Larry Townsend: Leatherman’s Handbook Author Who Mainstreamed Gay BDSM

Larry Townsend (27 October 1930 – 29 July 2008) was an American author of dozens of erotic and leather-culture books, most famously Run, Little Leather Boy (1970) and The Leatherman’s Handbook (1972). Issued by pioneer erotic houses such as Greenleaf Classics and Olympia Press’s Other Traveler imprint, and illustrated in the Handbook by Sean, those titles were among the first to carry gay BDSM and leather practice toward a wider reading public. For leather history, Townsend is both novelist and field guide—the man who put dungeon etiquette, gear lore, and fantasy into portable paperback form at a moment when many cities still treated the scene as pure underground.

From Air Force Intelligence to LA Leather

Born Michael Lawrence Townsend, he spent his teenage years in Los Angeles near celebrity neighbors including Noël Coward, Irene Dunne, and Laura Hope Crews. He attended the Peddie School and served 1950–1954 as a Staff Sergeant running NCOIC Operations for Air Intelligence Squadrons with the U.S. Air Force in Germany. After discharge he entered the small underground Los Angeles leather scene of the era; biographers note that he and Montgomery Clift once shared a lover—a detail that places him inside Hollywood-adjacent queer networks as well as bar culture.

He earned a degree in industrial psychology from UCLA in 1957, worked in the private sector and as a probation officer with the Forestry Service, and began homophile political activism in the early 1960s. Around then he met Fred Yerkes (27 August 1935 – 8 July 2006), his companion for forty-three years. In 1972, as president of the Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (H.E.L.P.), founded in 1969 to support gay men during and after arrests, he helped launch the H.E.L.P. Newsletter—an ancestor of Drummer magazine (1975). He lived in Silver Lake, Los Angeles’s leather-scene counterpart to San Francisco’s SoMa, where bars, private parties, and print culture fed each other.

Writer, Photographer, Drummer Columnist

As writer and photographer Townsend was an essential eyewitness to the salon around Drummer, which often excerpted his fiction and treated him as a house authority on leather life. His signature “Leather Notebook” column ran in Drummer for twelve years beginning in 1980 and continued in Honcho until 2008—nearly three decades of periodical voice after the Handbook had already made his name. His last novel, TimeMasters, appeared in April 2008; one of his final prose pieces was the introduction “Who Lit up the Lit of the Golden Age of Drummer” for Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (June 2008), a late career reflection on the magazine culture that had carried leather fiction and photography through the AIDS years and beyond.

He died Tuesday, 29 July 2008, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles at age 77, of complications from pneumonia according to family. An oral history interview with Townsend is held at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago; manuscript material is also archived at Yale University Library as the Larry Townsend Collection (MS 1975). Those holdings keep his voice available to researchers who never handled a 1970s Other Traveler paperback.

Honors and Afterlife

• 1995 — Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work, National Leather Association International
• 2002 — Forebear Award, Pantheon of Leather Awards
• 2016 — Inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame

Jack Fritscher’s memorial essay “Spill a Drop for Lost Brothers” on Townsend and The Leatherman’s Handbook later won the NLAI’s Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award (2009)—a measure of how central the Handbook remains in leather literary memory. Companion pieces on Townsend’s role in Los Angeles leather pop culture and the “lit” of Drummer‘s golden age continue to circulate among historians. Townsend’s blend of dirty fiction, practical handbook tone, and long magazine presence made him a mainstreaming engine for gay SM: not the only voice of leather print’s classic era, but one of the loudest, longest-running, and most cited when newcomers ask what the old guard actually wrote down.