The Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M) is a community archives, library, and museum in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood dedicated to leather, kink, BDSM, and fetish history. Founded in 1991 by Chuck Renslow and Tony DeBlase, its mission is to make that culture “accessible through research, preservation, education and community engagement.” It is a leading conservator of queer erotic art, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a member of the Reciprocal Organization of Associated Museums (ROAM), and open to patrons 18 and over. Research help is available by request. Only about one percent of the collection is on display at any time—the rest is the deep reserve that makes serious history possible rather than a single novelty gallery of jackets and drawings.
For BDSM and leather readers, LA&M is not a curiosity cabinet. It is the place that caught jackets, drawings, oral histories, and club papers when families and landlords would have destroyed them—and that still teaches new generations why Folsom, International Mr. Leather, Drummer, bootblack stands, and a red heart on black-and-blue cloth matter as culture, not only as costume.
Born from AIDS and a Refusal to Let Art Be Cherry-Picked
In 1991 Dom Orejudos—Renslow’s partner of forty years, better known as the artist Etienne—died of AIDS. While Orejudos was ill, Renslow had sold some work to fund care; after the death he insisted on preserving the full artistic legacy. Mainstream museums wanted selected pieces, not the whole body. After consulting friend Tony DeBlase—already a major leather publisher and, later, designer of the leather pride flag—Renslow set out to build a museum that would hold Orejudos intact and open space for other leather artists and trailblazers.
“We were in the thick of the AIDS epidemic,” Renslow later said, “and with each death, families and friends were unknowingly tossing our history into dumpsters.” Former LA&M president Jon Krongaard has been blunter: some families erased leather and fetish legacies because they found them “sick or perverse.” That double violence—virus plus shame—is the founding trauma of the institution. The museum was incorporated in Illinois in 1991 and held a ribbon-cutting and first public gallery show on 4 November 1995.
From Clark Street Storefront to Greenview Synagogue
The first storefront sat at 5013 N Clark Street beside Man’s Country bathhouse, itself part of Renslow’s Chicago leather geography. Donations of art and artifacts flooded in faster than the space could hold. Renslow and DeBlase identified a former synagogue on Greenview Avenue as a permanent home but could put only $3,000 toward a $60,000 down payment. They appealed to International Mr. Leather attendees, who raised $58,000 in a single night—an origin story that still defines LA&M’s relationship to title contests and leather weekends as fundraising engines, not only party circuits.
LA&M moved into the Greenview building in 1999 and remains there; the community paid off the mortgage over the next five years. DeBlase served as vice president of the board from 1992 to 2000. In May 2006 executive director Rick Storer joined a panel on “Censorship & Sexually Explicit Materials” at the LGBTQ Archives, Libraries, Museums and Special Collections (ALMS) Conference—signaling that LA&M sits in professional archival debates, not only in scene gossip. From 2009, IML proceeds were placed in a trust to benefit the museum. Cleveland Annual Leather Weekend (CLAW), Mid-Atlantic Leather in D.C., and other gatherings also feed the budget. The 25th anniversary weekend in 2016 featured Gayle Rubin and Guy Baldwin—scholarship and leather psychology under one roof. In 2024 the museum announced a capital campaign for renovation: dedicated research space, flexible events, and ADA accessibility, the next chapter of turning a rescued synagogue into a long-term research campus.
Art: Etienne, the Hun, Tom of Finland, and Beyond
LA&M holds the world’s largest collection of original Dom Orejudos (Etienne) work—murals, drawings, and commercial art that once defined bars such as the Gold Coast. In 2019 Bill Schmeling (the Hun) donated his entire personal collection of artwork and notes, a once-in-a-generation transfer of hypermasculine kink illustration into public trust. The museum also holds pieces by Chuck Arnett, Giacomo “Jack” Bozzi (Adam), David Grieger, Beau Lee James, Charles Kerbs (MATT), Michael Kirwan, John Klamik (Sean), Touko Valio Laaksonen (Tom of Finland), Donald Merrick (Domino), Mike Miksche (Steve Masters), Olaf Odegaard, Jacki Randall, Rex, Al Shapiro (A. Jay), Joe T, Dennis Walsh, Bill Ward, and others.
One of the largest paintings is Steven Brown’s The Last Supper In a Gay Leather Bar With Judas Giving Christ the Finger, born from the artist’s struggle to reconcile faith and sexuality—an altarpiece for people who found god and leather in the same decade of their lives. Among the most sacred textiles: one of the three original 1989 leather pride flags assembled by Tony DeBlase, on public display, alongside DeBlase’s papers. Visitors who know the flag only from stickers can stand in front of the real cloth and feel the scale of the invention.
Photography, Video, and Oral History
Photographic holdings include Kris Studios—the male physique studio founded by Renslow and Orejudos, named partly in honor of transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen—plus work by Kenneth Anger, George Dureau, Efrain J. Gonzalez, Adam Kozik, Lochai, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Holdings run from mid-century physique marketing to art-world leather portraits.
Photos, videos, and oral histories of International Mr. Leather and International Ms. Leather fed Christina Court’s 2015 documentary High Shine: 15 Years of International Ms Bootblack. Hundreds of oral-history recordings and transcripts preserve voices such as Joe Laiacona (Jack Rinella) and Larry Townsend for researchers who never met the golden-age bars.
Literature and Organizational Records
Complete runs of original Drummer and Bound & Gagged anchor the periodicals—primary sources for fiction, classifieds, club ads, and the visual language of 1970s–90s leather porn and community news. In 2009 LA&M acquired the 25-box papers of Robert Davolt—author, San Francisco Pride leather contingent organizer, and former Bound & Gagged editor. Organizational records cover Chicago Hellfire Club, Conversio Virium, International Mr. Leather, Mineshaft, MIR (formerly Mr. International Rubber), National Leather Association, Society of Janus, and more, plus DeBlase’s own files. For historians of kink media and club politics, this is not memorabilia; it is a research archive with finding-aid seriousness.
Artifacts: Clubs, Bars, Bootblacks, Body Mod
Vests, patches, and pins from motorcycle and leather clubs worldwide—Centurions of Columbus, Crucible MC, Empire City MC, Rochester Rams MC, Stallions MC, Wheels MC, and others—line the material culture of brotherhood and sisterhood by sew-on heraldry. Ephemera from legendary venues include a glory hole from Chicago’s Man’s Country and a dress-code sign from New York’s Mineshaft: objects that make abstract “bar history” physical.
Bootblack history is unusually deep for a museum subject often treated as side hustle. Holdings include kits and chairs from International Mr. Bootblack winners (William Shields, Jr., 1994; David Hawk, 2000) and a chair used by Harry Shattuck and “Daddy” William Shields, Jr. across Chicago, Boston, Providence, and New York bars in the 1990s–2000s. Body-modification holdings include Cliff Raven tattoo memorabilia; Samuel Steward stories, art, and stencils; Fakir Musafar publications; and Sailor Sid Diller photographs—linking leather to the broader modern primitives and tattoo revival that shared people, parties, and ethics with SM scenes.
Facilities: Etienne Auditorium, Library, Shop
The 164-seat Etienne Auditorium, named for Orejudos’s art alias, is lined with original Etienne work from the Gold Coast, Man’s Country, and elsewhere. It hosts lectures, community meetings, leather events, and the annual Fetish Film Forum. Small nonprofit community groups can use the space free; others rent it—policy that keeps the building a living clubhouse rather than a sealed shrine. The Teri Rose Memorial Library, opened 2005, is non-circulating and free on-site: more than 5,000 books, 11,000 magazines (including Honcho, Mandate, Mattachine Review), and about 100 journals. A gift shop—physical and online—sells vintage erotica, apparel, and merchandise often featuring Etienne and the Hun, recycling visual history into sustainable revenue.
Recognition and Leadership Honors
Chicago City Council named 18 September 2016 “LEATHER ARCHIVES & MUSEUM DAY” for the 25th anniversary (Resolution R2016-704)—municipal recognition that would have been unthinkable in the raid decades. LA&M entered the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2017 and the Leather Hall of Fame in 2019. Pantheon of Leather named it Large Nonprofit Organization of the Year in 1997, 2001, 2006, and 2011; International Deaf Leather gave a Recognition Award in 2011.
Chuck Renslow, who died in 2017, remains Chairman In Memoriam; the museum issues a Chuck Renslow President’s Award for major supporters. Executive director Joseph Bean received Pantheon Man of the Year (1998, 2000) and the NLA’s Steve Maidhof Award (1998). Rick Storer, while executive director, collected Pantheon President’s Award (2005), Man of the Year (2008), Mr. Marcus Hernandez Lifetime Achievement Award (2012), and NLA Lifetime Achievement (2015). Those résumés show how running a sex-positive museum became recognized leather leadership, not a back-office chore.
Exhibits That Widen the Frame
Past and present shows have included Fakir Musafar (2016); A Room of Her Own (2016), a women’s leather history installation whose title, curator Alex Warner explained, riffs on Virginia Woolf while literally and figuratively making room for leatherwomen; Excavating Experience: The Presence of LGBTQ People of Color in Cook County, IL (2019); Verboten: Works by Rex (2021); The Golden Era: Leather, Levi and Motorcycle Clubs (2021); and Gabriel Martinez’s Sparks in a Dark Room (2023–2024). The programming deliberately counters the myth that leather history is only white gay men in 1970s bars—even when that demographic still dominates older accession piles.
Related institutions often mentioned in the same research circuit include Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, and the Tom of Finland Foundation. LA&M’s special claim is leather-and-kink specificity: a mission statement that names BDSM and fetish as worthy of the same archival dignity as any culture that almost vanished under disease, law, and family shame.
