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LEATHER. It's hot, it's taut, it's everything everybody else is not.

But when did it become so big in the gay community?

My guest today, Race Bannon, leather community activist and co-host of the On Guard podcast, taught me a few things I never knew about leather that I bet you don't either:

1) Leather is all about play: it seems hyper-masc and dark. But really it's a bunch of beautiful horny people expressing themselves erotically and inventively. In a world where adults are never allowed to play, leather allows all people, queer or not, to explore their true selves.

2) Leather literally saved lives. The leather community was at the vanguard of the AIDS epidemic, providing sex education and support to show gay men in particular how to express desire and intimacy without penetrative/fluid-exchanging sex.

3) Leather is a protest! Leather began because queer men wanted to be seen as masculine - in the 1950s, that was radical. And in the 1980s, The Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, which is now one of the biggest leather festivals in America, launched as an anti-gentrification demonstration uniting queer communities in the SoMa neighbourhood in San Francisco.

Leathermen have much to teach us, in and out of the sack, and you can start by diving into this episode where the water is a deliciously...human temperature.

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Episode Credits

Written and hosted by Bash

Edited by Alex Toskas

Produced by Dani Henion

Guest: Race Bannon