Coming Out All Over Again

This might be a familiar story...

It was a rainy day in April of 1991. The man I was dating at the time was looking for a leather jacket. I had bought a brown leather bomber jacket the previous fall, so we went back to the store that jacket came from. I wasn't really shopping for anything myself, so I started wandering around the store while Tom was trying on a couple of jackets.

Close to the jackets was a rack of black leather motorcycle chaps. I started looking through the rack, trying to figure out what the sizes were and getting a little curious. I found a pair that might fit and tried them on.

Mind you, I wasn't particularly dressed for trying on chaps. I was wearing a baggy pair of pants with lots of pockets, more suitable for camping trips than anything else. So the effect was a little strange-looking when I got the chaps zipped up and went over to the mirror. But the feeling in my crotch was something else. Needless to say, I walked out of the store $130 poorer. (I don't think Tom bought anything himself.)

Not only was I, um, physically excited, but my brain woke up too, and I spent the ride home "connecting dots." See, I had just discovered something big, like the missing link between a lot of thoughts I had over the years. As a teenager, well even a little younger than that, I had lots of fantasies about "awful" things being done to me. I didn't know who was doing them or many of the other details. Finding those chaps triggered a major "Oh, so THAT'S it" as I put two and two together from my younger days. Fueled also by the occasional issues of Drummer I was buying and my trips to the Detroit Eagle, where I got to see real actual leathermen, I knew I was on a whole new road now. And it felt just as exciting as the road I embarked on three years before, when I came out to myself for the first time.

You Actually Wear THAT in Public?

Of course, it wasn't that simple or fast. For months the chaps never left the house. That Fourth of July weekend, though, I had an opportunity to go out and I figured, "What the hell." So that was my first trip to the Eagle with the chaps. (I did have a good pair of 501s by then, and even a pair of boots too.) I was kind of nervous, as you might expect. It was a different crowd of people at the bar anyway because of the holiday, and there wasn't much leather around. But I liked my appearance and the feelings I had because of it. It spurred me on to get a vest, jacket, and hat -- the whole outfit.

I know I wondered if there was someone out there noting my transformation. I mean, a journey so momentous as the one I was on had to have been noticed, right? Probably not, since I had gotten into a relationship and hadn't been going to the bar as much. When the relationship ended, it was a little like starting over, only this time I had all the cowhide. I know the guys I hung around with before drifted away from me, even as I made friends from men in the leather community.

So does that mean, you know, you actually DO stuff?

I spent a lot of time wearing leather, but that didn't mean I spent a lot of time playing kinky games. It took quite a while to start finding partners to explore some of the activities that had been running through my fantasies since I was about 10 or so. And, of course, there was the inexperience factor for me, since the only person I ever tied up was myself. I knew enough about the whole thing to know I couldn't jump in and expect to do things well the first time out. I eventually met one or two guys who were patient enough to let me figure a few things out with them. Then I got involved in a relationship where, whatever else that relationship was, I got plenty of the right kind of experience in the SM world. And that's the subject of another article someday....

—Charlie Songdog
November 24, 1996