CLAW 19 Press Release May 27th, 2019

Cleveland, Ohio, May 27, 2019 – CLAW 19 was a huge success, enjoyed by a record 2250 registered attendees, a 15% increase over last year, marking 18 consecutive years of growth.

CLAW filled three hotels (Westin, Hampton and Aloft) and several other venues with more than 250 different events and exhibitors:

• 125 different skills and education sessions, the world’s largest curriculum of kinky sex education for men;
• 50 different vendors -- all on the Westin’s 6th floor;
• 20 hotel parties and receptions, including the magnificent Bound and Beautiful Live Muscle Gallery and Auction;
• 10 banquets, including our best ever International Leather Family Dinner and the debut of three new dinner buffets at the Westin, including our first ever BLUF dinner;
• 10 speed dating sessions, where hundreds of men got to meet 12 like-minded men each in less than an hour;
• 10 bar parties at the Leather Stallion Saloon, Mean Bull, McCarthy’s and Stella’s;
• 7 Men’s BDSM Play Parties at the extraordinary Academy Dungeon;
• 3 naked pool parties at FLEX Spa;
• 3 silent auctions with 500 different items of gear and other merchandise.

CLAW 19 also featured in-room coffee service, a CLAW Body Spa, two showings of the Tom of Finland movie, six Leather Recovery meetings, and the third annual SquarePegToys® Misfit Toys Sale, which raised almost $9000 for CLAW charities.

The CLAW Bootblacks raised a record amount for charity too, and ten people participated in the Bootblack Apprenticeship program.

The 11th annual Leather Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and Brunch honored the Leather Archives & Museum, Samois, and Fakir Musafar.

The private and equipped CLAW Cigar Deck on the Westin’s 5th floor parking ramp continued to be the greatest space on earth for hundreds of CLAW attendees.

Last but not least, CLAW and Alphatribe Magazine were hosts to Fetish Alliance, the first ever business to business reception for leather and kink professionals.

1001 volunteers helped make all this happen, including 400 in leadership roles. Volunteer of the Year Awards were won by Roger Edwards (Facilities Coordinator) and Rostom Mesli (Leather Hall of Fame Coordinator) and the Cornerstone Award was given to long time emcees and entertainers Larry Golubski and Lou Romano. Awards were presented to the Titans of the Midwest for all their educational initiatives, and the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit at Case Western Reserve University for all their tireless work protecting the health of sexually active communities, including ours.

Very special thanks to our five Master Sponsors: SquarePegToys®, Mr-S-Leather, FLEX Spas, REV4Men and LeatherWerks, and our twenty Sustaining Sponsors: Nasty Kink Pigs, Blow Buddies, Twisted Headz Smokeshops, Jackhammer, Leather Stallion Saloon, Torso, Leather64Ten, Chicago Hellfire Club, Jim Support, Alphatribe, Recon, Touche, Palm Springs Leather Pride, The Point Tent and Trailer, ICON Detroit, Mr Michigan Leather, Bootblack Round-Up, Stompers Boots, Westin Cleveland and The Hampton Inn Cleveland.

The profits from CLAW 19 will be distributed to community charities by the CLAW Board of Directors on Sept 6, with planning meetings for CLAW 20 on Sept 7-8. Contact CLAW through our website for more information and to help us plan to make CLAW 20 even bigger and better. The future of sex is very good!

Bob Miller
CLAW Executive Director

P R E S S  R E L E A S E

Leather Hall of Fame 2019 Inductee List

December 3, 2018

The Leather Hall of Fame honors and preserves the legacy of the extraordinary people and organizations that have significantly shaped the history of the leather/BDSM communities worldwide since 1950.

The Board of Governors is pleased to announce the nominees selected for induction in the Leather Hall of Fame in 2019: SAMOIS; FAKIR MUSAFAR; THE LEATHER ARCHIVES AND MUSEUM.

SAMOIS

Created in June 1978 in the Bay Area, Samois was the first lesbian and feminist SM organization. Like other contemporary SM groups such as The Eulenspiegel Society and The Society of Janus, Samois had three main functions: social, educational, and political. During the infamous feminist “sex wars,” Samois led the fight against Bay Area antiporn feminist organizations and, by becoming one of the major voices of sex-positive feminism, it gained fame well beyond the SM world and well beyond California.

 
FAKIR MUSAFAR (1930-2018)

A founding father of the “modern primitive movement,” Fakir Musafar gained a large audience through his art, his writings, and his classes. He became an extremely influential figure of what he called “body play” — body piercing, branding, body-sculpting, sensory deprivation, flesh hook suspension, etc.. In a society largely hostile to his explorations, Fakir’s passion for intense bodily experiences resonated with many kinksters. Fakir helped to broaden the scope of kink, and to expand awareness of, and access to, many of the now popular technologies of body modification.

THE LEATHER ARCHIVES & MUSEUM (LA&M)

Since the early 1990s, when Tony DeBlase and Chuck Renslow laid the foundations for a repository for the primary documentation, art, and artifacts of leather culture, the Leather Archives & Museum has become a premier, central, and unique leather institution. The LA&M houses an extensive library, with over 7,100 titles; a museum that contains over 1,500 artworks as well as 10,000 fetish objects and gear; and an unparalleled archive preserving the papers of over 125 individuals and leather organizations and making them, as well as oral histories, manuscripts, accessible to researchers.