lgbtq event spotlight
by tim parks LEATHER PRIDE: SAN DIEGO
A SENSE OF COMMUNITY
E
ach year, members of San Diego’s leather community gather to celebrate their collective unity as a singular entity, showcasing the sense of community within their tribe. The second weekend in March signals the start of the five-day event and kicks off on Wednesday, March 11 and runs through Sunday, March 15.
Aside from the much-heralded San Diego Bootblack and Ms. and Mr. Leather contests
held at the WorldBeat Cultural Center on Saturday night, there will be a series of educational and social events leading up to that auspicious occasion. TheRage Monthly spoke with San Diego Leather Pride producer Tom Dickerson and
last year’s Bootblack titleholder Alexander Williams to get the lowdown on the ties that bind together the leather community. The genesis for Leather Pride began with the Mr. San Diego Leather contest in 1983
and then with the Ms. San Diego Leather in 1995. Dickerson, who has been on both sides of the Leather Pride fence, first as a titleholder and subsequently as a producer of the event, told us about how the latter came to be. “Well, Leather Pride is like any kind of Pride, when a community gets together. It’s a
good opportunity for them to celebrate themselves,” Dickerson said. “I was Mr. San Diego Leather in 2002 and when the end of my year came, the producers didn’t want to do it anymore, so they asked me to take it over. And I did it for seven years and then I stepped away from it. Then about three years ago I got asked to be involved again. “It’s not a really hard thing to do [coming back as producer], it’s just time-consuming getting it all together,” he explained. “It’s all volunteers and we’ve got really good volunteers, which makes it much easier.” Williams, who also goes by the moniker of Pup Rowdy, first became involved with
both the leather community and Leather Pride in 2012 and was drawn toward a specific element of the event when it was introduced. “When they added the Bootblack title, I got especially interested and I had been meaning to run for the Bootblack title since they started it five years ago,” he said. “I had been in contact with the people that produce the title, and they were always kind of bugging me to do it. But I always had some kind of excuse and then finally I decided it was now or never. I proceeded to run my mouth to every single person that I knew as a way to hold myself accountable, so that I would have to run.” Fast forward to 2019, when that accountability paid off for Williams with him win-
ning the title, an experience he termed as “really, really amazing.” “It’s something that I’d been working towards for five years just to compete; I’ve been bootblacking for 10 years, so it felt really cool to get that recognition for my skills,” he said. “And at the same time, I had this moment of ‘Oh my god, I have a whole year of stuff ahead of me now!’
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ragemonthly.com | March 2020 continued on page 14
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