If you count a two-stop trip as a “tour”, my tour of the American Midwest was a great success. It was also my first trip to the USA since before COVID. I had some nerves crossing the border, but there were no problems.
My first stop was Chicago’s Leather Archive & Museum. The staff were welcoming and helpful, and the archivist let me see behind the scenes where they do the work of sorting and cataloging material. This includes books, magazines, artwork, emphemera, video, film, and even garments like club jackets and vests.
The lower section of the building is a museum in its own right. The collection is skewed a bit towards gay male leather, but there’s lots of fascinating material.
The auditorium was a great spot for my “Celluloid Dungeon” talk, and the staff took care of all the technical hitches. I also managed to sell some books, and consigned a few more.
For me, the real treat was seeing the library. Some of the best finds included this 1930s edition of Venus in Furs with art nouveau illustrations.
Also an edition of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.
And a bit of Nazisploitation called Buchenwald Mistress, published 1979.
I also got to attend a female dominant play party Saturday night. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much else of Chicago, as I chose my hotel to be close to the LA&M and didn’t realize how far that would be from downtown where all the museums are. I was interested in seeing the Chicago branch of the Medieval Torture Museum, though I suspect it was more about sensation than education.
Timing issues forced me to take the bus to Bloomington, IN, instead of a more comfortable train. As I traveled through the hoosier homeland of Indiana, I was struck by all the flat, open countryside. I’ve lived most of my life in Vancouver, which is surrounded by mountains to the north, ocean to the west, and rivers to the south. Flat land extending in all directions was disorienting.
My hosts picked me up at the bus station, and provided excellent hospitality. Bloomington is a bit odd to me in that the area around Indiana University is very walkable with high density urban planning, but once you leave the university area, it quickly turns into car-dependent urban sprawl, very unfriendly to pedestrians.
I don’t know why I expected the Kinsey Institute to look different from any other university department (unless you looked closely at the artwork on the walls). The staff provided me with the items I had requested in advance. I started separating the wheat from the chaff.
One of the biggest finds was a mimeograph of a 51-page typed document by “G. Allen Marburger”, titled “Bondage fantasies in popular entertainment”, dated to 1975.
Marburger typed up this idiosyncratic guide to bondage in television and film, largely based on his own memories. To keep his task manageable, he required that a scene had to include gagging to be considered. He included archetypes of women in these scenarios and complained about the poor quality of the bondage. “The portrayal of bondage on film has remained unchanged over the past 70 years.” [Pg.] The references to HOM, presumably “House of Milan”, make me suspect this was an unpublished article for a HOM-published magazine. This goes into my thesis in Celluloid Dungeon about how BDSM fans have been scrap-booking elements of mainstream media together for their own reason.
The “Sadomasochism in Cinema” vertical file had some interesting finds too. There was a 1976 Harpers magazine article about “the currently developing hard-core pornography of murder”, about how The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre (1974) was a commercial flop that was “inexplicably rescued by a certain branch of the film intelligentsia.” Bear in mind, this is two years before John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) kicked off the slasher craze of the 80s. The author, Stephen Koch, couldn’t begin to imagine the endurance of the genre.
A copy of a 1936 newspaper ad for the film Road Gang emphasized the tortures inflicted on the male protagonist.
A 1985 People magazine article talks about the yet-to-be-released “yuppie sadomasochistic flick” Nine and a Half Weeks, and includes quotes from director Adrian Lyne. Even before the film was released, people were talking about the intense, possibly abusive dynamic between Lyne and star Kim Basinger.
I want to thank the Leather Archive & Museum, the Kinsey Institute, Redbud Books of Bloomington, IN and my friends in Bloomington, IN, for their help and hospitality.
