Charles "Chuck" Renslow (August 26, 1929 – June 29, 2017) was an American businessman who pioneered homoerotic male photography in mid-twentieth-century America and built many landmarks of late-twentieth-century gay and leather culture, especially in Chicago. His résumé includes co-founding the Leather Archives & Museum with Tony DeBlase; co-founding with Dom Orejudos the Gold Coast bar, Man’s Country bathhouse, and the International Mr. Leather competition; and founding on his own Chicago’s August White Party and the magazines Triumph, Rawhide, and Mars. He was a romantic partner of Dom Orejudos as well as Chuck Arnett, Samuel Steward, David Grooms, and Ron Ehemann. For leather and BDSM history he is infrastructure: bars, contests, baths, magazines, and the museum that keeps the gear and the stories from being thrown away.
Orejudos, Kris Studios, Triumph Gym, Gold Coast
Renslow was a photographer. In 1952 he met Dom Orejudos on Chicago’s Oak Street Beach and asked him to model. The two began a lifelong personal and professional relationship; in the 1970s they lived together in the Francis J. Dewes mansion. Renslow and Orejudos founded Kris Studios, a physique photography studio that shot for the gay magazines they published. The studio name partly honored transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen. In 1958 they bought a gym and renamed it Triumph Gymnasium and Health Studio. That same year they bought the Gold Coast Show Lounge and transformed it into the country’s first gay leather bar—the Gold Coast—with a uniform/western/leather dress code, a backroom, and homoerotic art by Orejudos on the walls. In 1965 Renslow helped found the Second City Motorcycle Club. That sequence—beach model to lifelong partner, physique studio to leather bar with backroom and wall art—is the industrial birth of Chicago leather as a public commercial culture rather than only private parties.
Man’s Country, White Party, International Mr. Leather
Man’s Country/Chicago, founded by Renslow and Orejudos, opened at 5015–5017 North Clark Street on September 19, 1973, and held the title of Chicago’s longest-running gay bathhouse when it closed in 2017. It was the third bathhouse Renslow co-founded; the previous two were forced shut under homophobia-fueled police pressure. Before Man’s Country he co-owned Club Baths locations in Chicago, Kansas City, and Phoenix with Chuck Fleck. He founded Chicago’s August White Party on August 8, 1974, as a birthday-and-patron thank-you party, then ran it for thirty-six years until 2010. The largest edition was 1979 at Navy Pier with about 5,000 participants. The forerunner of International Mr. Leather was the 1970s "Mr. Gold Coast" bar contest at the Gold Coast. That contest grew so popular it needed a larger venue in 1979, at which point the title became International Mr. Leather—the contest system that still defines much of international leather title culture.
Leather Archives & Museum with Tony DeBlase
In 1991 Renslow and Tony DeBlase founded the Leather Archives & Museum as a community archives, library, and museum of leather, kink, fetish, and BDSM history and culture. Its mission is to make leather, kink, BDSM, and fetish accessible through research, preservation, education, and community engagement. They founded it in response to the AIDS crisis, when leather and fetish communities’ history and belongings were frequently lost or deliberately suppressed and discarded. Renslow is listed as Chairman In Memoriam of the LA&M; the museum gives out the Chuck Renslow President’s Award for contributions to the institution. Cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin has argued that Renslow was one of the most consequential leathermen of the long twentieth century: his impact was vast and spanned decades, from iconic gay male erotica to one of the earliest and longest-lasting leather bars to building the leather contest system from a big local party into a major international institution. In her view his most significant contribution was establishing and maintaining the Leather Archives & Museum—giving it legal corporate structure, quietly ensuring operating funds for years, and making the LA&M the ongoing beneficiary of IML. Though others such as DeBlase made key contributions, Rubin holds that Renslow did more than any other single individual to grow the museum and secure its future, and thereby to secure a future for the leather past.
Honors, Chuck Renslow Way, Stonewall Wall of Honor
In 1990 Renslow received the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the National Leather Association International. In 1991 he was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Pantheon of Leather Awards include the President’s Award (1992), Lifetime Achievement (1993), another Lifetime Achievement with Jim McGlade (1996), Lifetime Achievement alone (2007), and the Forebear Award (1998). In 1995 "Chuck Renslow – IML" was among 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 honorarily designate the eastern stretch of Clark Street between Winnemac and Ainslie as "Chuck Renslow Way"—the corridor that once held many of his businesses, including the Gold Coast and Man’s Country. The new sign was unveiled on the anniversary of IML. In June 2019 he was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument at New York’s Stonewall Inn—the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history—timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. In 2021 the LA&M issued the Chuck Renslow & Tony DeBlase Founders’ Award. Further reading includes Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen’s Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow (CreateSpace, 2011, ISBN 978-1461119081) and the Chuck Renslow Dance Photographs collection at the Newberry Library. For BDSMWild readers, Chuck Renslow is the Chicago builder of leather modernity: Kris Studios beefcake, Gold Coast as first leather bar template, Man’s Country as bathhouse endurance, IML as global title machine, White Party as mass celebration, and the Leather Archives as the vault that keeps boots, magazines, and bar myths from vanishing with the men who made them.
