What do you get when a leather daddy and a librarian walk into a synagogue? Well, apparently, a museum. The now 30-years-old Leather Archives & Museum to be exact.
“Chicago is probably the only place that this could exist, because we’re right there on the street front in Andersonville like, ‘Hey, look at us,’” says Gary Wasdin, LA&M’s executive director and resident Daddy. “We’re not ashamed or shy.”
The museum’s auditorium is lined with enormous murals of men painted by Etienne. Its lobby boasts a display case of kink-themed parody tchotchkes like a “BOND-AID” box and a trio of S&M-themed Lego pieces, across from a standard display of museum T-shirts and mugs. Intricately adorned and well-worn leather vests hang in reverence in an adjoining room.
Other than its actual founding, few moments stand out among the museum’s history more than the 1999 move to its current home, the former synagogue. The only milestone that might upstage that is the capital fundraising effort to pay off the building’s mortgage, which Windy City Times reports raised more than $400,000 and allowed the museum to buy the space.
“You have to actively go out and seek people of color or women or trans leather and kink folks, reach out to them and put in the work and time to build that trust and relationship to get these kinds of collections,” Wasdin says.
Alexandra St. James, a Black transgender woman who won the Ms. Iowa Leather 2017 contest, recalls hearing transphobic comments from people at leather and kink events who didn’t know she was trans. And Choc Trei, at one time the only person of color on the board, says she received significant pushback and accusations of tokenism when another board member, Catherine Gross, brought her to the board for consideration four years ago.
