deep end of the pool”: during his title year, he was fully immersed in the leather community and lifestyle, visiting dozens of events across the country, and trying to keep up with the overwhelming crash course in leather protocols, BDSM skills, and fundraising. This was also the year he moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore, when John replaced his original producer who was not doing a proper job. As a producer, John’s task was to make sure that Jerry lived up to the responsibilities of being a titleholder, such as attending the right events and serving the leather community in a manner appropriate to his newfound status. In this way, John became Jerry’s mentor and Jerry became John’s adopted “kid”—as mentees are known in the kinship-based vernacular of the leather community.

Like John, Jerry’s affection for leather emerged many years prior to his initiation into the leather lifestyle. For him, it happened in the early 1990s when he started riding motorcycles and wore leather protection gear. He noticed how wearing his gear boosted his confidence, making him feel more powerful and sexy, although his attraction to leather was not necessarily sexual at the time. The sexual dimension developed as he began wearing leather uniforms to social events and play parties, ⁶ where he is frequently overtaken by the multisensory allure of cow or lamb leather:

The feel, the smell, knowing that I have it on, as a material … it’s wonderfully intoxicating, it hits all my senses. I can taste it, I can smell it, I can feel it, see it, hear it when it crinkles as I walk. It’s all enveloping, all-powerful.

Next to the overwhelming and sexually charged sensory experience, he also feels a deep sense of community when he is in a room full of other people wearing leather, something that resembles a kind of ambient awareness of the collective history they all wear, literally, on their sleeves—and on their backs, in the form of club patches and buttons that adorn the leather.

Jerry speaks about their shared embodied history and sartorial protocols with a measure of reverence whose intensity surpasses even John’s earnestness, and he finds it equally difficult to dissociate this history from the materiality of leather, which is not to say he did not try. As he bluntly puts it on one occasion, “leather is just dead animal, with dye.” Yet, he recognized that, because of its toughness and durability, leather is also protective and that it was this very quality which originally enrolled the fabric into what would become leather history. My questions seemed to make him a bit impatient:

One of the big things that are important to me is the historical aspect of it, and the traditions. There may not be a definitive answer as to why it is leather, but it is, so learn about it, respect it and move on, you know?

I don’t think I really got what he was saying at the time and neither was I ready to “move on,” but I did understand that Jerry’s approach to leather was essentially oriented toward the reproduction of its communal form of life rather than theorizing the form and function of its materiality. So move on we did.

The tradition Jerry cherishes most is the ritual gifting of leather from a Sir to his boy, because it assures the ongoing circulation of intimate material memories and their aggregation into the collective history of the leather community. As discussed above, gifting a leather item is never a casual or careless affair due to the obligation attached to the gift as munus, and the prospected recipient thus has to prove himself worthy of the gift: it has to be earned before it can be received. “Earned leather” is the most coveted kind of leather, as it presents a valuable reward for living a life of service, both to one’s Sir and to the community at large. It signifies that the recipient is ready for the obligation of taking care of a piece of leather that many before him have worn, and is trusted with the associated responsibility of keeping the leather—with all its accumulated stories, memories, and congealed affects—alive so that it may be passed on to new generations of leathermen:

Knowing that you’re helping the tribe keep moving, keep growing … The tradition, the ceremony, the ritual of our oral history … If that ceremony, that ritual, becomes observed each time, it becomes a beautiful thing. Each time that this gets repeated, the tradition gets repeated.

He stresses the urgency of this tradition in relation to the 1980s AIDS epidemic:

Because a lot of our ways … we lost so many to AIDS when it first hit, when it obliterated many of us a good deal of our history and knowledge was lost. We don’t have the elders to turn to, a whole generation has been lost.

Compounding this loss was a certain willful amnesia, or what Castiglia and Reed have called a “degenerational unremembering” that was part of a larger “assault on gay memory following AIDS” in which the trauma of the AIDS crisis generated at once a homophobic cultural backlash and a self-censoring impetus among gay communities to forget and sanitize their own sexual histories (Castiglia and Reed, 2012: 2). As they go on to argue,

The AIDS crisis became an occasion for a powerful concentration of cultural forces that made (and continue to make) the syndrome an agent of amnesia, wiping out memories not only of everything that came before but of the remarkably vibrant and imaginative ways that gay communities responded to the catastrophe of illness and death and sought to memorialize our losses. (Castiglia and Reed, 2012: 3)

For Jerry, the value of leather is inscribed through this collective, repeated labor of memorialization, which animates it through carefully observed ritual practices and thereby creates a joyful sense of consistency in the face of material and social attrition. It is in this way that he understands progressive action and conservation as two sides of the same coin, something he explains as follows:

Whether it’s upkeep or actual change and doing something different, you’re still taking care of each other, you’re still taking care of your community, helping one another out. I don’t view trying to affect change as different than keeping the status quo. And when I say status quo, I mean maintenance of the building, maintenance of the infrastructure. This relates back to the passing on of our history and tradition, our culture, our ways and protocols. That’s almost maintenance of the status quo, keeping that going, and you’re a citizen of that. Its your responsibility to keep that going.

In Jerry’s view, the ongoing practice of composing the gay leather collective, figured here as maintenance, is as important to its survival as the disruptive and insurgent practices more commonly associated with radical acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008). This echoes Lauren Berlant’s (2013) assertion that

[p]olitics is not just for genres of demonstration and demand. It requires also genres of checking in to provide a little breathing space that allows for redistributing and disturbing negative affect, de-isolating ourselves-in-damage, and hatching strategies for not reproducing the violence, for moving the scene of life to an alter-real.

Like any good plumber or construction worker, Jerry knows that a building needs upkeep in order not to cave in under the external and internal pressures that wear it out on a daily basis. Organizing the intimate, social, and economic logistics involved in this upkeep is thus a deeply political civic practice, in the sense that it enables Baltimore’s leather community to stake out what Henri Lefebvre (1996) would call its “right to the city” by fortifying its mnemonic and performative infrastructures, which would otherwise corrode and eventually disappear from the urban landscape. In other words, it is the reparative political work of not being defeated, forgotten, or rendered invisible. I will discuss my materialist interpretation of the notion of “reparativity” in the next and final section.

The endurance of leather

Reflecting on Derrida’s last interview, given shortly before his death, Didier Fassin (2010) writes,

To survive is to be still fully alive and to live beyond death. It is the [quoting Derrida] “unconditional affirmation” of life and the pleasure of living, and it is the hope of “surviving” through the traces left for the living. (p. 83)

According to Fassin, who is likewise concerned with the foreclosure of political life by the reduction of survival to bare physical existence, Derrida shows us how survival in fact “opens an ethical space for reflection and action” (p. 93). In Baltimore’s leather community, where survival structures a great number of ritual practices and daily routines, this ethical space is filled with an unwavering commitment to keep alive individual and collective biographies, as well as their contiguous materials.

Perhaps no contingent embodies this dedication as much as the community bootblacks, who not only figure as the “construction workers” responsible for maintenance and repair but also often function as “bartenders,” gathering stories while working on boots or other leather items at events. At least this is how Celia describes their role in the community. Celia had been active on the city’s leather and BDSM scene for about 3 years at the time of our interview and was one of the few female-identified bootblacks in a small community whose members predominantly identify as (transgender) male, genderqueer, or “boi” (a “biologically female” boy). It initially took her quite some effort to convince her newfound peers that she had a genuine passion for working on leather and was not just a shoeshine. The difference between the two—as it is understood in this community—is that the latter shines shoes for a living, while being a bootblack is a way of life. Once she had proven to be a worthy student, two prominent community bootblacks agreed to accept her as their apprentice. She could not have been happier.

Her desire to become a bootblack emerged some months earlier, when she had an epiphany during a Bootblacking 101 workshop. While working on a pair of boots owned by her Sir (Celia identifies as a bisexual slave), ⁷ the smell of the polish suddenly made her remember the service she had done for her father, who was a drill instructor in the army and had taught her how to shine his boots when she was a little girl “I was like ‘oh I remember this!’ It was strong, it was almost like a punch to the head, like ‘remember this, this is something important’.” She vividly recalled how much she had liked the smell of the polish and the feel of the leather, but the biggest thing for her at the time was to know that she was making her father happy.

Celia has always been a very service-oriented person, and this desire to make other people happy still drives much of her work as a community bootblack. Nevertheless, in our conversations, she persistently emphasized the reciprocity of the intimate transactions she engages in, frequently evoking the idea of an “energy exchange”:

When I’m working on someone’s leather, whether it’s their boots, their pants, their corsets, shoes, vest, hat, ehm … it’s the connection with the person. There’s an energy exchange that can be very powerful, to the point where I’ll break out in a sweat and my hands will actually heat up from working on the leather and it’s not just friction. It’s an energy flow between me and the person in the chair. It becomes very sensual, it can be very erotic.

It does not always have to be, however, and on other occasions a different yet interrelated kind of intimacy emerges from the act of storytelling. This is why Celia uses the “bartender” metaphor to describe the kind of affective labor bootblacks perform in the community, which often consists of listening as people narrate bits and pieces of their lives, patched together in the dense memories that congeal around a particular leather item.

By listening, bootblacks gather the personal stories that contribute to the collective history of the leather community, in addition to establishing the grounds for what frequently turn out to be long-lasting friendships. Celia usually starts by asking about the history of someone’s leather to get a better sense of what she will be working on—and with. How the narrative texture of these stories inflects the material texture of the leather in her hands will to a great extent shape the kind of energy she feels during an encounter, which in turn determines the intensity of her affective investment in the service she is providing. When the energy is positive, she reciprocates by offering words of advice, sympathy, or consolation, drawing on her technical expertise in leather care, as well as on the vernacular knowledge she has gained from listening to the intimate narratives of leathermen who have come to her before.

On one occasion, a boy sat down in her chair, visibly reluctant to be present at the party and obviously not having a good time. After some uncomfortable small talk, she noticed that his boots were about three sizes bigger than his feet, so she carefully inquired about their history. It turned out that they used to be worn by his Sir, who had passed away 4 months earlier, after which the boy secluded himself for a period of mourning. This was the first time he had been out in public again, having been swayed by his leather family, and he was wearing his Sir’s boots to honor his memory and perhaps to give them a new shine. He kept telling Celia how he was feeling very lonely and lost, having no desire to talk to anyone he knew at the party, but she gradually got him to open up more while she worked on the boots:

By the time he got out of my chair we had both cried over the loss of his Sir and he stood up smiling. He felt he had been brought back into the community, that just because his Sir had died didn’t mean that he was no longer part of the leather community.

Through listening and revitalizing a pair of boots which had “become the site of grief and struggle” (Stallybrass, 1993: 42–43), a struggle to commemorate without isolating oneself in the past, Celia at once extended the lifespan of these treasured leather items and rekindled the communal bonds that had lied dormant in their well-worn imprint.

Celia views these communal bonds as the most beautiful aspect of the leather lifestyle, and she admits that without the friendships and emotional connections she probably would not be a bootblack—although she might still shine shoes. Yet, like John and Jerry, she too finds it virtually impossible to dissociate the social and historical life of leather from its physical consistency and texture. As she pointed out on one occasion,

Without leather there wouldn’t be this community, because it’s a living thing. Leather is skin, so it’s only … It was once on an animal, but it carries its history as a boot, as gloves, as a piece of clothing. It carries the history of who’s worn it because it’s imbued with that person’s sweat, the cologne, the perfume. So it does have its own history, its own life.

She considers it to be her most important job to restore leather that been “abused,” as she calls it, in order to keep it alive so that people can continue to wear it and add new layers to its dense material history.

For Celia, then, being one of the community’s “construction workers” entails a life dedicated to the ongoing labor of social, psychical, and physical repair. She shares with her fellow bootblacks a deep reparative aspiration that at once echoes, materializes, and complicates Sedgwick’s notion of the reparative as a capacious and generous reading practice. In Sedgwick’s work (2003), the “reparative impulse” primarily informs an epistemological position that “wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (p. 149). She warns us, however, that this desire should not be taken as a redemptive act that returns the object of knowledge (and of love) to some pre-existing wholeness, given the fundamental ambivalence of our object relations and the precarious nature of the attachments that nourish us (p. 128).

Despite our best efforts to repair what is broken, we face the persistence of loss. Celia knows this truth intimately, as she frequently encounters how “the wornness by which presence is transmitted” is slowly “transformed into the wornness of the worn-out” (Stallybrass, 1993: 43). And yet Baltimore’s bootblack community offers a comprehensive support structure in which collectively honed skills form the reparative resources needed to not merely bear the persistence of death and decay but to turn survival into a beautiful art of memory and maintenance. In this way, it attends us to a critical blind spot in Sedgwick’s reflections on reparativity, which fail to fully account for the conditions of possibility that need to be in place for the reparative to do its work.

“It’s about saying ‘we’re here and we’re not going to disappear on you,’” Celia tells me in a determined voice:

The idea that there’s so much of our history lost, because those people are no longer alive to tell us their stories and we don’t have their leather to sort of embody the parts that they didn’t have to speak about … it’s important to not forget where we came from. We don’t want to be a footnote in history, or less.

There is a moment of silence, as she stares into her tea that by now undoubtedly has turned cold. Then, she looks up at me again and says, “Because if we’re not looking out for ourselves then nobody else will. It comes down to basic survival.”

Here, I have to slightly disagree with Celia, because if there is anything Baltimore’s leather community has shown me with great vivacity it is how there is nothing “basic” about their mode of survival. For this community, survival “is not simply what remains; it is the most intense life possible” (Derrida in Fassin, 2010: 82). What I witnessed was the collective articulation of a politics of survival that emphasizes more life over the mere life of necessity (Honig, 2009). By maintaining infrastructures for the care and preservation of their cherished leather items and rituals, men and women in the gay leather community refuse the protracted effacement of their biographies and thereby resist any attempt to reduce their existence to a “bare life” denuded of ethical capacity or political agency.

In the face of continuing interdictions and attrition, they draw on their richly textured material history to fill the ethical space of survival with memories, pleasures, ceremonies, and kinship, all entangled with this magical fabric that lines the contours of their common form of life. While Stallybrass (1993) believes the magic of cloth lies in its ability to “receive us”—“our smells, our sweat our shape even” (p. 36)—it is my contention that leather’s magic ultimately emanates from its situated capacity to “assemble us,” to make a collectivity out of individuals. Indeed, it is this magical quality of leather—its ability to shift between different modes of existence, to elicit affection, desire, and commitment, and to endure “through the traces [in the form of gifted and earned leather] left for the living” (Fassin, 2010: 83)—that constitutes what I call its political ontology.

To be sure, this is not to locate such magic in the substance of leather itself, which would do little more than mirror disenchanted attempts to explain it away by attributing magic solely to the lived experiences and actions of the leather community. Instead, I suggest we would do better to appreciate the distributed nature of the magic that marks leather’s political ontology: it acquires its power only in the tense space between inscription and texture, or consistency, as the provisional outcome of a shared commitment to the accumulation of “queer countermemories” (Castiglia and Reed, 2012: 54). Such memories, like the flow of time, do not just accumulate. Despite their obdurate materiality, they also erode and transform, imbuing the leather community’s reparative project of survival with a measure of ambiguity. Yet, such ambiguity has to be affirmed unconditionally and with joy, as Derrida has taught us, and on that night at the Hippo I knew that somehow John and his friends had already taken this lesson to heart.