Jul 30, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 12 segments
Melancholy Ghost, Missouri title holder and boundaries educator, joins the podcast to discuss how to set, communicate, and protect boundaries in kink. **Book A Consult Call with Amanda**…
Melancholy GhostGuest
Amanda DamesHost
So to kind of like give a CliffsNotes version, the leather community started really in the 1950s and '60s when gentlemen came back from the war and they decided that they did not wanna be in lavender marriages.
They wanted to be open, but not so open that they put themselves in danger, because you could be arrested during that period of time.
Oh, and beaten up and it wasn't even legally, there was so much that could happen.
But those gentlemen came back and they started leather protocol, which kind of went with their military protocol, and they started to go around in essentially biker gangs because they could create a stigma with the way that they looked to keep people away while protecting themselves and their group.
And a lot of the leather community were there whenever Stonewall happened on June 28th, and they were there when the AIDS epidemic happened, and the first international woman of leather, Judy Tall Wing McCarthy, she really helped to get medication to the- The gay community for AIDS, and it was like a whole network that they've created.
They are leather men, specifically POC, people of color, mainly MOC, which is men of color, and they allow that support group for men who are BIPOC.
But also, they open it for everyone, but whenever it comes to voting for things, they do it with them within their own core group to maintain that MOC, POC status, which is amazing.
There is the Carter Johnson Library, which there's different facets all over the United States, and the main one is in Indiana.
And like the leather community preserves history and it preserves education, and it's there when things are hard.
When Pride parades were originally started, it was the leather community that would drive with their bike to protect anybody who was marching because they had that stigma about them, right? They've created this role for themselves to where they look intimidating and they look a certain way, Tom of Finland, for example, to one, be super sexy, let's face it, but also to have that protocol and those standards that they uphold for each other to maintain that, what boils down to is family.
I'm talking things that like are really hard to learn, like needle play and sharps and just in general things that are not regularly offered at your dungeon on a normal basis.
So to kind of like give a CliffsNotes version, the leather community started really in the 1950s and '60s when gentlemen came back from the war and they decided that they did not wanna be in lavender marriages.
They wanted to be open, but not so open that they put themselves in danger, because you could be arrested during that period of time.
Oh, and beaten up and it wasn't even legally, there was so much that could happen.
But those gentlemen came back and they started leather protocol, which kind of went with their military protocol, and they started to go around in essentially biker gangs because they could create a stigma with the way that they looked to keep people away while protecting themselves and their group.
And a lot of the leather community were there whenever Stonewall happened on June 28th, and they were there when the AIDS epidemic happened, and the first international woman of leather, Judy Tall Wing McCarthy, she really helped to get medication to the- The gay community for AIDS, and it was like a whole network that they've created.
They are leather men, specifically POC, people of color, mainly MOC, which is men of color, and they allow that support group for men who are BIPOC.
But also, they open it for everyone, but whenever it comes to voting for things, they do it with them within their own core group to maintain that MOC, POC status, which is amazing.
There is the Carter Johnson Library, which there's different facets all over the United States, and the main one is in Indiana.
And like the leather community preserves history and it preserves education, and it's there when things are hard.
When Pride parades were originally started, it was the leather community that would drive with their bike to protect anybody who was marching because they had that stigma about them, right? They've created this role for themselves to where they look intimidating and they look a certain way, Tom of Finland, for example, to one, be super sexy, let's face it, but also to have that protocol and those standards that they uphold for each other to maintain that, what boils down to is family.
I'm talking things that like are really hard to learn, like needle play and sharps and just in general things that are not regularly offered at your dungeon on a normal basis.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
