Kassandra Sparks, LA&M, & I are hosting a happy hour for queers and leatherfolk writing, thinking, and making art about leather, k*nk, BDSM, and transgressive 🎷. Its happening during this year’s American Studies Conference in Chicago. Come through!
Free, no RSVP
Flyer photo by Efrain Gonzalez
![Young black woman wearing shiny black dress holding VHS tape and smiling. Text: [Queerness, if you are in the process of becoming a leatherwoman, becomes more and more difficult to hide, until finally it bursts forth in all its wanton inappropriateness.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iyfco36opjofallgh4axztsd/bafkreiafwxz34tw7omf6oqco2tb7sotgsanpkypmyemdubyiklpzpv2p3y)
![Black woman on her elbows with her wrists tied with white rope. Text: [To deny our fantasies because they are too complicated, too painful, or too perverse, to erase their presence or censor their articulation in public life, constitutes a particular kind of insidious violence that threatens to undermine our ability to explore the contours of our psychic lives, and the imaginary possibilities of the social worlds in which we exist.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iyfco36opjofallgh4axztsd/bafkreihwuavjvc557gtnjwmcqtcy5puedr2e2asmspsy7b6m2xiz5ssske)
![Close-up image of a white person with their wrist tied to a tree trunk with rope above their head. Text: [Most people who condemn public sex do not seem to know that the legal difference between public and private sex is not a simple matter of choosing either the bushes or your bedroom. There are many zones in between - a motel room, a bathhouse, a bar, an adult bookstore, a car, a public toilet, a dark and deserted alley - that are contested territory where police battle with perverts for control. The problem is that the state always wishes the zone of privacy to be as narrow as possible.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iyfco36opjofallgh4axztsd/bafkreibwfo2nvsyievpaij4kowk6bsknt2nduw226ypnqanrgb3wqn2ouy)
![Michele is a Black woman with a serious expression and short hair. She is wearing pearls and a floorlength robe or dress with a V-neck and stiff collar. She is sitting on a floral patterned chair next to a candelabra. Text: [When you are no longer willing to be someone else and live someone else's life in return for respectability, when your mind and your body are so changed that both a kiss and a blow can make you vibrate, when you find yourself on the street in plain clothes in a strange city and you see a man or woman dressed in leather and you meet that person's eyes and nod, and that person nods back, then you have become a leatherwoman.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iyfco36opjofallgh4axztsd/bafkreid7f5s32akk2l25pbtx4kzt36t22ijvfn6v4lbnzmlznhb3c2grli)
![Close up on person bowing down to lick a heeled boot. Text: [It is often the case that what moves our sexual choices in life is our will more than our cognitive reason; often the two forms of reason are not even capable of communicating with each other. Our cognitive reason cannot always be convinced about the rightness of the decisions made by our sensual will.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iyfco36opjofallgh4axztsd/bafkreigh4aee3gl3274pa355ndxl6f34bbwalzfl2ldbxfnadtn5n7gm2y)
