Gay biker culture
Assless Chaps and other Leather Paraphernalia; How a WWII Era Biker Club Revolutionized the Gay Community
A organization of mostly gay veterans who remained in Los Angeles after WWII created the Satyrs Motorcycle Club in 1954.
Satyrs launched the gay motorcycle club culture and heavily influenced the leather community in L.A. One of their signature activities, the Badger Flat Run, is an annual event where members ride to national parks and celebrate sexual verbalization. This tradition continues today, making Satyrs one of the longest continuously running gay organizations in the United States.
Founded in 1954 mostly by a group of gay veterans who stayed in Los Angeles after World War II, the Satyrs Motorcycle Club is one of the longest continuously running gay organizations in the United States. Satyrs launched the gay motorcycle club culture and heavily influenced the leather community in L.A. for over half a century. One of their signature activities, the Badger Flat Run, is an annual event where members ride to national parks and celebrate sexual expression. This tradition and the club continues today.
Satyrs is working with ONE Archive to preserve the club’s history. For m Leather in the Archives by Gordon Richardson, with assistance from Alan Miller and Michael Holmes (photography) The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities. Leather society is most noticeable in gay communities and most often associated with male lover men (“leathermen”), but it is also reflected in various ways in the gay, lesbian, bi, and straight worlds. Many people associate leather culture with BDSM (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sado/Masochism) practices and its many subcultures. Gay male BDSM leather culture grew out of post-WWII biker culture. Some men returning from the war received surplus motorcycles, leather jackets, and other military gear. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a leather jacket and cap riding a motorcycle created an iconic image that was adopted by the first gay leather people. The first gay leather bars were the club houses of preceding biker clubs that opened later to the public. Pioneering gay motorcycle clubs included the Satyrs, established in Los Angeles in 1954; Oedipus also in Los Angeles in 1958, and the New York Motorbike A crew of burly, bearded men wearing black leather pants, hats, vests, and jackets appeared in the doorway of Rockbar, a dive at the very edge of the West Village in Manhattan. They looked around, confused, at the the sight of long-haired guys in broken glasses wearing comic-book T-shirts. I realized this bar must normally be the group’s haunt of choice and the nerdy comedy show I was there to see was perhaps not first on their list of amusements. They turned and walked out, not before I saw the back of one leather vest—a yellow circle enclosed by a blue and red male symbol and the words Empire Urban area MC. A few months later, I’m waiting in a coffee shop for “Evil” Ed Caraballo and Chaz Antonelli, the current president and secretary, respectively, of what I have learned is the Empire City Motorcycle Club, or ECMC. The club is one of the oldest all-riding, all-gay, all-male motorcycle organizations in the world. Founded in 1964 by a group of 12 bikers from the New York metropolitan area, the club famous its 50th anniversary in October 2014. While other motorcycle clubs have perhaps been active for longer periods of time (at least one group disputes t According to journalist Liz Highleyman (“Past Out”), gay “motorcycle clubs, a mainstay of gay culture since the 1950s, ushered in a novel brand of gender non-conforming masculinity and gave rise to today’s leather/SM community.” The first gay motorcycle club, the Los Angeles Satyrs, began in 1954 and is still in existence. In South Florida, the Thebans Motorcycle Club, Inc. of Miami began its history as a domestic, organization corporation on Aug. 6, 1975. By 1976 the Thebans were important enough to be one of the cofounders of the Dade County Coalition for Human Rights. Theban Marty Rubin, “the Old Bike Daddy,” was active in the DCCHR and went on to chair Pride South Florida and record a popular column for twn (The Weekly News) and David. By the 1990s, gay bike and leather clubs enjoy the South Florida Eagles, Sunrays MC, the Brotherhood of Man MC, Stingrays, Saber MC, Key West Wreckers, and the South Florida chapter of Trident International were a major part of the local same-sex attracted leather scene. These “patch” clubs, named after the patch or colors that members wore on their leather vests, were patterned after “outlaw” motorcycle clubs like the Hell’s Angels. They incorporated most of the exclusiveWhat’s in the Archives? Leather!
Leather subculture