Detailing the history of the Leather Archives & Museum, the only bricks-and-mortar archive to be solely dedicated to the collection, preservation, and display of leather histories, this chapter takes a cue from Michel Foucault’s habit for reading archives on the diagonal, using the hanky code, a color-coded sexual signaling system developed in the 1970s, as an organizing principle for apprehending the social lifeways of gay and lesbian leatherfolks. By choosing yellow as a focal point in unspooling leather histories—a color whose relation to golden showers, or the erotics of pissing, remains consistent across the many historical iterations of the hanky code— the depth and breadth of the institution’s collections are put into coordination with the constellated visual and material cultures of gay and lesbian leather communities.
Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art considers historic gay and lesbian leather communities by way of two interrelated lines of enquiry; addressing the archives where leather histories and their attendant visual and material objects currently reside, while also examining the projects of contemporary artists who bring leather histories to the fore, making an implicit argument for their potential queer political force in the present. Arguing for an expansive, yet grounded, consideration of the vicissitudes and pleasures of archival work, the book centers the material and visual cultures produced by members of gay and lesbian leather communities, tracing their contextual meanings at the time of their making, as well as their continued ability to produce community-specific histories in archival repositories (that may or may not be solely dedicated to leather communities). Contemporary artists such as Dean Sameshima, Die Kränken, Monica Majoli, A. K. Burns and A. L. Steiner, and Patrick Staff have incorporated the themes, materialities, and/or histories of such archival holdings into their heterogeneous practices, establishing leather history as a persistent and generative touchstone for rethinking queer life, relationality, and sexual politics.