Sadly, Jack McGeorge passed away on Tuesday, August 18th.
In addition to being a retired US Marine, McGeorge was in the Scene before there was a Scene, in the late 1960s. One of his first meetings with other kinky people was through a Mensa group. Since then, he’s been teaching and organizing for longer than some people have been alive.
He gained an unwelcome degree of notoriety in late 2002, when some unprincipled flack in the Washington Post wrote a front page story asking whether a person in the BDSM culture should be allowed on the UN weapons inspection mission in Iraq. This is a very interesting case because I believe it is one of the first cases of a person under pressure in a high status position because of their kinky sexuality, and it has many parallels to the ideas that gays can’t hold critical positions.
A year or two ago, McGeorge was nice enough to take me up on my open offer to interview him by phone. I now have three cassette tapes of his life in kink. I found McGeorge to be a thoughtful, generous, brave and principled guy. He has been out about being kinky his entire life, even while working in high security government and corporate positions.
I have yet to do anything with those interview tapes, even transcribe them. As a condition of speaking with me, I agreed that I would not use these interviews for an article published in the mainstream media. As the mainstream media raked him over the coals with snide articles like “A taste of the whip for Saddam”, this is understandable.
Now that he’s no longer with us, I’m hesitant to think about doing anything with them as I can’t ask him if he’s okay with it. I think that I should transcribe them and send the files and tapes to the Leather Archives and Museum.
