Does the leather community have a Nazi problem?

For a kinkster, the upcoming International Mr. Leather is a beautiful event. Kinky folks of all stripes make lifelong friendships at the competition and community event — and sometimes fall in love. But this year, one IML regular will not be present.

Durk Dehner was removed as a judge of the world’s oldest leather gathering in January after photos of him wearing Nazi regalia circulated online. Following public outcry, Dehner stepped down from his role at the Tom of Finland Foundation, an organization he founded in 1984 with Touko Laaksonen, the original Tom of Finland — arguably the most famous gay erotic artist in history.

Since its founding, ToFF has preserved Laaksonen’s art and legacy, and every year it supports emerging erotic artists, often giving them the career boost they need to find success, and many have been people of color. The organization released a statement apologizing for Dehner’s actions and stating that it does not support hate in any form.

Even so, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Here’s the truth: I love Tom of Finland. I love the dirty comics of men in leather having wild sex. I’m not alone. Many gay men feel a strange affinity for the hypermasculine fantasy Laaksonen’s art depicts.

But Dehner actually knew Tom of Finland! They were contemporaries, friends, and former lovers. Laaksonen was born in Kaarina, Finland, and came of age in the 1930s and ’40s. He had his first gay sex experiences in the blackouts of World War II, when he enjoyed the “irresistible” black boots of German soldiers, according to his bio on the ToFF website. Before he died in 1991, Laaksonen admitted on more than one occasion that some of his art was inspired by SS uniforms.

Suddenly, Laaksonen’s art seemed to need a second look. A disturbing question emerged: If Tom of Finland art suggested something sinister, what did that say about leather culture? Many gay leathermen — myself included — were first drawn to the scene by his drawings. I thought of all my past visits to IML, where one experiences the uncanny sensation of being in a room filled with men in identical leather uniforms. Did it always look this…Nazi?

Pup-Diego Onyx, who holds the title of Mr. Bullet Leather 2024, was the first to post the images, in which Dehner clearly wears a leather cap featuring a tiny gold swastika. I asked Onyx what he thought.

“The first time I saw the photos a few years ago, they made me extremely uneasy and uncomfortable,” he said. “I mentioned it to others in the Los Angeles leather scene and most people brushed it off.” But when he saw Dehner would be a judge at this year’s IML, he decided to make a Facebook post.

“I didn’t believe it was going to make a huge impact,” he said. “As a trans person of color, our voices are often silenced or not taken into consideration. When IML removed him as a judge 12 hours later, I couldn't believe it. For once, I felt like our voices were heard.”

This felt like justice — it’s true that trans voices go ignored too often within the queer community, and I am certain that parts of the leather scene celebrating hypermasculine stereotypes remain unfriendly to my transgender siblings. But Onyx was also, like me, a fan of ToF art: “It was meaningful to me as a young kinkster, seeing something that represented a subculture I was involved in.”

Remembering my art history lessons at university, I decided Tom of Finland art itself can’t be canceled — it cannot be objectively good or bad. It’s art. Good art should, if anything, provoke debate, not quell it. It’s the Picasso problem: Can one judge art apart from its artist? I’m an author, so that answer has always been clear for me: Yes. Many writers in history were monstrous in their personal lives but made great and necessary literature. Their work is not rendered less meaningful by their personal transgressions. If we only celebrated art made by people who appease our modern sensibilities and mores, we’d have a world without rock and roll and countless great books, films, paintings, buildings, and more: a bland, censorious, ugly world.

I felt certain of two things. The first: Leather culture — and broader kink culture — is good and healthy, and is more commonly a safe space for the kinds of people Nazis tried (and still try) to erase and destroy, not Nazis themselves. The second: Dehner did something wrong.

(If I had to list a third thing I felt sure of, it’d be that Tom of Finland did what many queer artists before and after him have done: He took images of power — which were, in his day, militaristic men in uniforms — and queered them. In doing so, he subverted fascists. Subversion and glorification can look similar, but they are profoundly different.)

Context is important. Distressingly, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, invited Nazi comparisons when he did a very suspicious salute twice on national television. That was a political gesture at a political event in service of a political figure, Donald Trump, who has borrowed pages from Hitler’s playbook since he took office in January (charm followers with charisma, invent a domestic enemy and attack it, and threaten to take other lands).

In contrast to Musk, Dehner was a public figure in the leather scene, so his choice to appear in public in Nazi imagery as part of a leather look suggests a Nazi fetish. Was that better? Worse? Neither?

I consulted the brilliant mind of Beatrice Stonebanks — a growth revenue officer for Fortune 500 companies as well as a longtime BDSM dominant (Stonebanks’s pronouns are “she, her, and sir”). Stonebanks is part of the San Francisco organization Divine Deviance, which last year published the book Kink Is with Unbound Edition Press — a collection of personal confessions and antidotes from kinksters across the world. (For full transparency, I’m one of them.)

The book proves that kink is more diverse, healthy, global, and, well, normal than most people think. Kink’s more than Tom of Finland, more (and better) than a bunch of cis men in black leather. Stonebanks herself — a woman in her 60s with kind eyes and a firm, gentle voice — disproves what many think the leather scene is.

First, we talked about ToF art. “When Tom of Finland came along, gay culture was diminished and made fun of, so his hypersexualized imagery brought power to gay men,” she said. But what about Dehner?

Here, she got quieter. She reminded me of what kink really is: the craft of navigating consent. The “safe, sane, and consensual” mantra of kink sets a boundary between acceptable play and wrongdoing, an ethical hardline drawn at consent, not social mores or mainstream acceptability.

“Race play is real and in the kink community,” she said of fetish roleplay that involves racist language and even racist stereotypes and imagery, done willingly by consenting adults for erotic purposes. “There are lots of people who want to engage in race play and even play that involves Nazi imagery. I don’t condone it, but with consent, get your kink on!” She stressed that this is a hard thing for mainstream audiences to grasp, because “most people don’t have an understanding of what this respect-based, boundary-driven, consensual realm is.”

Whatever Dehner’s personal beliefs, he wore Nazi imagery, and he involved the public in an experience — seeing that imagery — without our consent, and that imagery hurt and offended. It hurt Pup-Diego Onyx and made him feel unwelcome in a culture he calls home. It hurt me.

This suggests that consent matters even at the level of information and exposure — and that nonconsent happens the moment one sees someone eroticizing Nazi imagery when they did not consent to that. “Absolutely,” Stonebanks agreed.

In business, Stonebanks brings the communication strategies of kink to the workplace without ever crossing an HR line. “I never say words like ‘BDSM’ or ‘sex’ because that crosses a boundary,” she said. Even so, she takes the principles of being a dominant and brings them to boardrooms without directly stating where these principles come from. “Everyone wants respect-based communication,” she said. “Everyone wants to be heard. Everyone wants clear boundaries, and they want those boundaries honored.”

“I have spent my life in the kinky world of negotiation, consent, and asking how we discuss this stuff and make it work for us,” she added. Dehner “did it to himself” and deserved to be removed as a judge, she said, because he did not consider or respect others’ boundaries.

In the end, I decided that kink was not ruined because one person did wrong. Kink remains an empowering human endeavor of love and mutual care, one that extends across generations and cultures — a global effort among people with weird turn-ons and pervy fetishes to play joyfully and healthily.

But the Durk Dehner controversy reminded me that nothing I love — not even sexy gay comics — is safe from fascism.

And maybe that’s the truth of fascism: It’s always there, a threat to the freedom and joy of the gay and kinky life I revel in. But when I “get my kink on” with the people I love, I know we are everything Nazis hate: fiercely queer, free-loving, joyful humans trying to please each other in a world that misunderstands us. We take care of each other. That’s what kink is.

Alexander Cheves is a writer, sex educator, and author of My Love Is a Beast: Confessions from Unbound Edition Press. @badalexcheves

Need dating advice? Email your question to Cheves at askbeastly@gmail.com — you may get an answer in a future column!

This article is part of the Out March/April issue, which hits newsstands April 1. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting March 20.