This will be multiple posts, this is Part 1: Question: What are we, the titleholders, the presenters, the authors, the teachers, all of us who have somehow made out way into the Leather limelight supposed to do? What are any of us supposed to do? It seems that no matter what we do or say, we are in the wrong. I try to be, and want to be a valuable contributor to the Leather world. I want to leave things somehow better than I found them. So how do I do that? I warned you all, this is a rant, and a long one. While I am going to speak from my personal experience, I know I am far from alone. This is emotional, and a lot of it isn’t nice. Here we go. It often feels like there is nothing I can do right in the public sphere. If I speak up when I see something that is wrong I’m creating drama and part of a lynch mob. If I think a situation is going to resolve on its own and remain quiet, I’m a fake and a fence-sitter without the conviction I claim. If I don’t make a statement on something because I am too close to the situation or obligated by agreement to not speak, I am hiding behind rules. If I feel compelled to speak up in spite of that, I am breaking my word. There’s really no way to get anything right, is there? I said this has been building since February, and it has, and here it goes. The first really ugly “What the Hell am I supposed to do?” issue I faced during my title year was when an individual who was known to be racist and anti-Semitic announced his intention to run for Colorado Bootblack 2013. I knew this was a problem, I personally had a huge problem with it, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could say. I was the current titleholder and a contest judge, and it was the job of my producer, not me, to make a public statement. While my producer investigated the situation, I was under heavy fire from all sides. There was exactly one person who talked to me directly and treated me like a person. Excepting that one person, I got nothing but angry rants, accusations, and was dragged through the mud on social media. I think what bothered me the most was the number of people whom I did not know, whom I had never seen at any Leather event, anywhere, ever, who were shouting about how they refused to let this person represent them and their community; that they “always supported titleholders” but were withdrawing their support. Seriously? I’ve never seen you in my bar, at my events, or anywhere in the Leather community before, I never even hear of you until you started sending me hate mail. What support are you withdrawing? My producer, myself, and my sash brothers all got dragged over the coals, accused of not holding to our core values, and generally treated like shit. The end result was that the neo-Nazi decided not to run. Which is what I expected to happen. Furthermore, I knew without a doubt that if he had run, he would not win. He would have been grilled by the judges in seriously uncomfortable ways, and I would have been the first judge going for the hard questions. So, I knew what the outcome would be, I knew it was not appropriate for me to start making statements before my producer did, and I got hammered for it. I also know that if I had done it any other way, I would have gotten hammered for it. This horrible person that I had no association with at all suddenly decided they wanted to run for my title, and as far as the treatment I received indicated, it was all my fault. So, how could I have handled that better?
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 03:29:27 +0000
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