As a leather woman I do want people to know how the community actually formed. Motorcycling was a socially acceptable hobby and served two purposes: it as a hobby has just always been useful for men dealing with ptsd who aren’t comfortable with therapy (it’s worse than therapy but it’s better than nothing and it’s not like 1948 Americans were ready to hear that John can’t process that he killed someone and that he fell in love with a soldier who died in his arms), and it served as a convenient excuse to get out of town into the middle of nowhere where nobody will see gay sadomasochism unless they came to see it.

It’s never been a parody of the right, but it has had parodies of what was expected of them. The Nazi fetishists were different folks usually. Though we did have people wearing parodies of us uniforms