Where the Leatherman's Uniform Came From

Almost everything else on this site is an argument, a case or a text. This is a set of objects: a jacket, a cap, boots, a pair of jeans, a vest with patches on the back. They were assembled into a recognisable uniform over about seventeen years by people who left almost no written explanation of what they were doing, which is why the standard account is such a mixture of documented history and confident invention.

1947, and a photograph

The starting point in the popular version is Hollister, California, over the Fourth of July weekend in 1947, when a motorcycle rally overwhelmed a small town. What actually happened was a weekend of drunkenness, some property damage and around fifty misdemeanour arrests.

What mattered was the picture. Life ran a photograph on 21 July 1947 of a rider slumped on a motorcycle surrounded by beer bottles, taken by Barney Peterson of the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper which did not run it itself. A named Hollister resident later said he watched the bottles being swept into place before the shot was taken. A colleague of the photographer disputed that. The allegation is on the record and so is the denial, and the image did its work regardless: the American outlaw biker as a visual type dates from that page.

1953, and a film

The Wild One followed in 1953, directed by Laszlo Benedek and produced by Stanley Kramer for Columbia, with Marlon Brando as the leader of a club called the Black Rebels. Its British history is a good measure of how the film was read at the time. The censors refused it a certificate on 18 January 1954, refused it again on 20 December 1955, and did not classify it until 21 November 1967, nearly fourteen years after its American release.

Writers close to the American leather scene have credited the film directly. Jack Fritscher’s essay on the muralist Chuck Arnett puts it plainly, that when Brando pulled on a leather jacket men saw a way of being masculine that they recognised, and Gayle Rubin’s fieldwork describes the figures in the Tool Box mural as variations on Brando and James Dean. These are attributions by named witnesses rather than measurements, and they are consistent.

1954 onward, and the clubs

The Satyrs Motorcycle Club was founded in Los Angeles in 1954 and is described by the archive that holds gay Los Angeles material as one of the oldest continuously operated gay organisations in the United States. Its own history describes seven founders, former servicemen with a shared interest in motorcycles and leather. Oedipus MC followed in the same city in 1958, and the same archive notes that Los Angeles supported more than twenty such clubs at the peak. A San Francisco club was running by 1960, and clubs in New York and Chicago followed through the 1960s, nine of them founding a national association of these clubs in April 1969.

This is where the uniform stops being borrowed and starts being made. The standard reference account of the subject records that members produced back patches modelled on the battalion patches they had brought home from the war, called them colours, and had medals struck in imitation of the sortie pins issued for wartime missions. Nothing about that is metaphorical. A generation that had spent its early twenties in an institution which used cloth and metal to say who you were and what you had done built its own version, for an identity that institution would have discharged them for.

Rubin’s reading of the result is that two incompatible sources were fused: military practice supplying formality, hierarchy and discipline, and biker imagery supplying disorder and individualism. The internal tensions of leather culture for the next fifty years are visible in that sentence.

1957 and 1964: the look gets published

Two publications fixed it. The Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, born in 1920, first appeared in the American magazine Physique Pictorial in 1957 under the name its editor gave him, Tom of Finland, and drew for three decades afterwards. The scholarly assessment of his effect, made in a peer-reviewed article in 2003, is that his drawings were central to the development and dissemination of a more unified gay leather aesthetic. A style that had varied by city became one style, because everybody was looking at the same pictures.

Then, on 26 June 1964, Life photographed the inside of a San Francisco leather bar, described in the Life article of 1964. Its account of what the men were wearing is the earliest detailed outside description on the record: the caps worn at an angle, the thumbs hooked into belts, the keys hanging from those belts. That last detail is the seed of the signalling convention traced in the history of the hanky code, and it is being reported here by a journalist who has no idea he is documenting a code.

What is not documented

Three things, and they are the three most often stated with confidence.

The cap has no established lineage. Explanations deriving it from a particular military or police pattern, or crediting a named manufacturer with inventing it, circulate without citation. The garment is attested from the early 1960s; its ancestry is not.

The checklist is later than the thing it describes. Lists specifying an exact jacket, an exact jean and an exact boot are codifications produced after the fact, some of them by the instructional literature that began with Larry Townsend’s handbook in 1972. Period sources describe a look, not a specification.

And the tidy sequence is too tidy. Hollister to The Wild One to the Satyrs to Tom of Finland is a clean line, and the actual process was a lot of men in several cities improvising with what was cheap, available and legible, over about two decades. The era essay for 1946 to 1969 sets out the wider period, and the full timeline puts these dates in order.