My leather world [is] being overrun by non-kinky people manipulating the powerful energy of the leather tribe into a vehicle for their own self-promotion. This has got to stop. If for no other reason, it is driving the kinky men I want to hook up with out of the few spaces we have left. This is cock-blocking on an enormous scale.... We congregate to meet and associate with people who play like we do. It’s pure and simple. That’s the point. Punkt aus! Unfortunately, this basic reason for gathering has been lost on a great many people—especially in the titleholder community.

You, with the microphone, please shut up so that I can do the dance Leathermen once did in these spaces. It can only happen when the environment is right, and your screeching is making it impossible. If you’ve forgotten, the dance is usually done very quietly while the music penetrates everything around us. It resonates in the gear two Leathermen wear. It starts when the gaze from under his Muir Cap catches your eyes from across the room, and that bolt of sexual energy blasts into you, through your chest, into your gut and down into your nuts. That’s the dance we’re here for, right? Your vision of children without toys has just obliterated the chance of that happening. Thank you, so much.

How did you end up here, anyway? And how can we get you to put down the microphone or at least sex it up and start doing the dance actual kinky guys do? Or how can we get you to leave?

My two cents: the combination of the Internet and the demise of the anti-leather/fetish bigotry that used to be so prevalent in the gay community—yes, in the gay community—have probably done more harm to the gay leather scene than all the Toys for Tots drives hosted in all the leather bars over the last 20 years. (Once upon a time, kids, gay guys who weren't into leather (or drag) didn't consort with, much less date, gay guys who were.) Today young and kinky guys don't have to sneak into leather bars and pray that their friends don't see them; they can post personal ads at sites like Recon and Gearfetish. (And they do, in droves.) And thanks to the general de-stigmatization of kinks generally, and thanks to concepts like, ahem, GGG, kinky gay guys don't have to date other kinky gay guys exclusively anymore. They're just as likely to seek out vanilla guys they find attractive and attempt to corrupt 'em.

Still, Toys for Tots drives and platitude-spouting leather-title-contest contestants are contributing to the general lameness of the gay leather scene across the country. In the best of all possible kinky worlds, gay BDSMers would be able to "hunt," as Mike puts it, in happening leather bars and online. But today most gay bars are so lame and/or snoozy that a kinky gay guy—whatever his age—doesn't have much incentive to make a second visit. Mike has thrown down the gauntlet and is probably catching hell for it. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, one kinky gay kid disappointed in the leather scene is doing something about it.