Amazing Men of WorldLeathermen

If I have only one life to live, let it be this one.

Yesterday, with softball fields flooded, I met up for lunch with someone I had flagged down on WorldLeathermen. My lunch companion was intelligent, creative, so handsome it was scary, full of insights, and clearly a lover of life.

And I spent the last night in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, with GI Joe and his husband Papi in their cabin in the woods. GI Joe and I smoked cigars while waiting for Papi to get home, then had a nice dinner of grilled salmon and mesclun, and then it was down to the dungeon, where I spent time on the bondage table, the bondage ladder, and wearing some items from GI Joe's amazing collection of steel restraints. Felt good to be in bondage at the hands of a man who knows what he's doing. Only small sour spot was when I realized that I could no longer breathe through the hood that I was wearing, and that was quickly rectified. The scene was sensuous. While I was bound, GI Joe and Papi kept busy with my balls, tits, and asshole. But before we got busy, first step was getting shackled into GI Joe's barber chair, where my scalp was taken down to the smooth and shining skin.

So, Gosh! Three great men in 24 hours. I mean, really wonderful men. Breathtaking, really. (And I'm not thinking of the hood mishap there.)

Lately I've been talking to a few men who are at the outset of their journeys in Leather. I feel compelled to do evangelism of sorts. What I've found--and the men I've met--have been so fantastic. I want these young men to have that, too. All that and more.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of the writers in the Leatherfolk anthology, Thom Magister, who was introduced into the scene in Los Angeles in the Fifties (I mistakenly said the Sixties), by being taken in as a brother by the local leathermen. I wrote about how foreign that was to my experience, so much so that Thom Magister's biographical sketch sounded fantastic. Small world that it is, one reader contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in meeting Mr. Magister. So, he and I are gonna get together for dinner sometime soon.

What is this world I've found? Who are these men who inhabit it? What is this tribe?

How is it that beneath the veneer of the humdrum workaday world, there are these warriors and magicians, these terrifying angels, that are in the world but not of the world? It almost has a cinematic quality to it. Like Rosemary's Baby. Only unlike Mia Farrow in her Jean Seaberg haircut, I've discovered not a malevolent coven of witches (seeing Ruth Gordon perkily intoning, "Hail Satan!" is to my mind a great Hollywood moment), but rather this fraternity of demigods.

Huh. I should re-read some Nietzsche. It seems to me that he was longing for this. Looking around at the bourgeoise world he inhabited made him sick. Rather, he dreamed of a world of strength and power and a joyous life lived with clenched teeth and taut muscles. Fritz knew the deal.

I'm awed and humbled.

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