Chuck Renslow: Chicago Leather, IML, and the Leather Archives

Charles “Chuck” Renslow (August 26, 1929 – June 29, 2017) was an American businessman and a pioneer of homoerotic photography in mid-twentieth-century America. In Chicago he built landmarks of gay and leather culture: bars, contests, bathhouses, magazines, and a museum that kept the objects. For leather and BDSM history he is infrastructure. He kept the gear, the photographs, and the stories from being thrown out. His romantic partners included Dom Orejudos, Chuck Arnett, Samuel Steward, David Grooms, and Ron Ehemann. Renslow himself was the photographer.

Kris Studios and the first leather bar

Renslow started as a photographer. In 1952, on Chicago’s Oak Street Beach, he met the model Dom Orejudos. The personal and working partnership lasted the rest of their lives. In the 1970s they lived together in the Francis J. Dewes mansion. They founded Kris Studios, a physique-photography studio that shot for the gay magazines they published themselves. Part of the studio name honors transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen. In 1958 they bought a gym and renamed it Triumph Gymnasium and Health Studio. The same year they bought the Gold Coast Show Lounge and turned it into the Gold Coast, the country’s first gay leather bar. The dress code was uniform, western, and leather. There was a backroom. Orejudos’s homoerotic art hung on the walls. In 1965 Renslow helped found the Second City Motorcycle Club. Beach model to life partner, physique studio to a leather bar with a backroom: that is Chicago leather starting as a public business, no longer limited to private parties.

Bathhouses, the White Party, and the contest

Renslow was central to Chicago’s gay bathhouse business. He and Orejudos founded Man’s Country/Chicago, which opened on September 19, 1973, at 5015–5017 North Clark Street. It was the third bathhouse he co-founded. The first two were forced shut under homophobic police pressure. When Man’s Country closed in 2017 it was the longest-running gay bathhouse in Chicago. Before that he and Chuck Fleck owned Club Baths locations in Chicago, Kansas City, and Phoenix.

On August 8, 1974, he founded Chicago’s August White Party. It began as a birthday party that also thanked patrons, then ran for thirty-six years, through 2010. The largest edition was 1979 at Navy Pier, about 5,000 people. He also shaped the leather title system. International Mr. Leather grew out of the Mr. Gold Coast contest held at the Gold Coast bar in the 1970s. The crowd outgrew the bar. In 1979 the contest moved to a larger venue and the title became International Mr. Leather. That contest system still defines a large part of international leather title culture.

Leather Archives & Museum

In 1991 Renslow and Tony DeBlase founded the Leather Archives & Museum as a community archive, library, and museum of leather, kink, fetish, and BDSM history and culture. The direct reason was the AIDS crisis. Belongings and history from leather and fetish communities were being lost or deliberately thrown away. The mission is research, preservation, education, and community engagement, so that material can still be reached. Renslow is listed as Chairman In Memoriam of LA&M. Cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin counts him among the most consequential leathermen of the long twentieth century. She treats the museum as his most important work: he gave it a legal corporate structure, quietly kept operating money in it for years, and made it an ongoing beneficiary of International Mr. Leather. DeBlase and others made key contributions. Rubin’s view is that no single person did more than Renslow to grow the museum, hold its future, and with that hold a future for the leather past.

Honors

The awards stack up. In 1990 the National Leather Association International gave him the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work. In 1991 he entered the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Pantheon of Leather Awards include the President’s Award (1992), Lifetime Achievement (1993), a 1996 Lifetime Achievement shared with Jim McGlade, Lifetime Achievement on his own (2007), and the Forebear Award (1998). In 1995 he was among the recipients of the International Deaf Leather Recognition Award. In 2009 he entered the Leather Hall of Fame. On May 25, 2018, the Chicago City Council voted to name the eastern stretch of Clark Street between Winnemac and Ainslie Chuck Renslow Way. That corridor once held many of his businesses, including the Gold Coast and Man’s Country. The sign went up on an IML anniversary. In June 2019 he was one of the first fifty American pioneers inducted onto the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor inside New York’s Stonewall Inn, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. In 2021 LA&M issued the Chuck Renslow & Tony DeBlase Founders’ Award. Further reading includes Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow by Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen, published in 2011, and the Chuck Renslow Dance Photographs at the Newberry Library.