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At the end of his 1980 travelogue to gay America, States of Desire, Edmund White commented, "I never had either the time or the money to penetrate the necessarily more closeted gay life of small towns. Working on a limited budget and even borrowing money to complete my travels, I found it simpler to head for big cities during those short periods I could spare from my duties as a teacher. Understandable as my strategy might be, it has given a strangely lopsided view of American gay life."
A similar statement could be made concerning portraits of gay leather life. Writings about leather groups in the 1970s and 1980s leave one with the impression that leather was at that time such a pervasive subculture within the gay community that it was difficult, if not impossible, to keep from stumbling over it.
No doubt this was true in the big cities (though even there it was difficult to enter into the inner world of leathermen until the eighties). To learn how different life has been for some leathermen living in smaller communities, one need only listen to Mack, a university professor living in a small town in the Midwest, who was interviewed for Jack Ricardo's 1993 book, Leathermen Speak Out, Volume 2. When asked how often he had sex with any other leatherman, Mack replied, "At best, once a year."
Small American communities – especially small, conservative, geographically isolated communities – can be time machines, preserving values and practices that have been abandoned for decades in the big cities. Obviously, this has both good and bad aspects to it. At any rate, the impression given by histories of sexuality – that information on gay sadomasochism was readily available by the beginning of the 1980s – does not match my own experience of growing up during that era in a community about the size of Mayhill (though my hometown was considerably less isolated and more liberal than Mayhill). Edgeplay in Mayhill is therefore my attempt to write a novel about the other leathermen: the men who had to make their own rules, based on the scraps of information they were able to gather.
This novel is also my attempt to penetrate past the conventions about leather life that have been established by leather literature. As one full-time leatherman commented caustically in Joseph W. Bean's Leathersex, concerning the couples in such stories, "The whole relationship takes place in a land of make-believe. Everybody has lots of money. Nobody has to do anything sordid like go out and work." It's a fantasy that can be played out when the encounter is nothing more than a three-hour game. When the encounter becomes something more, reality hits in a painful manner.
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