Fearful Symmetry
Is Leather Too Dangerous for This Moment?
Davey Davis
In January, CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) and Kink Out cohosted psychoanalyst and writer Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou and community organizer and writer Yin Q for their Power of Leather series. Following a reading from Q’s forthcoming memoir about leather rituals, sex work, and dim sum, the pair brought their professional and lifestyle interest in S/M to bear in a riveting discussion about exigent sadism as fleshed out in Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. This cruel yet ethical form of caretaking is only possible when the sadist can counter their ego’s resistance (or “bend their own will,” in Saketopoulou’s words) to risking harm to another party. “Psychoanalysts theorize and Dominants know that our sadistic impulses are not necessarily pathological,” read the event description. “If that’s true, what do we make of violent desires, especially when those link up with traumatic histories? Might there even be vulnerability in sadism and if so, what does it make possible?”
Since its 2023 release, Sexuality Beyond Consent has enjoyed a vogue in New York’s leather scene. Attending the event over Zoom, my girlfriend and I picked out several goth-garbed, tattooed friends and acquaintances in the crowd. Even so, some topics, particularly “edge” forms of kink like rape, age, and race play (the latter a predominant theme of Sexuality Beyond Consent, which hinges on a close reading of Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play), were clearly controversial, judging by audience responses and comments in the Zoom group chat. This tension came to a head during the Q&A when an attendee asked if, amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the destruction wrought by the Trump/Musk administration, the level of perviness that Saketopoulou and Yin were willing to engage with, both in theory and in practice, and especially race play, wasn’t actually dangerous.
“How do we do kink in this moment in a way that feels [. . .] not like it’s participating inside of, like, the thing that is us all having accepted that MAGA is where we are?” they asked. In the face of “this moment,” as they put it, could such extremity really be the way forward?
On the contrary, Saketopoulou responded: “I think this is the time to double down.”[1]
Is leather too politically incorrect, if not literally perilous, for 2025? Having myself been in the scene for over a decade, this wasn’t the first time I’d heard the straight world’s mimetic logic of repression from within the community: consensual violence is too similar to nonconsensual violence for anyone to consent to it, especially marginalized people (and even if they could, the danger it poses rises in intolerable proportion to the political violence of the immediate context). Insofar as a profoundly inequitable society can value sexual consent, ours has lately come to conceive of it as something that is granted and gained in order to foster mutually satisfying experiences between informed adults—the “yes means yes” that Saketopoulou joins scholar Ariane Cruz (another Power of Leather speaker) in identifying as neoliberal. For Cruz, BDSM, in particular, exposes the limits of contemporary consent politics while revealing the inadequacies of kink (race play or otherwise) without an analysis of race, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. As she writes in The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, “Consent is not a universal principle; it does not have the same valence for everyone. We must be cautious about adopting consent as our primary determinant of sexual freedom because it often buttresses normative sexualities and sexual hierarchies.” For Saketopoulou, affirmative consent “[issues] from a subject who is fully transparent to themselves and who, in thinking consciously and deciding rationally, can anticipate the probable effects of their assent.” As an alternative or addendum to this “epistemological project of dubious usefulness” (“one never knows what one signs up for and what one will get until after the fact, however carefully, dutifully, or earnestly one communicates,” she points out), Saketopoulou proposes “limit consent,” which “does not center on (re)producing an experience of satisfaction but instead works to facilitate novelty and surprise.” This enables “the pursuit of the states of overwhelm,” her phrasing for the wild, uninterrupted escalation of the sexual drive that can shatter the ego, unravel its previous translations, and open up space for new ones. It is in this field, among imperfect, unpredictable, and likely traumatized subjects, that exigent sadism bucks the paternalistic concern-trolling of not just leathersex, but of any relationship, transactional or not, in which two or more subjects come together to bend their own wills in pursuit of the “limit experience,” a term Saketopoulou cobbles together from the Marquis de Sade by way of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault. This is not an experience that we have, but one that we risk, because for all involved it brings the possibility of “generative traumatisms,” which “come up against the limits of the ego’s fortifications, to successfully contest the ego’s investment in its stability and to override its resistance to novelty (that is, to go against its consent).” Then what happens? As we all know, it’s only after fucking around that we find out.
Even in leather, a subculture where the extremity of our intimacies places us (I contend) at the vanguard of consent as a conceptual framework, Saketopoulou’s alternative to sexual consent norms can present a formidable challenge, as the CLAGS audience’s discomfited reaction demonstrates. Suspicion of the kinds of sadomasochistic interactions that foster and produce limit experiences is understandable—perhaps especially, if counterintuitively, among leatherfolk. Leather is traditionally comprised of queer social refuse, the kind for whom affirmative consent is uniquely easy to deny because to the wider world, our “yes” (to our desires, our sex work, our kinship, our gender transition, our abortions, our self-determination, our survival) renders our “no” meaningless. In a community defined in part by its members’ vulnerability to dehumanization, often on multiple axes, we are all the more vulnerable to those who would take advantage of this paradox. Edgeplay (which in American leather traces its roots to the postwar military and biker culture where the scene was born) and the way that it’s talked about, negotiated, and exhibited in porn and at parties, workshops, and events like San Francisco’s annual Folsom Street Fair, is under constant debate. In the twenty-first century, leather imagines a world in which interpersonal violence is only ever consensual, but that revolution hasn’t happened yet: our communities have not figured out how to cultivate spaces where players subjected to racialized, gendered, ableist, and other kinds of identity-based violence never have to wonder if their feelings or responses to play that (re)dramatizes systematic oppression and terror, from policing to chattel slavery to genocidal regimes, will be dismissed or even punished. Just this year, Tom of Finland Foundation (ToFF) co-founder Durk Dehner resigned from the organization after photos of him in Nazi regalia circulated on Facebook and he was removed as a judge from International Mr. Leather, the world’s oldest leather competition and conference. It’s not difficult to imagine that Saketopoulou and Q’s interlocutor was speaking from their own experiences or anxieties about intracommunity racism—that “race play” had been, or could be, deployed in order to obscure violence perpetrated by someone they were supposed to be able to trust.[2]
It follows that even less controversial BDSM—though what this means is so contextual that providing an example is trickier than you might think—comes under additional scrutiny during times of heightened political violence. Following October 7, 2023, my local leather scene in New York City was galvanized, as were other liberation-oriented communities across the country, to organize and join pro-Palestinian teach-ins, fundraisers, and actions, building power across countless other coalitions. Internally, however, some of us wondered how we could square the blood, electricity, and bondage, all highly publicized features of the Israeli-American war machine, in our personal scenes. On social media, such wondering occasionally veered into the proscriptive: sharing similar concerns with the CLAGS audience member, some wanted to know how we could play with suturing or cattle prods when Palestinians, including babies and children, were enduring analogous experiences, whether as medical treatment, often without anesthetics, after grievous injury by bombs and white phosphorous, or as torture at the hands of the IDF. If we as leatherfolk are to “double down,” as Saketopoulou recommends, how do we do so when even some of us fear that consensual sadomasochistic encounters cheapen, promote, or even contribute to “real” violence elsewhere?
“In the twenty-first century, leather imagines a world in which interpersonal violence is only ever consensual, but that revolution hasn’t happened yet.”
I suspect this fear is actually the collision of anxieties, beginning with leather’s origins among homophile World War II veterans, who merged with straight motorcycle culture beginning in the 1940s. “It was here,” writes leatherman and psychotherapist Guy Baldwin, “that they found the combination of easy camaraderie, the stress and thrill of real risk taking (the riding), and the masculine sexuality that they had known during their military days.” The Old Guard, as they’re now known, maintained a strict, if informal, web of rules, etiquette, and hierarchy that Baldwin identifies as a holdover from the war, the “raw material” that shaped returning soldiers’ kinky desires into something distinct from the generations of pre-war perverts. Irrespective of our contemporary political values, today’s leatherfolk are the descendants of imperialism’s literal foot soldiers, a group of men whose honor code didn’t just structure and protect queer outlaws from a cruelly homophobic world, but also reproduced, on a smaller scale, the value systems in which they came of age.[3] This is not to speak of the police, prison guards, Nazis, and white supremacists who weren’t just in the Old Guard, but among its founders (and remain in the scene today). Classic leather’s politics and desires were never homogenous, and sexual deviants, whether or not they identified with leather, have never been distinct from the gay liberation movement.[4] But internal disputes around what kinds of play are acceptable continue to this day in both fag and dyke leather communities, in no small part because of less marginal (read: white) players’ refusal to acknowledge or examine the friction between past and present, here and there, and “us” and other.[5] Tom of Finland himself, a conscript of the Finnish army, later attributed his exposure to the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht as sexually formative, while disavowing the “whole Nazi philosophy.” Yet while the ToFF website mentions his military service, it doesn’t discuss the context of Finland’s cooperation with Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia—a tension surely worth examining by any steward of queer art, culture, and history. As new political regimes produce novel traumas, reinventing taboo with new fantasies, props, and inflection points, any failure to balance sexual freedom and social entitlement has proven to erode the trust and safety of players with more at stake while also normalizing the political violence being fetishized for its singularity.
These rational concerns don’t entirely account for the anxieties generated by the apparent homology between “real” and consensual violence. I’m reminded of a drowning class my girlfriend attended a few years ago, whose white, non-Muslim instructor was very firm in their refusal to teach waterboarding, despite an audience request, because of its associations with American Islamophobia. I’m also reminded of a Black femme of Middle Eastern ancestry I know who, as someone raised Southern Baptist, adores waterboarding. While they do draw personal boundaries, neither player imposes their desires, or lack thereof, on anyone else. Is one right and one wrong? Is waterboarding essentially “about” American military black sites, the River Jordan, or something else? Though to outsiders leather inspires both fear (vulva sewing!?) and mockery (adults in diapers!?), we on the inside can feel even more threatened by taboo than those supposedly observing its limits, because honest risk assessment, rather than avoidance, is a foundation of our culture. That’s the trouble with taboos: they tell you things about yourself, disgust being as revealing as desire. By seeking to strictly and finally demarcate any play that could be construed as too “real,” we not only foreclose on the possibility of Saketopoulou’s limit experience, but replicate the similarity taboo that we in leather are so good at sniffing out in lower-stakes play. This is not an injunction to do BDSM any certain way, or a claim that everything should be on the table all the time—which can never be the case in a community even remotely interested in not just consent, but liberation—but rather a request that we think broadly and deeply about our desires and those of others, no matter how challenging that may be.[6]
“Many of us in this room are going to suffer in very varied and different ways about what’s happening politically right now,” Saketopoulou—who last year was disinvited from an event about “wars and conflicts” at Vienna’s Freud Museum for publicly supporting Palestinian liberation—reminded the CLAGS audience. “We need vocabularies, we need ways of thinking [. . .] What are we doing if in response to the danger that is outside we [stop] giving ourselves the dignity of complexity? What does it mean for us to start speaking about desires as too dangerous to talk about right now?”
Regardless of whether they’re “too dangerous” to speak of, these desires and their expressions are happening around and to us all the time, as Q suggested when discussing their experiences of racial fetishization as an Asian sex worker. “Nobody is pretending that those [racist] histories don’t exist [. . .] or that what is going on in the world has ceased to exist outside of the bedroom. It’s so important to bring those conversations into the bedroom as well, knowing though sometimes that both it’s going to be dangerous and exciting. [. . .] They could push you to a level that perhaps the dialogue starts to get just embodied, rather than actually through language.”
This is where Saketopoulou’s titular “traumatophilia” comes to bear. “Traumatophobia” is a “theorizing of traumatic inscription that assumes trauma to be unchanging and immobile.” This poses a problem because “trauma that is not inserted into circulation does not wither and disappear: it stalls and it controls us.” Traumatophilia, on the other hand, offers “a way of working with the recognition that we cannot turn away from our traumata, that we are strangely drawn to them. [. . .] Much as we would want to think otherwise, the impact of traumatic experiences cannot be eliminated or repaired: at best, we live in their aftermath on different terms than when they were inflicted on us.” (Speaking as a sadist, Q said, “The reason why I enjoy going back to the wound is to constantly recontextualize it.”) Saketopoulou differentiates between the repetition compulsion and “persistent, effortful repetitions” that aren’t always self-destructive.[7] In fact, as Willa Smart and Beckett Warzer have put it, this repetition is “mak[ing] good use of one’s traumatic history.” Rather than seeking to heal or eliminate trauma, an impossible task in Saketopoulou’s view, the traumatophilic response opens the possibility of transformation.
Leather, as traumatophilia in practice/praxis, proves that community-based resources such as education, self-defense, harm reduction, and mutual aid can transform the lonely pervert’s painful and meaningless compulsive repetition into a safer (if never safe) space for the production of transformational overwhelm. As is the case with all risk-taking, this undoing, as Saketopoulou calls it, can sometimes lead to regret. Over many years of “making good use” of my trauma, I’ve occasionally engendered more of it when my partners made honest mistakes, were lost in their own overwhelm, or even betrayed me—which is to say that even as I challenge the fears of that CLAGS audience member, I would never dismiss them. How could I? “Traumatophilic thinking can be itself painful, even itself a traumatism,” writes Saketopoulou. “[I]t can wound our ideas about trauma, and it can wound those of us whose identities are organized around having survived violence.” Perhaps I agree with that audience member that leather is too dangerous for the moment—but only because it always is.
[1] The audience question, along with the presenters’ full responses, can be found at youtu.be/KZrWLm8rpvg, starting at around 1:12:00.
[2] A few weeks after the CLAGS event, Saketopoulou and Q picked up where they left off with a follow-up conversation, appended to the YouTube video of the original discussion. Acknowledging the way that “[state] violence and sadism [are] constantly looming,” Q asked Saketopoulou to revisit the Q&A question. “I think it’s a very understandable fear,” Saketopoulou replied. “I’m not by any means critical of it. But if we allow it to take over and become the only way in which we may think of sadism, then I think it shuts down a bunch of other possibilities including the possibilities of thinking about the ethics of sadism, about ethical sadism, about the kinds of sadistic encounters that happen in the confrontation between the ways in which [. . .] the sadist stages an encounter for the other to be confronting their own unconscious and the confrontation of one’s own unconscious life.”
[3] Baldwin describes its tendencies toward internalized homophobia, like Tops being judged for kissing bottoms. “It is at once amusing, ironic and depressing to recognize that some in the SM/leather scene employ the same oppressive you-are-not-OK tactics to standardize SM behaviors that nonSM people use to ‘normalize’ us.”
[4] Baldwin identifies multiple groups and subgroups of Old Guard leathermen, including “bike club members who wanted nothing to do with sadomasochism” and “fisters who wanted no part of S/M, motorcycles, or bondage.”
[5] Gone unaddressed, this racist and anti-Black tendency only compounds, alienating and endangering players of color generally and Black players in particular, whether or not they identify with leather. In “The Chromatics of Play,” writer and scholar Zoé Samudzi writes about the ambivalent pleasures of a D/s relationship with a white male dominant: “My relinquishment of whatever contextual power I possessed was always plagued with the question of just how much of this was kink fantasy and how much of it was a contained externalization of real life fantasy (and whether these things could actually be compartmentalized).”
[6] In my NYC leather community, many Black players have drawn attention to the nonchalance with which neck rope tends to be exhibited on social media and in public scenes. Those who are disturbed or triggered by neck rope’s similarity to or evocation of the lynching of Black American people cannot force other players to take their feelings into account (nor do they wish to). However, non-Black players who want to remain in community with Black players have an array of options at their disposal (including using trigger warnings for images of neck rope, not posting images of neck rope at all, not playing with neck rope publicly, or not playing with neck rope at all) to prosocially discipline their own desires, thereby building trust and reciprocity with players for whom this form of play is more emotionally risky.
[7] The Color of Kink again comes to mind. Revisiting artist Betye Saar’s accusation that Kara Walker is replicating “derogatory” images of Black people, Cruz quotes scholar Christina Sharpe’s position that Walker’s work “is not simply the recycling of stereotypes.” “Rather,” writes Cruz, “it emblematizes the constitutivity of this repetition for black female sexuality and subjectivity—the ‘signifying power of slavery’ in the present, ‘a violent past that is not yet past.’”