Being gay has definitely made its way into mainstream. When you feel so different in the real world and others are hogging up every gym in America, and the regular gay guy is jocking for a romantic dinner, and the gay world is just going about its regularly vanilla white exterior, thank heaven for the leather world.

The world of leather retains a raw look at the sexual nature of leatherfolk around the community tha'ts gone missing from other queer spaces and scenes in our journey from underground to everywhere.

In the leather community now, you can see on stage jockeying for titles, their fight to battle for good causes and community service while this could naturally provoke a sneeze but its true they fight for what they believe and do it with poise and character.

While leather old-timers grumble about the lost days of ritual and courtship, about newcomers who don leather merely for fashion, who eschew clubs and codes and instead plump for quick-connects over the internet.

But even when leather tries to fit in, it stands out. One weekend in 2004 or late May, 12,000 leather-clad (and often largely unclad) guys thronged the Chicago Hyatt Regency for International Mr. Leather-- one of the mega-events on the global leather circuit. You knew from the wide-eyed bewilderment of the stray businesswoman or family-from-Iowa that it wasn't a gay-marriage conference.

"What is leather?"

A good place to start is with the stuff itself-- the feel, the smell of it, maybe even, if there's a bridle in your toolkit, its taste. But most of all, there're the inexhaustible meanings of cloaking one's skin in an animal's.

For many purists, leather's erotic charge goes way back before conscious sexual orientation.  Here is what one leather enthusiast said "My first and very early-- at the age of six or seven-- interest was in riding-boots and breeches, which in England, after the First World War, were common sights," recalls Jason, an enthusiast now pushing 90, who lives in California, and recounts his history on the fascinating site www.cuirmale.nl. "Also, military uniforms, especially booted horse-soldiers and mounted policemen, gave me lots of excitement," Jason goes on, sparing no detail. "Some motorcyclists wore long leather coats, like early pilots used to wear. Those early air-circus pilots were very dashing and exciting to my young eyes. They didn't have leather pants, but wore tight white breeches and shiny boots with their leather jackets, and long white silk scarves flying out behind their leather helmets and goggles."

A devotion to leather as end-in-itself is evident as well among the makers of chaps, harnesses, thongs, cuffs, and jackets-- the fetish objects around which the scene revolves. As the modern leather underground coalesced post-World War II, the motorcycle clubs that were its nucleus had to buy their gear from firms in the military and police trade. But today, gay leather has spawned a world of craftsmen-- who, if they weren't serving their communities-- could be running high-end workshops in Modena or Milan.

Naturally, such accomplished practitioners sometimes journey to water's edge to catch the zeitgeist's incoming tides. "Purple is the hot new color," declares a press release announcing Northbound Leather's winter 2005 collection, inspired by cartoons and animated porn from Japan. Black bomber-jackets will sell perennially, says Northbound president George Giaouris, but "young guys today are more into the brightly-colored motocross uniforms that have a superhero influence, as opposed to the Tom of Finland aesthetic that's been popular since the 1960s and 1970s."