Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years

inventory of what they had stored in their
apartment. In a report to the Executive
Committee, I enumerated the conservation
needs of the collection and requested funds
be budgeted for archival storage materials. I
also noted that both my own collection and
that of the NLA were “challenging the limits of
available space” and needed some repository
other than the residences of individuals. I
concluded my report with the following:
One of the most pressing needs we have as
a national community is for a stable, well
funded, soundly run national leather/SM/
fetish archives/museum/library. Such an
enterprise needs several things, most
critically a suitable building and an
endowment sufficient to hire staff to manage
the collections and to pay for the materials
needed to properly care for them....The need
is urgent. Private apartments can only hold
our history for a limited time, and everything
other than a separate institution is a stop-gap
measure.
My long term recommendations are,
therefore, that the effort to create an
institutional infrastructure for the leather/kink
“historical society” be given attention and
energy. Once a non-profit corporation is set
up and a board installed, fundraising for the
“historical society” should become one of the
funding priorities stressed by the NLA. We
should make that a big part of our message
to the leather community. Even now we
should be encouraging people to donate their
memorabilia either to the NLA or to someone
willing to be a custodian until there is a better
place to put the stuff. NLA could even do
what the local San Francisco lesbian and gay
historical society did for many years and rent
a storage locker to store the material until
there is a better place to house it. We might
want to budget for such a storage locker and
appoint someone to receive the material in
the interim. Whoever does receive it should
have some knowledge of how to store it so
that it will not deteriorate while it is in the
locker…
In this time of so much morality, a lot of our
community’s past is landing on the junk heap
of history. One of the main ways material gets
lost forever is when people die and do not
make some kind of provision to save it. I have
painful personal knowledge of many fantastic
collections of artifacts that have been either
deliberately destroyed by heirs, or tossed in
the garbage by people who knew nothing of
their value. Even before we have a perfect
facility, we need to be reminding people of
the need to provide for their photos, run pins,
club insignia, club documents, newsletters,
posters, art work, etc. And if we can also
provide even a temporary repository, we will
be doing a great service. If there is a nonprofit
organization set up, we can also
encourage people to include it in their estate
planning (Report to the NLA Executive
Committee, May 21. 1991).
Little of this ambitious agenda was
accomplished by the NLA itself, and
realistically, the organization was not ideally
equipped to do so. In retrospect, the attempt
to establish a single, general-purpose
organization charged with doing everything
the leather communities needed was far less
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