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by Joseph
W. Bean
Old Guard
versus New Guard. It's all become so much more complicated than it used
to be, and so very much more complicated than it ever needed to be. I can't
for a moment claim to "know it all" on this question. I can
hope--by sharing what I know to be true and laying out what I believe to
be true--to shed some light on the subjects involved.
First, let me point out that there is nothing at all new about this
question. The famous Brando movie, The Wild One, is a (presumably
all-hetero) version of the conflict. Ten years after the movie swept
through the lives of leathermen and bikers, I saw the same us-versus-them
model working itself out in the gay leather communities of Southern
California. I am not trying to be mysterious.
For those unfamiliar with The Wild One, the plot is something else
altogether, but the point that matters to us here is that Johnny, the
Brando character, has dropped out of the rough, street club with the
loose-morals and unkempt, rebel appearance to join (or form) another group
in which, under his leadership, the guys are a touch less rebellious in
action, a touch less disrespectful and a great deal neater and more
concerned with their appearance. The older way of being a biker is the way
of Lee Marvin's club, the one Johnny left. The new way looks weak by
comparison, in the perspective of the bikers. Marvin's gang could hardly
have day jobs, Brando's may have. Marvin's men are hard, sex-crazed
and fully comfortable with their outsider status. Brando's men--himself
first and foremost, again--are more concerned with the people and
institutions around them; still rebels, but not at ease with being
disconnected outsiders. The 1954 movie was intended to recreate a real
event that took place in 1947 in Holister, California.
I suspect the writers of the movie script found their cues for the
internal action that formed and distinguished the two primary characters
and their followers in what was happening in the gay community at the time
they were writing rather than in what had happened on the open road in
1947. That's a guess. I didn't see anything like this until 1965 among
people I knew, and I didn't begin to understand it until some years
later.
Here's my view of the 60s version in gay leather:
The circle I was in worked (meaning we did SM scenes) in planned parties
with rules and with a host who was playing what eventually became the role
of the dungeon master. We dressed carefully, groomed ourselves neatly, and
tried with all our might to follow Social Rule One: Don't frighten the
villagers. This meant not behaving in ways that would attract attention
from outsiders, more than anything else. I had to walk across Santa Monica
Boulevard to the gate that led to our party space with my hands cuffed
behind my back, but my Master was required to see that this was done
without being noticed by anyone. He was always successful.
We were aware--me last of all it seems--of others who worked differently.
Their lives are pretty much described in the famous Carney book, The Real
Thing. There don't seem to be rules and there definitely are no dungeon
masters. Same world, same time, different approach. In the real world as I
knew it, the Real-Thing men could be seen as descendants of the Lee Marvin
gang, many of them too rebellious to bear the rules of the world in such a
way that they could hold and succeed in jobs or have careers. If we were
neat to a pre-Beatles fault, they were studies in slovenliness. I have to
admit that they were very
sexy to me, but their sexual appeal was mostly in the fact that I was
scared to death whenever I saw them. The important thing is that I knew
they were not us.
The word choices reflect my leather breeding, I know. An example: Smoking
was common if not quite universal in both groups. In my circle, smoking
was done in areas provided with ashtrays, and the ashtrays were always
used. In the other kind of group, smoking and tricks involving cigarettes
were done everywhere, and the ashes went on the floor, on any bottom at
hand or, most commonly, were rubbed into the thighs of the smoker's
jeans.
The possibilities of the two groups were obviously very different. The men
around me (I do not include myself in this) were generally successful in
terms of their jobs and finances, and they were the ones who were
beginning to create stable institutions. Among their accomplishments were
the in-town bike clubs which had significant social functions and usually
allowed buddies as well as bikers, leather tailoring businesses, retail
shops with a definite edge, and-fanfare here-leather bars. All of
these institutions and the system of manners and etiquette, training and
deference we now call Old Guard were, at that point, the New Guard,
although no one said it that way. Outsiders called it "sissy
shit" or "gay stuff." We called it our life. We called
their ways greasy and raunchy, and we meant nothing good by it.
By the late 70s, the founders of both traditions were too old to be its
best leaders, but the attitudes and mores had been ingrained in a new
generation, which is where I come in. Meantime, the bars and pay-to-play
sex clubs needed enough customers to stay open, so they were willing to
admit most of the greasy, raunchy outsiders to the carefully constructed
institutions of the stay-at-home leather club-men.
An uneasy alliance was struck which was sometimes more volatile than the
word uneasy coveys. Soon, of course, the outsiders wanted in, all the way
in. They wanted membership in organized clubs and recognition for their
ways. By then, their rebellion had taken new forms. They were wearing
rubber and spiky hair--sometimes in strange cellophaned colors--whereas
before they wore heavy, dirty leathers and combed their hair in Vaselined
wings with duck's-ass backs. It may be that the overwhelming popularity
of black leather over brown and the uniformity of the biker model over all
others was born,
finally, in the tacit dance toward agreement that made the co-existence of
the two groups possible. That's guessing again, but I could argue the
point very effectively, I think. Piercing and tattooing, especially if not
covered by normal, daytime clothing, are products more of the greasers'
history than the club-men's. Order and acts of respectful mutual
recognition are contributions of the club-men from which we have derived
what is conceived today as The Old Guard.
That is, the current Old Guard was the new form of the late 1950s and
early 1960s. The (now so-conceived) conflict between the values of the two
groups came to a head any number of times, with the businessmen usually
deciding the compromise. In the late 70s, the (now so-called) New Guard
went too far for the (now so-called) Old Guard to tolerate without
resistance in terms of "frightening the villagers." They were on
the street in their gear--biker leathers without bikes, for instance--and
such behaviors as wearing handcuffs out to be seen or leading boys down
the street in bondage or on a leash.
An important part of what was seen as "going too far" was the
parodying of by-then traditional values by behaving "within" the
forms without having learned the meaning of the gestures and modes
involved. Example: When I hear someone in the new form try to use the word
"Sir," my skin sometimes crawls. The word is not a name or a
noun and, in my world, cannot be used as if it were. It is a title, a
deference, a display of respect, and can only replace a name in direct
conversation with the respected party. The new form likes the word, feels
the charge in it and, apparently, mistakes the charge for the substance.
"You'll call me 'sir,'" results today in the boy speaking
of "my Sir" and doing things because "Sir said to." It's
bad English and a broken descendant of the original use of the word. I
could give a dozen similar examples, but they will only insult and
irritate people. Why would I want to do that?
I don't really know if I have made anything clear at all yet. My point,
at least in part, is that all varieties of leathermen existing today have
existed all along if we are talking about how the men are being. What they
are doing changes with time, but it is always informed from being, and
that seems to come in as many flavors as there are people, but in only two
broad forms. You can have the flavor of your choice, but all flavors are
either sweet or savory--if you know what I mean. On the one, side you have
your institution-builders, community leaders, men who balance their
interactions with the larger world against their relationships in the
leather world. On the other side, you have your rebels, your pioneers,
your "bad boys" who take a fuck-em attitude toward the world
when it is troubled by them. The institution-building types were the New
Guard of 1960, and their habits are the traditions called Old Guard today.
The bad boys of 1960, with shifts due to nothing more than the changes in
the social world, are still with us, and we call them New Guard in the
90s.
So where do we go with this in 1999 and beyond? First, we can accept that
almost all young people will always think that what they are discovering
is new and that, therefore, their version of anything must be called New.
Witness Bossa Nova, la Nouvelle Vague, and New Age, as well as New Guard.
Second, we can accept that youth matures, and we can let it do that at its
own pace and in its own way. Third, once we are over the brashness of
youth and the newness of every (re)invention, we can recognize that the
history of leather, like the history of the world, is made of great forces
diverging and recombining. In
the case of the world of leathersex, the great forces are order (which
supports Master/slave realities best) and rebellion (which supports the
most extreme forms of physical sexuality best). I wouldn't and couldn't
give up either for the other, but I know many people in each camp who--two
to five decades after they started doing SM--still can not accept the
tenets of the "opposing" camp.
I want to be able to work a bottom out to the very edge of his capacity
and mine without negotiating the plan to death, but I also want to be
shown deference and respect once I've earned it. So, at 51, it might be
said that I want to be both New Guard (big tattoo that I show off on the
streets in good weather, piercings that straight resort dwellers have to
put up with, leather gear including whips carried through malls if it
suits me) and Old Guard (careful manners and order, etiquette and respect,
reflected in some level of care that my New leanings don't disturb
others overmuch). If I were 25 years younger, I'd probably have had
blue-green hair by now and piercings in my face as well, but I'm not. If
I were 25 years older (and I know these men very well), I'd probably be
unable to tolerate the in-your-face "freshness" of the young men
and novices who are called New Guard today.
Personally, I can be very nostalgic for the rigid simplicity of the small,
tightly networked circles of SM men I first knew. I liked the freedom that
came from everyone knowing all he needed to know about everyone by
observing their manners and the forms of respect by and around them. I
liked the signs and displays of submission and the easy acceptance of
superior place. But these are all part of the now nearly lost side of the
traditional club-men, the "Old Guard."
In the privacy of my own life (at home and in leather-public as well as
full-public at times) I have been able to strike a nice balance:
everything, all the time, 100% my way. And, my way is usually exactly the
way I was raised: Respect required in all directions, deference in one,
training in the other. That's what is called Old Guard today, but it was
new to the leather world, in a sense, when it was new to me.
The truth is that the Old Guard as is it conceived and spoken of today is
mostly myth. Some of the forms are genuine and have history, but they
never had the kind of universal acceptance and weight they are given in
"memory." That is not a problem! If inventing a way of life that
is loosely (and sometimes comically so) based on the behaviors of the
"Old Guard" results in a myth that can breathe and have value in
the lives of leathermen today, so be it. If Sy Lechter and Jim Kane and
Bill Swenning and Val Martin are to be made (usually nameless) gods in a
pantheon they would not recognize, so be it. Better to become giants and
myths than to be ignored and forgotten. And much of what is being invented
in the name of the Old Guard is genuinely useful, regardless of how it is
rooted in the past.
Is there really a New Guard/Old Guard conflict? Yes, absolutely! What's
more, there will always be a conflict between the two forces driving us
down the leathersex and leather-social road. Paint-by-number safety and
Picasso-like risk/madness can never enjoy each other (except in private
and secret moments of wild passion), but each is undefinable without the
other, maybe even pointless.
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