BLUF Fetish Club: Leather Breeches, Jackboots, and Uniform Dress Code

BLUF—Breeches and Leather Uniform Fanclub—is an international fraternal organization whose core members are gay men and other men who have sex with men. It sits inside the larger leather subculture. The sexual aesthetic leans on the exaggerated masculinity in Tom of Finland’s drawings. For fetish-clothing readers, BLUF is not a vague leather social. It is a dress-code club. The rule is blunt: leather breeches worn inside tall jackboots, or you do not get in.

Members share leather fetishism, boot fetishism, and uniform fetishism. Uniform styles include leather kit that recalls German World War II-era dress without Nazi regalia and without NSDAP politics, plus American-style police motorcycle patrol dress and German police dress. That strict code is why the club exists. The founder first tried Leather Navigator, then the main online platform for leather men, and found no real dress standard. BLUF was built to filter for men who treat full leather uniforms, breeches, and boots as the entry requirement, not an optional costume. Photos and applications that break the posted BLUF Dresscode are rejected together. Once accepted, a member gets a random number as his identity among the others.

Montreal 1997 to Folsom, London, and Amsterdam

The story starts in October 1997 in Montreal. The founder had just found the internet, was disappointed that Leather Navigator had no dress code, and put up a simple HTML site for men into full leather uniforms. He emailed friends and mailed postcards to men without computers. Few Europeans were online yet, so almost all early members were American—people he had already met at parties in Canada and the United States. Access was free; he paid the server and worked as webmaster. Besides a member list, the early site had a picture gallery, an admirers list for men who could not meet the dress code, an online magazine, and later a forum.

From that start BLUF grew into regularly scheduled meets in European and North American cities. Members often plan vacation time around international meetings and travel to them. In September 1998 the first BLUF party ran during Folsom Weekend at the Loading Dock in San Francisco. The club had only about 150 members then; the party is still remembered as one of the best in BLUF history. Around November 1998 a series of London parties began, and many UK men joined. In autumn 1999 money problems shut the site; members talked him into reopening and arranged donations. He put the public galleries behind age verification—AdultCheck, later ManCheck—which covered the bills and for a while left pocket money. More Europeans joined. The center of gravity shifted from North America toward Europe. Most members live in northern Europe—Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden—with others in North America, Asia, Central America, South America, and Africa.

Awards and three thousand members

In 2008 BLUF received the Large Club of the Year award from the Pantheon of Leather Awards. BLUF 3 went online in December 2009 with messaging between members and direct photo uploads. In 2012, its fifteenth anniversary year, membership hit 3,000. On January 20, 2013, during Belgium’s Leather Pride, BLUF won the X Award for Fetish Organisation 2013.

Membership is open to men of all races and nationalities above the age of consent in their home countries. Useful background on the look the club fetishizes includes F. Valentine Hooven’s Tom of Finland, His Life and Times (1994) and Micha Ramakers’s Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure (2002). The club’s own site remains the dress-code and membership door, still guarding the breeches-into-jackboots rule that started it.