Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years

MEMORY AND THE POWER OF PLACE:
MEDITATIONS ON ARCHIVES AND COMMUNITY AT THE LA&M
T
he collections of the Leather Archives
& Museum are not passive, idle.
These materials are living and active.
Sweat stains on the armpits of a bar vest;
Etienne murals, handwritten letters of
adoration and worship; newsletters about S/
M technique; organizational bylaws, event
ephemera, run planning documents; t-shirts,
leathers, denims, uniforms; thousands of
original artworks by greats such as kd
diamond, Rex, Steve Masters, Jacki
Randall. Mistress Mir’s corset; homemade
and distributed pornographic films; oral
history interviews. At the Leather Archives &
Museum, these are just some of the sexual
objects, memories, histories, club and
organizational records, and artifacts that
have become museum, library and archival
materials.
As a community archive, we have been on
the forefront of collecting, describing,
preserving, and providing access to leather
history for the past 25 years.
Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth
Shepherd are U.K.-based archival scholars,
and they provide the following definition of
community archives:
Community Archives are ‘collections of
material gathered primarily by members of a
given community and over whose
community members exercise some level of
control. This allows both for collections that
are sustained entirely independent of
mainstream heritage institutions and those
that receive support in some form from such
organizations. Indeed, we argue that the
defining characteristic of community
archives is the active participation of a
community in documenting and making
accessible the history of their particular
group and/or locality on their own terms’.
(Source: Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and
Elizabeth Shepherd, ‘Whose Memories,
Whose Archives? Independent Community
Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream’,
Archival Science, 9 (2009), 71-86).
At the LA&M, archival work is guided by
principles and best practices of the
professional field while simultaneously
integrating the unique language,
descriptors, and cultural meaning of the
materials we collect. It has been incredible
to apply both of these methods and
practices to the LA&M collections. From
preservation assessments to deacidification,
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