Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years
The official catalog celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Leather Archives & Museum. The catalog features essays, collection photographs, and highlights over the LA&M's institutional life.
The official catalog celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Leather Archives & Museum. The catalog features essays, collection photographs, and highlights over the LA&M's institutional life.
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Chuck Renslow, Kris Studios,<br />
International Mr. <strong>Leather</strong>, LA&M<br />
Dom first encountered Chuck Renslow on<br />
Oak Street beach in Chicago in 1950.<br />
Instantly drawn to each other, Dom moved in<br />
with Chuck and in 1954. They forged the<br />
physique photography business, Kris<br />
Studios, which they ran until 1969. Kris’<br />
photographic studio was originally set up in<br />
the back area of the Triumph Gym, also a<br />
Renslow-Orejudos collaboration, and many<br />
of the gym’s patrons found their way into the<br />
pages of Kris, the studio’s physique<br />
magazine. It was within the pages of Kris<br />
that Etienne launched his artistic career,<br />
earning a living through mail order photo<br />
prints of his drawings and art series’. Jack<br />
Fritscher experienced the gym and the<br />
scene it begat first hand early-on. In 1969,<br />
he was first introduced to Dom and later<br />
‘married’ into the Renslow clan when he met<br />
and partnered with Gold Coast bartender<br />
David Sparrow. He took many of his<br />
“Chicago values” with him when they moved<br />
to San Francisco in 1969, roots<br />
which played an important role in his<br />
association with Drummer and American<br />
leather heritage. Dom and Jack became<br />
lifelong friends.<br />
By the time they closed Kris Studios, Chuck<br />
and Dom had already become successful<br />
business managers and owners of a series<br />
of gay men’s gathering places in Chicago,<br />
from the Triumph Gym to the Hi-Lo Bar, to<br />
the various reincarnations of the Gold Coast<br />
bar (beginning in 1958), to Man’s Country<br />
bathhouse. Together, they also founded<br />
International Mr. <strong>Leather</strong> in 1979, for which<br />
Dom produced much of the contest’s<br />
promotional art and its logo, served many<br />
years as Head Judge, along with judging<br />
roles at other leather contests across the<br />
U.S.<br />
Although most know Dom through his visual<br />
art and involvement in the Chicago leather<br />
community of the 50s to the 80s, he was a<br />
passionate and talented dancer from early in<br />
life. Dom served with the Ellis-DuBoulay<br />
School, Illinois Ballet Company, New<br />
Orleans Ballet Company, Southeast<br />
Regional Ballet Association and others as a<br />
student, dancer, teacher, choreographer,<br />
composer, mentor, and judge. Orejudos<br />
danced with the Illinois Ballet from 1958, at<br />
the age of sixteen, until 1973, eventually<br />
becoming resident choreographer, principal<br />
dancer, and associate director of the<br />
company. The Dom Orejudos Dance Papers<br />
at the Newberry Library in Chicago hold<br />
correspondence, clippings, photographs,<br />
programs, sketches, and audiovisual<br />
material relating to Orejudos' dance career<br />
and to the Illinois Ballet.<br />
Fritscher commented on the relation<br />
between Dom’s dance sensibilities and his<br />
visual art, noting, “His talent for dramatic<br />
movement and story arcs, developed on<br />
stage in his choreography, informed his<br />
cartoon-strip narratives.”<br />
The Dom Orejudos Collection at the LA&M<br />
holds keys to this more personal side of<br />
Dom, ranging from photograph albums,<br />
leather clothing and vest, personal letters<br />
and business correspondence, souvenirs,<br />
buttons, an oral history recorded in 1984,<br />
and of course, his amazing oeuvre of art.<br />
38