"I was surprised to read this. It's from a conversation between New York based artists Nayland Blake and Rachel Harrison. Only one leather bar left in New York? That's a disappointing sign of the times:" I participated in a short-lived leather activism group in nyc that attempted to address the decline of the leather community without much success. Locally there are many factors contributing to the decline. The biggest obstacle is affordable space which is connected to the rise of monied owners (vs. renters) in Manhattan who don't want nightlife in their neighborhood. However, that hasn't stopped the skyrocketing, mostly heterosexual, drinking establishments catering to NYU students. But the NYPD's vice squad has been consistently making raids on sex clubs, booth stores and leather clubs over the past fifteen years and has more or less successfully shut them all down. There's also the rumored NYPD "hip-hop squad" which targets night life spaces for black and latino young people. All of these anti-sex and anti-nightlife initiatives began under Mayor Dinkins but were cemented into an institutional practice under Giuliani's "quality of life" campaigns which Bloomberg has more or less continued. Bruce Benderson and Samuel Delaney have written at length on NYC and the NYPD's successful attempt to remove all traces of the city's red light districts. There's also the single minded obsession in the gay community on monogamy and marriage that has contributed to the decline. Connected to that is the devastation of the older players in the community from AIDS. Like a lot of things, a kind of received wisdom stopped getting passed on and the leather repertoire was one of its casualties. And there's an undeniable dustiness of the sexual allure of the repertoire's characters... leather jacketed "rebels" from the 50's, cowboys, etc. And finally, there's the dominance of online social networking where people with the most fine tuned sexual obsessions can hook-up without the necessity of a leather bar; though I have my doubts whether these hook-ups, often based on a sexual obsession reduced to its most abstract detail, can profoundly satisfy. The decline appears to have hit the European capitals as well. Amsterdam, in terms of a leather scene, is a shadow of what it once was and so are London and Paris. Antwerp and Berlin are still going strong, bless 'em. So the problem, if you think it's a problem, is not just localized. fm