BLUF—Breeches and Leather Uniform Fanclub—is an international fraternal organization of gay men and other men who have sex with men who share a fetishistic interest in leather breeches and uniforms. The breeches are worn inside tall leather boots, the kind known as jackboots. BLUF sits inside the larger leather subculture. The sexual aesthetic is close to the exaggerated masculinity in Tom of Finland’s drawings. Members share leather fetishism, boot fetishism, and uniform fetishism. Some wear leather uniforms that recall German World War II-era kit, but without Nazi regalia and without embracing NSDAP politics. The other common uniforms are American-style police motorcycle patrol dress and German police dress. For fetish-clothing readers this is a dress-code club, not a vague leather social: breeches into jackboots, or you do not get in.
Dress code, age rule, and member numbers
Membership is open to men of all races and nationalities above the age of consent in their home countries. Applicants have to respect a strict dress code and a set of guidelines posted on the club’s official site as BLUF Dresscode. Any breach of those requirements means the photo is rejected and the application with it. Once accepted, a member is assigned a random number that identifies him among the others. The code is the point of the club. Leather Navigator, the earlier internet platform the founder tried first, had no real dress standard; BLUF exists because that absence was not enough for men who wanted full leather uniforms, breeches, and boots as a filter, not as an optional costume.
Montreal 1997 to Folsom, London, and Amsterdam
BLUF began as an internet site in 1997 from Montreal, Canada, and grew into a run of in-person meets and events regularly scheduled in European and North American cities. Members often plan vacation time around international meetings and travel to them. A majority live in northern Europe—primarily Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden—but members also turn up in North America, Asia, Central America, South America, and Africa. The site started in October 1997 as simple HTML for men into full leather uniforms. The founder has described the origin in straightforward terms. He was living in Montreal, had just found the internet, and joined Leather Navigator, then the only online platform for leather men. Disappointed that it had no dress code, he started BLUF. He emailed a few friends, sent postcards to others—not everyone had a computer—and told them about the new club. Some joined. At the beginning almost all new members were American; he had already met quite a few at parties in Canada and the United States. Not many Europeans were online yet. The early site had a picture gallery, a member list, an admirers list for men who could not meet the dress code, an online magazine, and a little later a forum. Access was free. He paid the server himself and worked as webmaster.
In September 1998 the first BLUF party was held during Folsom Weekend at the Loading Dock in San Francisco. The club had only about 150 members then, but the party was a huge success and is still remembered as one of the best in BLUF history. Around November 1998 the first of a series of BLUF parties was held in London, and many men from the UK joined as a result. In 1999 the founder moved back to Amsterdam and, that autumn, shut the site because of money problems. Some members got together, talked him into reopening, and arranged for members to donate so the site could stay up. Around the same time he restricted the public picture galleries behind an age-verification system—AdultCheck, now ManCheck. That brought in enough money to pay the bills and, for a while, even some pocket money. More Europeans joined. The center of gravity slowly shifted from North America to Europe.
Awards, BLUF 3, three thousand members
In 2008 BLUF received the Large Club of the Year award as part of the Pantheon of Leather Awards. BLUF 3 went online in December 2009, adding the ability to send messages between members and to upload photos directly. In 2012, its fifteenth anniversary year, the organization reached 3,000 members. On Sunday, 20 January 2013, during Belgium’s Leather Pride, BLUF won the X Award for Fetish Organisation 2013. Useful background on the look the club fetishizes includes F. Valentine Hooven’s Tom of Finland, His Life and Times (St. Martin’s Griffin, Stonewall Inn Editions, 1994, ISBN 978-0-312-11365-0) and Micha Ramakers’s Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure (Taschen, 2002, ISBN 978-3-8228-8598-7). The club’s own site remains the dress-code and membership door. For leather and uniform fetishists, BLUF is the international gay/MSM club that made breeches-in-jackboots a membership test, threw its first legendary party at the Loading Dock on Folsom Weekend with only about 150 men on the books, and then shifted from a Montreal hobby site to a several-thousand-member European-centered scene without dropping the uniform rule that started it.
