The Cuff: Seattle Capitol Hill’s Leather Bar

On Capitol Hill in Seattle, Washington, Cuff Complex is a landmark of Pacific Northwest leather and BDSM nightlife, not a side room. Two men opened it because they wanted a decent social outlet for people into leather, Levi’s, and uniforms. Cuff, Ltd. was created in December 1992. Construction started in January 1993. The leather culture was in the building from the start.

Inside there are four bars and a large outdoor deck. Randy Fields bought Cuff in 2004. In March 2013 the bar marked its twentieth anniversary. Those twenty years are leather-and-jeans nightlife putting down roots on the hill, and Capitol Hill staying a main point on Seattle’s queer map. The customers are adults. It is a bar, and it is also a long-running meeting place for leather, bears, HIV-positive people, and queer groups.

The calendar is heavier than a regular nightclub. Northwest Bears, POZ Seattle (a grassroots group of HIV-positive gay men), and Seattle Men in Leather use it as a home base. So do the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who do religious parody in nun drag, and the Rainbow Alliance of the Deaf. An annual Sunday Pride street party shifts the place from an after-midnight cruise bar into something closer to a neighborhood living room.

Cuff Complex won Business of the Year at the Pantheon of Leather Awards in 1995 and again in 2001, national leather-community recognition. In 2009 Seattle Weekly joked that other gay clubs, Neighbours and R-Place among them, had been filling up with straight customers, while the Cuff was still mostly gay men. The paper guessed at why: a sex shop full of cock rings and flogs, a wall portrait of a lion having sex with a man, or the fact that women had a single unisex bathroom. The line about vaginas being few and far between is dated and crude. It still records how the city read the room. Other clubs were thinning out. The Cuff was still coded gay male and leather.