Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years (1991-2016) [digital]

constituency led to the acrimonious and
largely disastrous meeting in Dallas, Texas,
in the winter of 1989.
Instead of supporting either the existing NLA
or the GMSMA plan, the Dallas meeting
produced another organization, dubbed
SSCA (Safe Sane Consensual Adults). The
SSCA was doomed from the outset. Its
structure was an attempt at a compromise of
the competing visions, but the result was a
clumsy hybrid that pleased no one. Although
SSCA had been designed to appease the
GMSMA contingent and maintain its
involvement, GMSMA and its allied groups
(mainly East Coast and predominantly gay
male) almost immediately withdrew their
support, and appeared to be as hostile
toward SSCA as they had been toward the
NLA. With the collapse of the compromise,
SSCA was absorbed into the NLA.
Unfortunately, the NLA was forced to
incorporate the untenable structural features
of SSCA that had been adopted on behalf of
a partnership that no longer existed, and
which NLA had neither wanted nor needed.
However, along with its awkward structure,
SSCA had formalized a statement of purpose
that included an explicit commitment to
leather history, and this goal was injected into
the official agenda of the NLA. Back in Dallas,
when it became evident that a new leather
organization was going to be formed, a group
of us was sitting in a Denny’s trying to
salvage the situation and preserve the hope
of national leather political unity. I do not
recall the exact composition of this group,
although I know Tony was part of it. In any
case, we drafted a statement of principles for
what became SSCA, and it read as follows:
This organization is dedicated to the following
purposes: To help build, strengthen and
defend those groups and individuals involved
in SM, Leather, and other fetishes; to
promote the right of adults to engage in all
safe, sane, and consensual erotic activities;
to promote increased communication and
cooperation among our organizations,
individuals, and businesses everywhere; to
promote education about safe, sane, and
consensual behavior within our own
communities; to convey an accurate, positive
image of our interests and lifestyles; to unite
against threats to our freedom of expression,
our right to free association, and our right to
equal protection under the law; and to
preserve a record of our history, traditions,
and culture (my emphasis).
When SSCA was incorporated into the NLA,
so was much of this language. The clause on
preserving leather history was included
verbatim in the NLA International statement
of purpose. So much for intent. It is much
easier to fantasize about new institutions than
to generate them.
By 1991, I had been elected to the Executive
Committee of the NLA, and took this as an
opportunity to try to operationalize that history
clause. The first job was to try to figure out
what archives the NLA itself had, and secure
their conservation. Most of those records
were then in Seattle, in the possession of two
the NLA principals. They sent me an
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,
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