In gay culture, bear is a term for men who are large, hairy, or both.
Leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities that involve leather garments, such as leather jackets, vests, boots, chaps, harnesses, or other items. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Many participants associate leather culture with BDSM practices and its many subcultures. For some, black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles, motorcycle clubs and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
A gay bathhouse, also known as a gay sauna or a gay steambath, is a public bath targeted towards gay and bisexual men. In gay slang, a bathhouse may be called just "the baths", "the sauna", or "the tubs". Historically, they have been used for sexual activity.
Glenn Michael Hughes was an American singer who was the original "Leatherman" character in the disco group Village People from 1977 to 1996.
Cruising is a 1980 crime thriller film written and directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, and Karen Allen. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name by The New York Times reporter Gerald Walker about a serial killer targeting gay men, particularly those men associated with the leather scene in the late 1970s. The title is a double entendre, because "cruising" can describe both police officers on patrol and men who are cruising for sex.
Robert Opel was an American photographer and art gallery owner most famous for streaking during the 46th Academy Awards in 1974.
William Ward (1927–1996) was a British erotic artist. He is best known for his strips featuring bear-like men and in particular his Adventures of Drum series for Drummer magazine.
The Rainbow Motorcycle Club is a gay men's motorcycle club based in San Francisco, California. The club was founded in San Francisco in 1971 by Ron Johnson, Mario Pirami and Paul Denino. Some commentators have credited the RMC as being instrumental in the creation of the bear subculture among gay men during the 1980s and 1990s.
The National Socialist League (NSL) was a neo-Nazi organization of gay men in the United States that existed from 1974 until 1984. It was originally founded by Jim Cherry, but was quickly taken over by Russell Veh, a neo-Nazi and transplant to Los Angeles, California, from Ohio. Veh financed the party using the profits from his printing business. He also financed the league with a film distribution unit that specialized in Nazi propaganda films, including Triumph of the Will. The National Socialist League had chapters in various parts of California, and implied in their mass mailing on July 4, 1978, that they had established an offshoot organization in Manhattan.
Village People are an American disco group known for its on-stage costumes and suggestive lyrics in their music. The group was originally formed by French producers Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo and lead singer Victor Willis following the release of the debut album Village People, which targeted disco's large gay audience. The group's name refers to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, with its reputation as a gay neighborhood. The characters were a symbolic group of American masculinity and macho gay-fantasy personas. To date, Willis is the only original member still remaining with the group.
Gerard P. Donelan, known primarily as just Donelan, is an openly gay cartoonist. Part of the first wave of LGBT cartoonists, he drew "It's a Gay Life", a regular single-panel cartoon feature in The Advocate, for 15 years.
John Joseph "Jack" Fritscher is an American author, university professor, historian, and social activist known internationally for his fiction, erotica, and nonfiction analyses of pop culture and gay male culture. An activist prior to the Stonewall riots, he was an out and founding member of the Journal of Popular Culture. Fritscher became highly influential as editor of Drummer magazine.
Drummer is an American magazine which focuses on "leathersex, leatherwear, leather and rubber gear, S&M, bondage and discipline, erotic styles and techniques." The magazine was launched in 1975 and ceased publication in April 1999 with issue 214, but was relaunched 20 years later by new publisher Jack MacCullum with editor Mike Miksche.
David Randolph Hurles was an American gay pornographer, whose one-man company, run from a private mailbox, was called Old Reliable Tape and Picture Company. His work, produced primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, falls into three categories: photographs, audio tapes, and videotapes. Hurles' models were typically ex-convicts, hustlers, drifters, and ne'er do wells. Hurles died on April 12, 2023, at the age of 78.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent LGBT communities in the United States, and is one of the most important in the history of American LGBT rights and activism alongside New York City. The city itself has been described as "the original 'gay-friendly city'". LGBT culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the southern San Francisco Bay Area.
The Caldron was a sex club for gay men located at 953 Natoma Street in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. It opened in 1980 and closed in 1984. It was called "the epitome of the uninhibited, abandoned, 'sleazy' sex club."
REX is an American artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoids photographs and does not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he has remained a shadowy figure saying that his drawings "defined who I became" and that there are "no other 'truths' out there".
Bill Schmeling, better known by his pen name The Hun, was an American artist active in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, known for his explicit, homoerotic fetish illustrations and comics.
Cynthia Slater (1945–1989) was an American sex educator, HIV/AIDS activist, and dominatrix. She was the co-founder of the second BDSM organization founded in the United States, a San Francisco, California based BDSM education and support group known as the Society of Janus, which she founded with Larry Olsen in August 1974.
