Hardy Haberman was in his local dungeon a couple years ago, beating a friend at a "play party," when things suddenly got weird. Wielding a soft leather flogger — a thick-handled instrument that resembles a whip, but with a dozen slender tails — he was lashing the slightly younger man's back. Haberman and his friend barely noticed the crowd formed around them; they were focused totally on each other. But Haberman did notice that his friend was enjoying the flogging. He knew it from the way the man moaned, writhed, screamed and cursed under his touch. True to leather-scene etiquette, though, Haberman's plaything remained unfailingly polite. "Motherfucker! Sir!" he yelled, as leather met skin.
Brandon Thibodeaux
Eagle co-owner Jeffrey Payne (left) at home with his husband, David Roy. The Dallas leather community, Payne says, "is my family."
Brandon Thibodeaux
Ms. Boots at her suburban home. She stresses the need for in-person mentorship for leather newbies, not just the online kind. "These new young people coming off the Internet, they think everything they read there is true."
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As Haberman flogged away, a straight couple kept edging in close — way too close, stepping right into the backswing of Haberman's flogger. When he finally could sense their presence, he stopped to avoid hitting them. He gave them a look that, for most people in the crowd, would have been enough to get them to back off. But they didn't budge.
Now they were messing with Haberman's rhythm. He ignored their presence as long as he could, but then the man — wearing a billowy white Renaissance Faire-style blouse, for reasons Haberman couldn't quite make out — stepped even closer and started barraging Haberman with questions. "How do you do that?" he asked, staring in fascination as the flogger landed another blow.
Haberman was starting to understand: The couple was clueless, just the latest in a parade of curious amateurs who leather-scene vets swear are destroying Dallas' once happily insular leather community.
"Look," Haberman finally told the guy. "I'm not trying to teach a class here. I'm just trying to have a good time with my friend." He sarcastically offered to flog Ren Faire next, if he really wanted a demonstration of Haberman's "technique."
The guy and his girlfriend stormed off in a huff. Later, they complained to the party's organizer about Haberman's mid-flog display.
Haberman's a big man in his early 60s; he'd be a lot more imposing if not for the long, drooping mustache that makes him look like a friendly walrus. He's been around long enough to remember, wistfully, the way Dallas' leather scene used to be back in the 1970s. To hear him and his friends tell it, a contemporary leatherman can't swing a flogger or clamp a nipple around here without running into some "sexual tourist" poking around the city's dungeon and play-party scene — "looking," Haberman says, "to spice up their love lives."
"For years, we flew under the radar, and we had some fabulous times," he says, reveling in the memory of the scene's powerful "sex magic." "There was an erotic energy that happened that was palpable. Now you just don't see it as much."
For a dom's eye-view of this city's leather community, especially the gay part, there's no better place to start than the Dallas Eagle.
On a recent Saturday night, techno thuds from the speakers of the Maple Avenue bar, while green and purple lights swirl over the dance floor. Bartenders, in leather harnesses and metal-studded jock straps, serve drinks to a clientele that is overwhelmingly male: shirtless in jeans and boots, wearing leather harnesses of their own, or clad, despite the heat, in leather vests, chaps and motorcycle boots. These days, a few women sometimes dot the crowd, some wearing sundresses and flip-flops and looking like they've wandered in from a different movie altogether.
Out on the crowded patio, there's a bootblack chair in a corner, elevated to the height of a throne. Leaning against the fence are a few large wooden X-shaped structures called St. Andrew's crosses, used for whipping or flogging. In the corner, a guy in a harness with ornate sun and moon tattoos on his shoulders sits beneath a tree strung with Christmas lights.
Leather fetishism is a sub-category that falls under the big, spiky umbrella of BDSM — itself a combination of the terms bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. BDSM activities are as varied as the people who perform them, but they're all about the transgressive, sexy fun that can be had with toying with power and control, pleasure and pain. Some of BDSM is physical: flogging, tying up, clamping sensitive body parts. Some of it is mental: giving over trust and control to another person, dominating someone else completely.
Most leather fetishists have a fondness for leather itself — the way it looks, smells, feels. Others love it for its outlaw associations. The first prototype for the leather look, according to Haberman, was Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. "That was an image of power and hyper-masculinity," says Haberman, who's written two books on leather history (as well as a memoir about life as a gay Christian leatherman). "And people don't fuck with you when you wear leather. A lot of the early leathermen did it a little bit out of self-defense. People still think of it as scary."
What's often called "Old Guard" leather was born in the 1950s. They were World War II veterans who realized they still longed for the structure and hierarchy of the military — and the company of other men. "Imagine this," Haberman says. "You're a gay guy, but you don't know it. You're fighting in Europe, surrounded by men. You get back home and realize that something's just missing." So they started motorcycle clubs. "You could hang out with all guys and it didn't look weird."
