Topic · Organisations
International Mr Leather: A Bar Contest That Became a Congress
By Niall Brannagh, Law, language and community Published 9 September 2026
In brief
International Mr Leather was first held in Chicago in May 1979, founded by Chuck Renslow and the artist Dom Orejudos out of a contest that had been running at their own bar, the Gold Coast. Around twelve contestants competed and David Kloss won. It grew from a few hundred people in a hotel ballroom into the leather world's annual gathering, with a vendor market, delegations from other contests and, from 1989, a flag.
Most of the institutions in this history were founded in somebody’s living room by people who wrote a constitution. This one was founded in a bar, by a businessman, as a competition, and it turned out to be more durable than most of the organisations that had constitutions.
Chicago before the contest
Chuck Renslow was born in Chicago on 26 August 1929. By the time the first International Mr Leather was held he had been operating in this world for a quarter of a century: a physique photography studio from the early 1950s, the Gold Coast, a bathhouse opened in 1973, and a motorcycle club founded in 1965 that was among the first of its kind outside the West Coast.
The Gold Coast is the relevant piece. Renslow and partners took over the premises in 1958 and it reopened under that name in 1960. It is widely described as the first gay leather bar in the United States, which is a superlative rather than an audited fact, and it operated in Chicago until the late 1980s. Its interior, its clientele and its house artist all belonged to the postwar culture set out in the era essay for 1946 to 1969.
Dom Orejudos, born on 1 July 1933, was Renslow’s partner for around forty years and the other founder. He drew as Etienne, and his work did for the Chicago scene approximately what Tom of Finland’s did for everyone else. He was also, in a detail that makes the standard account of leather culture harder to keep tidy, a principal dancer with the Illinois Ballet and later its resident choreographer.
1979
The bar had run a Mr Gold Coast contest since the early 1970s and it had grown past the room. In May 1979 the event moved to a hotel ballroom on Michigan Avenue, took the name International Mr Leather, and drew around twelve contestants and a few hundred people. David Kloss won.
The word international was a statement of intent. In the first year the field was almost entirely American. Within a decade it was not, and the contest had become the fixed point in the calendar that a dispersed population uses to find itself: clubs sending delegations, other contests sending their winners, and a vendor market that grew into the largest commercial gathering the subculture has.
Attendance figures should be handled carefully. Reported counts of a few hundred in 1979 rising into the low thousands by the mid-1980s come from single sources, and the very large numbers quoted for recent years are organisers’ estimates rather than audited ones.
What the weekend became
The contest is the smallest part of it. What assembled around it was an annual congress: the market, the club delegations, the fundraising, the parties, the arguments and the informal business that a subculture with no head office has to conduct somewhere.
Two things follow from that. The first is that the leather world acquired a calendar. Anything that needed to be announced, launched or settled could be scheduled against a date in May that everybody already knew. The clearest example is the design examined in the history of the leather flag, unveiled by Tony DeBlase at the 1989 contest precisely because it was the one occasion where a new symbol could reach the whole constituency in a weekend.
The second is that the contest circuit multiplied. A rival series ran from 1980 and 1981 out of the magazine described in Drummer magazine. International Ms Leather was incorporated in 1986 and held its first contest in San Francisco in 1987, won by Judy Tallwing McCarthy. Mr International Rubber began in Chicago in November 1997. Each addressed a constituency that the original had not, which is the usual way this history proceeds.
Arguments
Title contests attract a specific criticism and always have: that judging people on stage selects for appearance and nerve, and that a subculture which claims to be about negotiated intimacy is an odd place to hold a beauty pageant. That criticism was made at the time and has never gone away.
What the contests supplied in exchange is concrete. Titleholders are people, and a movement that needs somebody to speak to a reporter, testify at a hearing or headline a benefit cannot get that from a mailing list. The contests raised money continuously through the AIDS years, when the institutions described in the history of BDSM organisations were converting themselves into health education and memorial services. And the titles carried politics: contemporaneous accounts record the win by Ron Moore in 1984 as the contest’s first by an African American man and as controversial at the time, and the 1985 titleholder as the first to use the year as a platform for activism about the epidemic.
A bar competition in Chicago is an unlikely place for any of that to have started. It is nonetheless where it started, and the full timeline has the sequence.
This page is assembled from published biographies and the notes at the back of them, period magazines and newspapers, the minutes, newsletters and membership records that organisations left behind, court reports and published judgments, and academic histories of sexuality. Dates and events are taken from that documentary record rather than from what the subculture repeats about itself, and the two often disagree. Where the record is thin, where it survives only through a single interested witness, or where historians still argue about what happened, the page says so in the text instead of smoothing it over.
Questions readers ask
Who founded International Mr Leather?
Chuck Renslow, born in Chicago in 1929, and his partner Dom Orejudos, who drew under the name Etienne. Renslow ran the Gold Coast, widely described as the first gay leather bar in the United States, and had already built a physique photography studio, a bathhouse and a motorcycle club. Orejudos was a principal dancer and later resident choreographer with the Illinois Ballet, and the leather world's most reproduced illustrator after Tom of Finland. Renslow died in 2017; Orejudos died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.
Did the contest come from somewhere?
From the bar. The Gold Coast had run its own title contest since the early 1970s, and it outgrew the room. The 1979 event moved into a hotel ballroom on Michigan Avenue and added the word international, which at that point was aspirational rather than descriptive. The lineage matters because it explains the format: the judging categories, the interview and the sequence of appearances are a bar competition scaled up, not an institution designed on paper.
What does a leather title actually do?
Three things that a membership organisation does badly. It produces a person who can be asked to speak, which a committee cannot supply. It raises money, because contests sell tickets and titleholders headline other people's fundraisers. And it fixes a date and a place in the calendar, which gives a population spread across a continent a reason to be in one room once a year. The criticism, made at the time and since, is that it selects for physical presentation and public confidence rather than for anything else, which is true and does not cancel the first three points.
This thread has not been cut
Law, language and community argument all keep moving, and the people moving them are in the same rooms as everyone else.
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