Finding Friends, Legacy, And Leather Sluts At New Jersey’s Finest Holiday Inn

In 2011, a Princeton Borough police officer gave me a public urination ticket as I was on my way to go drinking. I went home with someone that night and forgot about the ticket in my crumpled pants pocket. Weeks later I paid it off in a panic, hours before my delinquency would have added me to a New Jersey sex offender registry. For no particular reason, I was reminded about that while watching a femme top squat over a girl lying across a storm drain in the courtyard of a Holiday Inn in central Jersey. It took her a little while to find her stream, but she got there.

While I’ve had interesting desires all the way back to my days furtively printing Final Fantasy fetish erotica off the family Epson, I’ve only been in the queer leather world for a few years now. Like many trans folks, turning myself into a girl destabilized my sense of my desires for the better. Cocksucking, anal bottoming, violence: These have become fixtures in my sex life, where before they were fantasies punctuated by shame spirals. But becoming what a good chunk of your country views as a pervert freak is a good way to force yourself to consider whether you might actually be a pervert freak. This is how I became one of 1,100 other pervert freaks converging on a Holiday Inn over a long April weekend for the 40th International Ms. Leather and 27th International Ms. Bootblack, a leatherdyke convention and celebration of kink and community.

My first thought rolling up to the low and liminal three-story office park hotel we’re taking over is, Wow, look at all those dykes. Dykes behind registration desks, verifying COVID rapid test results, directing other dykes with luggage carts spilling over with duffels, hardshell Pelican cases, and sporting goods bags filled with what cannot be sporting goods. Dykes I know and don’t. Boy dykes and girl dykes and men who used to be dykes and dykes who used to be men, innumerable shades of exuberant faggotry, with canes and wheelchairs and mobility aids, some in leather vests dense with pins and patches, some in titleholder sashes, some in sweats and full beats. They embrace in many-way hugs and scream upon seeing each other, like sophomores back from summer. Across the parking lot, a pair of hoss-type white guys in performance basics are practicing golf swings. They’re there for hours, swinging and swinging in a perverse durational scene.