Asexual Histories of the Leather Subculture: A Semi-Structured Approach to Identity and Belonging

Asexuality and the leather subculture are often assumed to be in direct opposition in terms of their relationship to sexuality. In this study, I employ an oral history of an asexual leatherperson, using a semi-structured interview with archival methods, to explore how leather, BDSM, and asexual identities can interact to form an asexual individual's cohesive social and erotic a/sexual experience, and to facilitate their greater sense of belonging. I found that the leather scene's values—such as fantasy, communal intimacy, and repeated patterns of self-emergence—provide asexual practitioners with levels of self-trust that transform not only their a/sexual commitments, but their vanilla lives as well. In addition, I consider how asexual participants reconstruct normatively sexual acts into non-sexual ones, and how leather and BDSM relationships can form notably different forms of intimacy than allonormative and heteronormative conceptions of sex and love.