Something Leather: Alasdair Gray’s Glasgow S&M Initiation Novel

Something Leather is a 1990 novel-in-stories by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. Marketed as a Glasgow S&M initiation book—and often reduced by reviewers to a “sadomasochistic lesbian adventure”—it is structurally stranger: a leather-shop frame around a wider portrait of Glaswegians across class lines. For leather and BDSM-literature readers, the framing chapters are genuine female-led SM initiation; the rest is Gray arguing that kink is only one door into a city of voices.

Plot and Central Characters

The framing narrative follows June’s initiation into sadomasochistic activity by the women who run a leather clothing shop in Glasgow. Four main figures cross different social worlds:

• June — works for the civil service
• Donalda — a dressmaker
• Senga — Donalda’s employer
• Harry (Harriet) — an aristocratic English artist and dominatrix

Around them moves a large cast of minor Glaswegian characters. Some segments rework Gray’s earlier broadcast material. The leather shop and Harry’s dominance give the book its fetish surface; the mosaic of side lives is what Gray insisted the sexy title had hidden.

Critic Fuel, Title Trouble, and Later Softening

The novel ends with “Critic Fuel – An Epilogue,” in which Gray describes the book’s development and offers an extended ending. In the Acknowledgements he notes that the title led reviewers to treat it as “a sadomasochistic Lesbian adventure story,” though those events occur mainly in framing Chapters 1 and 12. Had he called it Glaswegians, he suggests, critics might have paid more attention to the rest.

When collected in Every Short Story 1951–2012 (Canongate, 2012), the material was grouped under Glaswegians, and some stronger sadomasochistic elements were dropped—confirming how central the S&M frame had been to the original book’s identity.

Origin and Reception

Gray said the novel grew from an attempt to write about a woman—an idea he credits to Kathy Acker—because his previous books focused on “men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits.” Critical reception was mixed. Commercially, Gray later said the book “[sold] badly.”

For kink readers, Something Leather remains a rare hybrid: female-led SM initiation and leather-shop power play by a major Scottish modernist who then asked not to be read only for the whip. Desire opens the door; Glasgow fills the room. The book’s afterlife—under both the leather title and the later Glaswegians packaging—shows how literary markets and fetish markets pull the same text in different directions, sanding or selling the S&M frame depending on the shelf.