Alex Pilkington

Leather & Lavender: Guest at the Gate On Protocol, Property, and the Parallel World Leather Built

11/ New essay in the Leather & Lavender series.

“Guest at the Gate: How Gay Motorcycle Clubs Built a World the State Couldn’t Reach”

open.substack.com/pub/leatherl...

#LeatherAndLavender #QueerHistory #SpartansMC #DCEagle

10/ This essay is dedicated to Joseph “Gnome” Dress — a Spartan, gone one year this March — and to his husband Jim.

I met them during my pledging period. They made every room feel crossable.

Not by lowering the threshold. By standing at it like it was theirs.

9/ One of their early presidents later bought that building outright and opened the DC Eagle.

A leather bar. Privately financed. Owned. Standing across the street from Hoover’s building for decades.

The state couldn’t reach it without reaching everyone.

8/ They held their first meetings at a bar on 9th St NW.

Directly across the street from FBI headquarters.

Whether by accident or nerve — I find that geography almost unreasonably perfect.

7/ The Spartans MC organized in Washington DC in 1968.

Seven years before gay people had a single civil service protection. In a city where the entire economy ran on federal clearances gay men were legally barred from receiving.

6/ You call it a motorcycle club.

You make it cost something to join.

You encode your world in leather — signals legible to the people who need to find you, invisible to the people who want to destroy you.

5/ The Satyrs MC (LA, 1954) didn’t petition for rights. They wrote bylaws.

Every club that formed after them borrowed those bylaws — because the Satyrs had solved a problem no one else had: how do you constitute a community when your existence is criminalized?

4/ Early leather motorcycle clubs chose a third path.

They exited.

They used motorcycles, rented halls, and private property to build a parallel world the state couldn’t reach without overreaching everyone.

3/ Standard gay history gives you two strategies:

1. Voice: petition the state, ask for rights.
2. Confrontation: fight back when it won’t listen.

Both accept the state as the arena. Both treat recognition as the goal.

2/ The bar manager said: protocol isn’t cruelty. It’s preservation.

The rules don’t exist to exclude the sincere. They exist to protect a world that had to be built — specifically because the outside world would not have it.

1/ I got turned away from the back room at Touché because a jockstrap and tennis shoes, I was told with complete conviction, does not count as gear.

The conversation that followed changed how I understand the world I’ve been trying to belong to. 🧵

Keep reading. You can do it.

stoptheshuffle stoptheshuffle is a social impact campaign inspired by the film, Shuffle. It contains resources and information on addiction treatment and exposes the corrupt practices of an unregulated industry.

That’s the wrong way to frame it. It misses how our insurance policies incentivize fraudulent behavior.

www.stoptheshuffle.com

Now I see. Just terminally online brain rot. Carry on.

Hot Take from a Georgetown Scholar… who must be new to social media platforms or just very dense.

The Sovereign Sanctuary | AlxPilk Reclaiming the Libertarian History of the Leather Subculture from the Shadow of Randy Shilts

11/11
Leather isn't a flight from responsibility—it’s an embrace of it. We can honor the dead without surrendering the right of the living to be free. Men like Duke Armstrong weren't antagonists of a crisis; they were the guardians of the sovereign sanctuary. 🛡️⛓️

Link: alxpilk.me/the-sovereig...

10/11
Shilts couldn't grapple with this. He needed a villain. He couldn't see that in Miami or DC, the state was often the problem the bathhouses were built to solve. Armstrong didn't fight for the right to be reckless; he fought for the right of a community to govern its own risks.

9/11
In Miami, the shadow of Anita Bryant loomed. Any state agent arriving under the banner of "welfare" was rightly seen as a threat. For these men, keeping their spaces open was the only way to preserve communication networks they actually trusted.

8/11
In D.C., the ClubHouse on Upshur St. proved this. For Black gay men, the barrier to care was a rational distrust of the medical establishment. The ClubHouse offered "stealth health"—outreach that worked precisely because it was outside government surveillance.

7/11
He was right. The resulting 1984 injunction—prohibiting private rooms—remained for decades. As the LGBTQ Policy Journal noted, a "heterosexual judge with no gay advisory committee" determined what was acceptable. This is state coercion dressed as public health.

6/11
When Mayor Feinstein sent in undercover SFPD spies, she wasn't just checking health; she was violating the sanctity of a voluntary society. Armstrong fought this in court, recognizing a jurisdictional seizure that would outlast the emergency used to justify it.

5/11
Duke Armstrong knew the "Architecture of Resistance." A membership card was a juridical deadbolt, establishing a private jurisdiction governed by the contractual ethics of consent and self-ownership rather than by municipal code.

4/11
This was "Leather & Lavender" in action: the understanding that if you don’t own the land, you don’t own your liberation. By occupying industrial zones like SoMa, the leather community engaged in libertarian homesteading—building a state-within-a-state when the actual state failed.

3/11
We must distinguish between "gay" as a demographic and "leather" as a society of owners. While others sought acceptance, leathermen built infrastructure. From Renslow to Campbell, they bought the real estate and created the first concentrated centers of economic power.

2/11
Randy Shilts’s ‘And the Band Played On’ cast men like Armstrong as "merchants of death." But Shilts’s narrative rests on a flawed premise. What he dismissed as "deadly lobbying" was actually a principled defense of communal sovereignty with stakes far beyond the 1980s.

1/11
In Oct 1984, as SF debated closing its bathhouses, lawyer Duke Armstrong walked into the fight that would define his legacy. A libertine leatherman, he saw what the establishment wouldn't: the bathhouses weren’t the enemy. The state was. A thread on sovereignty & the "Convenient Villain." 🧵

Why? Because you can’t understand it and think that its only value is how much it’s worth in USD?

Too many people on Bluesky think that relentless expressions of despair are a sign of intellectual sophistication.

I’ll cede that we live in an intolerant time. I agree fully,

However, when we allowed the Frankfurt School’s scholars fleeing Nazi Germany to come in and start applying critical theory to all of our institutions it created the necessary conditions of the mess we’re in today.

Okay Herbert Marcuse.