Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Morgan Keith. Walgreens said it's closing some San Francisco stores because of an increase in retail theft. Police data obtained by the Chronicle did not show high rates of shoplifting reports at the closing stores. One expert said people moving out of the city during the pandemic could've hurt Walgreens' business. Please enter valid email address to continue. Chrome Safari Continue. Be the first to know. Leatherman Wingman Multi-Tool.
Leatherman Free P4 Multi-Tool. Leatherman OHT Tool. Leatherman Free K2. Leatherman Charge Plus. Leatherman Tread Multi-Tool Bracelet. Gerber Center Drive Multi-Tool. Leatherman Sidekick Multi-Tool. Leatherman Surge Multi Tool. Just as female drag had once been the town queer's way of signaling blowjobs to sailors, suddenly drag divided and alternated; and leather became the new semaphore advertising a new, open man-to-man sex encounter. Leather was a welcome way out of the closet for masculine men who in larger numbers than anyone ever suspected thanked the gods that the New Leather Culture allowed them to do their Father's Act rather than their Mother's Act, and in doing their Father's Act to excel beyond the father.
The sign on the ceiling of The Tool Box said, "No Tennis Shoes," which nixed limp wrists, fluffy sweaters, and the passe code slang of the Friends of Dorothy. Nothing happens in a vacuum. So parallel is the leather universe, that, in , the year before the publication of The Leatherman's Handbook, I had no idea that "The Leather List" was anything but a folk document circulated as jerk-off material, but informational enough that I quoted anonymous questionnaire as a grass-roots source in my own nonfiction book, Popular Witchcraft: Straight From the Witch's Mouth.
This Popular Witchcraft was the first modern uncloseting, analysis, and mix of homosexuality, leather, and satanism. Leather was a happening mutuality, and Larry was there as a fellow working-journalist in the midst of an extraordinary Leather tribe featuring a convergence of major minds and talents who were the mediums through which homomasculinity articulated its modern self.
Such spontaenous outbreaks were of major significance as scholarship models for the newly founded American Popular Culture Association , Bowling Green University. Twenty-First Century Leather Men might start highlighting their ancestral roots here. In Chicago, Chuck Renslow, entrepreneur of the Gold Coast, had since the early s run the manly and leathery Kris Photo Studio which featured seductively ominous photographs of muscular Polish-Catholic working-men culled from the streets and the Triumph gym Renzlow managed.
In this way, Renslow's ACLU-defended photography conditioned emerging gay men with a laser-straight masculinity that became archetypal totem and fetish for leather men. Few neo-leather historians remember that Illinois, where I grew up, was the first state to legalize homosexuality in Thus freed up, Chicago leather society, inspired by the Kris standard of masculinity, led the charge of the Leather Liberation Brigade. Renslow's crew was as pivotal to the creation of the American leather archetype as was the early cartooning of the fine artist Tom of Finland, who was introduced to the United States by Bob Mizer via his LA-based Physique Pictorial magazine in The "Leather List" questionnaire, circulating through the players in Chicago leather, was filled out and mailed to Los Angeles.
Early on, I had the good fortune to model for Target and spent five years associating with Lou Thomas and his "take" on leather, before becoming bi-coastal lover of Robert Mapplethorpe who in the early 's was collaging photographs of leathermen into high concept art that bloomed up and out of the gay ghetto and brought leather into the art world's mainstream. Manhattan "straight" magazine artist-illustrator, Steve Masters, imaginating muscular leather men in painterly drawings killed himself when his wife found out about his second career.
Masculine image input came from every where, and Larry's "Leather List" was read, re-typed, and mailed from Manhattan to Los Angeles. In San Francisco, Harvey Milk opened a vanilla photo shop to compete with photographer Walt Jebe's leather-identified camera store on 19th Street in the Castro. In , my lover of ten years, David Sparrow, and I posed duo for Jebe's leather photo magazine, Whipcrack , which pre-dated Drummer by five years and provided early gay images for the emerging leather analysts like Townsend and artists like Domino and Bill Ward.
So it was that the leather cadre in Chicago and Manhattan gene-spliced the commercial leather genesis that was simultaneously combusting like wildfire in San Francisco and Los Angeles where Larry Townsend was busy working the leather pop culture scene on the leather bar and bike run circuit at venues like The Black Pipe, Griff's, and Larry's no relation to Townsend , with leather superstars like the respected British movie actor Peter Bromilow Camelot, The Railway Children.
Did the Roman Empire have gladiator bars? Ask Aaron Travis. Ask Steven Saylor. The original gay leather bar was an Italian-American invention inspired by the the leather world's nicely capitalistic drive to make money. Gay liberation, originally and in fact, was successfully and openly driven by gay capitalism much to the later chagrin of a successive generation of lesbigay Marxists with a taste for tuna casserole "fund-raisers" because they quit their day jobs. Sex, a recession-proof industry, always drives money.
And vice versa. Sexmeister Tony Tavarossi d. July designed the basic leather bar as the s became the s. In Manhattan, leather begot Keller's and The Anvil. To time-trip back to the sexual decor at the time of publication of The Leatherman's Handbook, throw onto a video monitor a copy of the William Friedkin film Cruising which features actual leathermen of the period playing "atmosphere people.
Everything rising out of the closets converged. Larry Townsend, a networked part of all he met, was well focused. He examined exactly how leather was kicking out from all the heretofore closeted places military, prison, industry where men enjoyed covert masculine contact that was very physical, very rough, and often very erotic, but not always sexual, and not ever female. One can most assuredly agree with my pal Camille Paglia who says even homosexual men must observe women; but one can also agree with Katharine Hepburn who advised no more than, "Men and women should live next door and visit each other once in a while.
Marlowe's virtual Queen's Handbook rather demanded the balance Mr. Townsend introduced in The Leatherman's Handbook. Reference to gender of all kinds is suggested only to inform those seeking offense were no slight is meant, that at the start, in his initial field research, and laser-true even on its 25th anniversary, Townend targeted a man's leather Handbook to a demographic of masculine-identified men before leather women and female bodybuilders were invented in American pop culture.
While diverse others have read, enjoyed, and learned the basic leather tropes from the Hand Book , the author's specific subject is homomasculinity and his operative audience is gay males. Over the years, many women as well as many other-than-gay men, have quoted Townsend's man's Handbook as a leather primer, a clarificatory introduction into their own legitimate versions of leather culture.
Hopefully, the diversity of all others who are not gay males--and who believe in women and female-identified homosexuals writing about and for women and female-identified homosexuals--will not hold a grudge ever in print or in their hearts against one of the earliest historic, agenda-free documents written by a man about men and for men.
The Leatherman's Handbook , chock full of sexual entertainment and literary license to illustrate the wide psychology of leather, merits, by entertainment value, at least, status with Chaucer's travelers' handbook, The Canterbury Tales.
Masculine-identified leather artists of the visual, articulated by all the masculine-identified leather voices writing--including Townsend in , helped motivate, and received validation in prompting, the American Psychiatric Association's removing homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders in This victory is a red-letter day in the black-and-blue History of Homosexuality.
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