Press Release – March 17, 2025
The Leather Hall of Fame is pleased to announce that after reviewing the nominations received from the community, the Selection Committee has selected the following nominees for induction in 2025:
DRUMMER Magazine has been an iconic and central publication of the leather and BDSM communities since 1975. Drummer helped to create the modern leather culture, first nationally and then internationally, and the magazine compiled extensive documentation of a formative period of leather history.
Drummer was much more than just a pornographic magazine. In the absence of a national movement, it was a critical instrument for unity. It was the go-to fuel for fantasies while also serving as a significant tool in the formation of the modern leather, kink, and BDSM communities and identities. Drummer's coverage of leather life, art, writing, sexualities, businesses, clubs, and products helped to form a leather audience and provide it with a set of shared cultural references. Drummer was a platform for community leaders to disseminate their messages and it was a forum for important discussions and debates. Its personal ads were a major means of connection before the Internet and social media, and these gave readers access to communities in different cities and countries.
Drummer became the most widely available mass-circulation publication to print material centered around leather and gay masculinity, providing gay men across the world with reflections of themselves: edgy, explicit, unapologetic, and kinky. While Drummer was a gay magazine, its contents extended beyond the strict gay male world, as did the readership. In 2019, 20 years after issue #214 was the last to hit the stands, another leatherman bought it and relaunched the magazine with issue #215. This rebirth is a potent demonstration of the enduring importance of Drummer and its place within leather culture.
CHARLES GUYETTE (1902-1976) was an American entrepreneur and erotica producer whose influence was as massive as it has been unacknowledged. Based in his New York City store from the early 1930s, where he sold burlesque and theatrical costumes, Guyette created and sold kink materials to an international audience of aficionados. His work included original and stylistically unique American-made photography addressing themes such as female domination, pony girls, and fetish clothing such as extremely high-heeled shoes.
He helped to foster an international network of producers of early kink materials, including John Coutts (John Willie). Guyette established a business model for the production and marketing of kinky materials adapted later by American producers such as Irving Klaw. Highlighting his centrality in the development of the American Kink Community, Guyette is the earliest known American producer of kink materials whose influence and personal connections across generations link to today's kink communities.
Despite some recent scholarly work addressing Charles Guyette and references in film and other popular culture products, Guyette remains largely unknown. The Leather Hall of Fame is glad to bring longoverdue recognition to this key innovator who helped to found today's Kink/Leather community.
GEOFF MAINS (1947-1989) was a Canadian activist, scientist, writer, ethnographer, and novelist. He first encountered leather around 1974 through motorcycle clubs in Vancouver and the Northwest. But it was the leather and kinky scenes of the San Fransico Bay Area that would change the course of his life, and Mains relocated there in 1983.
With the publication of Urban Aboriginals in 1984, Mains gained recognition as one of the most creative and brilliant minds in the community. In its ethnographic chapters, the book offered a cartography of this new age of leather - less formal, more spiritual, and with new sexual practices. The book described leathermen's behaviors, sexual and otherwise, in their terms, particularly as forms of lovemaking and community building. In the scientific chapters, Mains drew on his background in biochemistry to suggest that the sexual pleasures of SM, rather than manifestations of a psychiatric disorder, might be the natural result of brain chemistry: specifically the production of hormones (the then recently discovered endorphins) in response to extreme physical conditions.
Tragically, the decimation of the community he loved so passionately was underway by the time he arrived in the Bay Area, and its demise would only become more inexorable. Mains spent his last years mourning the loss of his world, while also celebrating its beauty in a few articles and the novel Gentle Warriors. Gentle Warriors is both an action epic and an elegiac swan song for the world Mains loved so fiercely.
He died at the age of 42 in 1989.