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Selection Committee
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Robert Miller
Desert Hot Springs, CA, USA
Founder and Executive Director
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Bob is founder of the Leather Hall of Fame, and is the President, Executive Director and co-founder of CLAW Corp, a national leather charity. He serves on the Boards of Leather Archives & Museum, Int’l Mr. Leather and CARAS, and is the General Manager of Alphatribe USA. In 2016, Bob was awarded a life-time achievement award by the National LGBTQ Task Force’s for his years of service to the leather community. He is a lawyer, a grass-roots progressive political organizer. He lives in Desert Hot Springs, California. |
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Gayle Rubin
San Francisco, CA, USA
Lead Academic Advisor
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Gayle is a noted scholar of San Francisco leather history and social life, and of the politics and economics of South of Market. She was a founding member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society, and was involved in the establishment of the Leather Archives & Museum, on whose Board of Directors she currently serves. She is also a member of the Board of the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District in San Francisco. Rubin has been active in many leather organizations and events, including Samois, Janus, the Outcasts, LDG, CLAW, and the Leather Hall of Fame. She has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of California Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Harvard University, where she was the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan.
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Vince Andrews
Glen Burnie, MD, USA
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Vince is dedicated to providing education and support to the community as well as continuously volunteering his services and his time to a broad range of projects. His success in art and activism compliments his talents as an author. His activism previously allowed him to lead NLA International, allowing him to help various leather clubs throughout North America over the years with their diverse formation and structuring needs in creating or revising by-laws. As an artist, Vince has helped with tasks like designing club logos, websites, and auction works, along with creating and distributing published media to publicize organizations and their events. As an author, Vince is most known for his successful work, The leatherboy Handbook, now in its third edition, along with other works. He is an author, artist, activist, and educator.
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Guy Baldwin
Los Angeles, CA
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Guy has been an active participant, commentator on, and observer of the American Leather scene since the late 1960s. He is a California licensed psychotherapist and in his 4 decades of practice has helped countless clients and taught audiences of erotic adventurers across the continent how to have less trouble and more fun being kinky. He has authored three books and countless essays in a wide array of lifestyle publications. His monthly columns in Drummer Magazine were published with a few more articles of his in Ties that Bind. Now in it's fourth printing, and recently made available as an ebook, SlaveCraft has long been required reading for those who feel turbocharged by the voluntary inclusion of Authority in their erotic and romantic relationships.
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Race Bannon
San Francisco, CA, USA
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Race has been an organizer, writer, educator, speaker, and activist in the LGBTQ, leather/kink, polyamory, and HIV/STI prevention realms since 1973. He is an author, widely published writer, active speaker, community organizer and project leader, and has received numerous national and local awards, the latest of which was the Palm Springs Pride 2021 Spirit of Stonewall Lifetime Achievement Award. You can find links to Race’s writings and social media here: https://linktr.ee/bannonrace
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Robert Bienvenu
Olney, MD, USA
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Derek Cohen
London, UK
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Derek has spent over 40 years as an SM practitioner, educator and activist. He founded SM Gays in 1981. Through that and as a trustee of The Spanner Trust he has been involved in campaigns to change the UK law on consensual BDSM and extreme pornography. Currently he manages a large online chastity community and, under the pseudonym Jacob Morrison, authored a BDSM erotic novel. Now retired, he has returned to university and is planning to research the motivations and fallacies behind the search for the “gay gene”.
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Nancy Irwin
Toronto, ON, Canada
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Nancy (she/her) is a rebel femme who occasionally fights for justice. A biker, SM activist, world traveller, handy-dyke… play party organizer WHO SPENT 13 years custom making latex clothing for all genders. Over the last few decades, Naughty Nancy has presented numerous workshops and published incriminating articles in the queer, kinky and straight biker press. She is a switch who plays well with all genders - still taboo! An adventurous street biker who loves the dirt, she makes a living in Toronto driving diesel dump trucks. And she’s hunting…..fun playmates!
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Viola Johnson
Evansville, IN, USA
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Viola is a leatherwoman, activist, motivational speaker and author who has been active in the leather BDSM scene for well over four decades. She has served as a mentor to countless individuals, and was dubbed "Mom" by several generations of Leathermen and women, and is delighted to now be “Grandmom” and Great Grandmom to a whole new generation of “kinklings”. Mama Vi is a firm believer in preserving leather history, and is the Director and Senior Griot of the Carter/Johnson Library and Collection, a compilation of over 15,000 books (both fiction and non-fiction), periodicals, posters and other art, newsletters, and ephemera documenting the history of SM/Leather/Kink from early drawings documenting human sexuality to the present day. One of the original Pearls of Onyx and a proud member of the ONYX Pearls Mid-Atlantic chapter, she is also the wife of the first Black IMsL, Jill Carter, International Ms. Leather 1996. They have been together 48 years.
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Daniel Rüster
Aschau, Germany
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Daniel was born in Berlin (Germany) in 1970. He was a founder of FOLSOM EUROPE, is a member of MLC Munich; he received the International Pantheon of Leather Award in 2006 and he served as an IML judge for the class of 2010. He is also Mama's GERMAN DADDY (Mama's Family, San Francisco) and can be found at BLUF dinners (member #324) or on Recon as GERMANBOOTMASTER.
He now resides in Bavaria and is the proud owner and partner of his Belgian slave. A huge sports fan, he has served as a board member and delegate for various German and European LGBTIQ+ sports organizations and is a member of UNION BERLIN (1st league soccer team in Germany). He also loves to ski, ride a motorcycle and travel around the world (conveniently, he works for an international airline!)
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Leonora Anne Weston
Melbourne, Australia
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Leonora is an International teacher in Dominance studies, history and arts, and Ki theory hyperarousal responses to force power. She authored 'The History & Arts of the Dominatrix' under pseudonym of Anne O Nomis, undertaking original research in museums, libraries and underground sources. She holds a Master's degree in Comparative Art & Archaeology from UCL (University College London), won the Legal History Writing Prize for Auckland University, and has studied broadly across disciplines. Leonora is presently based in Melbourne, Australia, and travels as a keynote speaker and teacher on Dominance and Ki theory in London, Europe and USA. |
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Jeff Willoughby
Atlanta, GA, USA
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