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leatherarchives.bsky.social
Leather Archives & Museum
@leatherarchives.bsky.social
3.8K followers 1.4K following 1.2K posts
A Chicago-based research archive, library and museum dedicated to the preservation of leather, kink, fetish and BDSM community history.
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Leather Archives & Museum @leatherarchives.bsky.social · Dec 15
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Leather Archives & Museum | Instagram, Facebook | Linktree
Chicago-based research archive, library and museum of leather and kink history.
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leatherarchives.bsky.social
Cover of A Drummer Guide to Where the Action is in Los Angeles (ca 1980). #LosAngeles
Muscular, blonde, white man sitting on an outdoor apartment staircase with his legs between the rails. He is wearing peach swimsuit bottoms. Text reads: bars, wet and wild, celluloid skin, shops, restaurants, hot businesses.
January 6, 2026 at 9:56 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Thursday the 8th, 7pm to 8:30pm.
All experience levels are welcome! Bring your own rope if you can! A limited supply of extra rope will be there for attendees who don’t have their own. See you there! 🪢
January 6, 2026 at 4:51 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Knotty by Nature with The Persian Prince is back!
Join us this Thursday for the first class where you can learn bondage skills this new year!
January 6, 2026 at 4:51 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Gay Male S/M Activists (1980-2009) at the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Photo from the LA&M collections. #LeatherClubs
Four men carrying a large horizontal banner, and marching in front of a crowd of men wearing leather, black, and plaid. Five people in the background are waving various countries flags. It is a gray day.
January 5, 2026 at 10:01 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
The Seattle girls of Leather is a club that was founded in 2011. Patch from the LA&M patch library. #LeatherClubs
Round patch with a black background, and a heart in the center with light pink, black and white stripes, and a red interior heart. Text: Seattle girls of leather.
January 5, 2026 at 4:19 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Quote from Ivo Dominguez Jr.'s book of essays, Beneath the Skins: The New Spirit and Politics of the Kink Community (1994). Illustration by Ken W. Kelly from the cover of John Norman's Kajira of Gor (1983).
Illustration of a Roman centurion appearing man and a woman with medium toned skin, kneeling in a white dress with chains on her arms beside him. He is holding a short sword and has another sheathed on his hip and she is wearing a decorative metal head dress. Text: For novices searching for a frame of reference for their experiences, the average piece of kinky fiction misrepresents the norms of our community. For outsiders, these misrepresentations have the potential to generate further misunderstanding or to serve as ammunition in ideological wars. This would not be as critical an issue were it not for the fact that our erotica tends to be our most public face.]
January 4, 2026 at 9:18 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Today! Join us at 3pm for the first Kink Klass of 2026 w/ Master Leather Redux!

Maybe flogging will be your new fetish to explore this year 😉
January 4, 2026 at 4:58 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Cover of Reflections magazine, edited by Mistress Antoinette. The LA&M is missing many issues of Reflections. Do you have them? 🎁
Magazine cover with two white woman in leather fetish outfits stepping out of a luxury vehicle. Headlines: rubber lovers unite. The sensuous dominant.
January 3, 2026 at 8:47 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Quote from For a Pornoscape by Paul Willemen (in More Dirty Looks, 2004). Photo from Heat (Nov 1991).
Close-up image of a man with medium brown skin resting with his forearms and cheek against the sand. He is wearing a Muir style leather cap with a chain. Text: [Fortunately, no taboo was ever capable of erasing what it sought to obliterate, and this is true of both sex and cognition. On the contrary, to impose a taboo on something offers a sure-fire guarantee that whatever is thus put under erasure, is sustained as an object of desire.]
January 2, 2026 at 5:26 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
New Year, New Kink! Kick the year off with some hit, kinky fun. It’s the first Kink Klass of 2026, with Master Leather Redux and Raea. Sunday the 4th, at 3pm. Free and open to everyone! Details online at leatherarchives.libcal.com/event/15518506
January 2, 2026 at 12:08 AM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Centurian's Latex and Leather Catalog No 8 (1992), donated by Centurian to the LA&M collections.
Cover of a catalog that reads: latex and leather for men and women catalog number eight. With someone wearing a full body latex suit, and a red laced waist trainer.
January 1, 2026 at 5:05 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
We appreciate you. Visibility is Resistance. Be as open and present as you can, and support others who are doing the same. Lift each other up. Be loud. And may 2026 be a better year for you, your loved ones, and for all of us.
A collage of leather and kink photos with the words thank you in the middle.
January 1, 2026 at 1:13 AM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Quote from Helen Henley's introduction to her novel Enter With Trumpets (1989). Henley wrote an advice column for Atomage and Dressing for Pleasure. Photo of Henley from DfP No 13.
White woman in her 50s with short blonde hair, wearing a high collared rubber double breasted coat and standing in a summer field. Text: Fetishism, involving materials such as rubber and leather, exists; so does bondage and restriction. They are not inventions of overworked imaginations or disordered minds. A bizarre manifestation of human sexual behavior, certainly; but disabling and harmful, certainly not. Guilt and sublimation, added to fetishism, may combine to produce a crippling condition in need of treatment, but, in my investigation, fetishism and bondage seems to be different only in form and application from many of the common and obsessive pastimes such as football and angling that are given common credence. Indeed, many of those socially acceptable hobbies offer very little opportunity for involvement of the female partner, whereas with fetishism this is not only possible but desirable.]
December 31, 2025 at 8:07 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Sam Steward (aka Phil Andros), writer, tattoo artist, professor, pornographer, and infamous renaissance man of the erotic arts died on December 31, 1993 at the age of 84. Original tattoo flash stencils, artwork, and stories by Steward are archived at the LA&M.
Sam is a thin white man with a mustache in his 60s or 70s wearing a formal white shirt and black jacket. Photo overlay with a tattoo outline of a unicorn and a hand holding a winged heart.
December 31, 2025 at 2:02 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Y'all we live in a world where queer history is being erased. LA&M fights to protect the art, artifacts and archives that document leather, fetish, kink and BDSM culture. That is why we, and other museums, libraries and archives, exist! Help with that work as you are able. leatherarchives.info/2025
Collage of historical leather and fetish photos and artwork, asking for support for the leather archives and museum
December 30, 2025 at 7:04 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Astuto died on December 30, 2019. Did you know Cynthia? Donate photos and memories of her to the LA&M to help preserve her legacy in the community archive. 🖤
December 30, 2025 at 5:09 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Cynthia Astuto was a lawyer, healer, and member of Samois, a trailblazing lesbian feminist S/M group in San Francisco. Cynthia was later an officer of The Outcasts and served as orientation leader in the mid to late 1980s.
[Being Weird is Not Enough: How to Stay Healthy and Play Safe by Cynthia Astuto and Pat Califia. Negotiation: Careful and complete negotiation can make the difference between a scene that is safe and hot, and one that will you shudder to remember. It is also an excellent way for the top to begin to take control. The bottom should be asked about her vanilla sexual history; any medical problems (asthma, back problems, poor circulation, diabetes, hemophilia, etc) which may affect her flexibility, pain tolerance, or limits; prior experience with S/M; a list of things she absolutely will not do, might do, and wants to do; fantasies; if she has used a safe word (a word that is not likely to be used accidentally during sex which means "I'm having trouble, lets get out of role and talk about the scene") in the past her reasons for wanting to play with the person...]
December 30, 2025 at 5:09 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
The post-holiday sale is here! Get some great buys on holiday merch, but jump fast cause when it’s gone, it’s gone!
lamgifts.com/collections/...
December 29, 2025 at 8:32 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Quote from Come Hither by Gloria G. Brame (2000). Photo from Toy No 44 (1985).
Black man wearing a leather head mask and a collar with a D ring. Text: [Consensual submission is about making a choice. It’s not about weakness. Even before you face the enormous tasks of surrendering power to your lover, living out your submissive needs requires that you go against the grain, that you do something unconventional, and that you make a choice for yourself that most people in your position are too terrified ever to make. Indeed, considering the social stigma, making the choice to be submissive demands courage.]
December 28, 2025 at 10:58 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Oregon State Leatherman and Leatherwoman titleholders, from the Bill "The Hun" Schmeling collection. #LeatherCommunity
Two white people wearing studded leather sashes. A man wearing a leather, chest harness, and a woman wearing a T-shirt and suede vest with bleached short hair.
December 28, 2025 at 7:50 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Quote from Down Again by Ellen Willis (in Salmagundi No 81, 1989). Photo from Mister SM No 38 (1983).
Close-up of a man with his neck craned back, something dark and gloopy dripping around his face. Text: [For many men, freedom to separate sex from relationship without guilt or hypocrisy has always been what sexual liberation is about. But the conventionally masculine dream of pure lust is, I'm convinced, as conservative in its way as the conventionally feminine romanticism that converts lust to pure emotion — or, for that matter, the patriarchal values that subordinate passion to marriage and procreation. All are attempts to tame sex, to make it safe by holding something back. For the objective risks of sex would not terrify us half so much if they did not reinforce a more primal inner threat. To abandon ourselves utterly to sensation /and/ emotion -- to give up the boundaries and limits that keep us in control -- would be, for most of us, like cutting loose from gravity and watching the earth spin.]
December 27, 2025 at 9:25 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Panther L/L (1988-2019) was a pangender leather club, founded by former members of the Charlotte Tradesmen on May 16, 1988. Panther L/L members raised funds for charity and participated in community service as a club. Patch from the LA&M patch library. #LeatherClubs
Round patch with an upside down pink triangle, male and female symbols to either side and a black panther crawling over top.
December 27, 2025 at 4:39 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Cyll died on December 27, 2006. Did you know Cyll? Donate photos and memories of him to the LA&M. 🖤
December 27, 2025 at 3:24 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Cyll Sheppard was a veteran of the first Gulf War, founding member of the Seattle Boys of Leather and Seattle Daddy's Boy 2001. He volunteered at many leather events.
[Cyll Sheppard passed away peacefully in his sleep on December 27th. He was 39 years old and lived in Seattle, WA. Cyll had been battlingl ymphoma for several months. Cyll was a US Army veteran of the First Gulf War, attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and was a victim of Gulf War Syndrome. Cyll has been a tireless worker behind the scenes in Seattle's leather community, serving with Seattle Men in Leather as Seattle Daddy's Boy 2001 and as a founding member and membership coordinator of Seattle Boys of Leather. Cyll volunteered his services at many leather contests in years past and was a favorite judge's runner at Seattle contests. A memorial service will be organized by Seattle Boys of Leather early in 2007.]
December 27, 2025 at 3:24 PM
leatherarchives.bsky.social
Chees died on December 26, 2004. Did you know Patrick? Contact the LA&M to help preserve his memory in the community archive. 🖤
December 26, 2025 at 10:59 PM