Recent changes to ILSb/ICBB to dissolve regional contracts, limit trans men from participating have ‘literally torn the community apart’
TICKED OFF | Jeffrey Payne-Roy, who bought the International Leather SIR/boy competition a year ago, is being criticized for requiring contestants to be cisgender gay males. (Arnold Waynes Jones/Dallas Voice)
The local leather community is upset about a recent change to the Dallas-based International Leather SIR/boy and International Community Bootblack organization that will limit transgender participants.
The Dallas-based ILSb/ICBB board of directors announced several changes last week that included dissolving contracts with regional producers, preventing appointed titleholders from running for ILSb/ICBB and requiring the contestants to be cisgender gay males.
The decision to exclude the transgender community was at the center of debate this week.
Jeffrey Payne-Roy, president of the board and co-owner of the Dallas Eagle, bought the contest a little more than a year ago and it was held in Dallas last month. He said after the board announced the changes a week ago, it sparked a heated debate among the leather community. He declined to comment until after an emergency board meeting Thursday evening, which was closed to media.
The board of directors released a letter Friday, Sept. 27, explaining that it had unanimously rescinded the transgender exclusion in the ILSb competition during its meeting Thursday evening. The letter also explains the reasons behind the changes.
However, Payne-Roy told the online publication Leatherati that after new management took over, the ILSb/ICBB board felt the changes were necessary to continue their vision of the organization. Payne said that ICBB, which had a transgender winner when Henry James won in 2006, will remain open to any gender.
“We are not turning our back on any segment of the community,” Payne-Roy told Leatherati. “It is okay for an international title to belong to a gay man. But we welcome everyone to the party as far as the weekend events and so on. As far as the Leather Sir and Leatherboy, it will belong to the gay male community. ICBB will again have no change there because it is a community title that is open to anyone.”
The cisgender male requirement dates back to the International Drummer Boy competition. ILSB was originally a contest for cisgender gay males until it moved to California five years ago, where the law required organizers to open up the contest for anyone who legally identified as male.
The city of Dallas has a nondiscrimination ordinance dating back to 2002 that prohibits discrimination in public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which is included in the definition of sexual orientation.
Rafael McDonnell, communications and advocacy manager at Resource Center, volunteered at this year’s event at Crown Plaza with the Dallas Bears. He said he’s concerned that the cisgender requirement will violate the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance, especially since the event is expected to return to Dallas. As for whether the ordinance would apply to the event because its owner and organization are based in Dallas even if the contest is held outside city limits, he said the situation becomes complicated.
“It certainly would complicate things,” McDonnell said. “But then you run the specter of having the city of Dallas investigating an LGBT organization for violating its nondiscrimination ordinance, and that’s something nobody can win. … Even if it they were to find that it wasn’t discrimination, it would still look bad.”
The feedback from community members became so heated since the announcement that Payne-Roy posted on his Facebook on Monday that he was shocked by the emails mentioning “threats of physical harm to myself and/or my family.”
“You have taken this way too far and the next one I get will be dealt with by the authorities,” he wrote. “Passion is one thing; fanatical behavior is another.”
Mo Snow, a transgender member of the local leather community, hasn’t competed in the contest before but has come out and supported the events. He said the changes seemed sudden from the new management and it reflected poorly on them.
“As a package, it seems to be a fundamentally bad management decision,” he said, adding that input from the larger leather community wasn’t sought. “It seems really rash. There was no town hall meeting.”
Over the past week, Snow said the leather community has been mostly offended by the trans exclusion, which shows how much times have changed and how much more supportive the LGB community has become of the trans community.
“At least in the leather bubble, it’s kind of exploded,” he said. “From everything I’ve seen, it’s been negative.”
Snow said he respects the need for gender-specific spaces, such as women and men’s organizations, but he said if Payne-Roy wanted to continue the Drummer Boy tradition, he should have brought back that contest.
“Why not revive [Drummer Boy] instead of taking away something that’s been open to everyone and trying to rewind it 20 years?” Snow asked. “But the difference is that what he did wasn’t going to create a space. He took it over and kicked people out. You can’t not take that personally.”
Mark Jiminez, who has been competing in leather contests since 1990, declined to comment on the controversy other than to say that he and husband Beau Chandler will be competing in the Gulf Coast Leather Sir/boy and Community Bootblack contest.
“And we are 100 percent confident that the board of directors for the contest will diligently look at the issue and come up with a well-thought-out decision,” Jiminez said.
Hardy Haberman, a longtime LGBT activist and prominent Dallas leatherman, said the reasons behind the changes are unclear and have divided the community.
“My take on the whole this is the rules change, I understand if they want to change the rules. It’s their contest, they can do whatever they want,” he said. “I think it is phenomenally insensitive and I think it relegates transgender men to a third sex and that’s not what they want to be.”
The change about ending the contracts with local producers, who are often individuals and bars that put on a contest, judge it and sponsor the titleholder, was also a surprise, he said.
“That’s the untold story in this and I’m not quite sure what the reasoning is,” he said.
While there is a new trans leather contest, Haberman said International Mr. Leather dropped cisgender rules years ago and Tyler McKormick was IML titleholder in 2010.
And with ILSb being more for players, with IML being more of an image contest, Haberman said many people have started to take sides, with most opposing the rule changes. But even if the board decides to undo the changes, he said he thinks the damage to the competition has already been done as many people have vowed not to support it in the future.
“Surely they never would have thought that this would become such a big deal,” Haberman said. “Because it has literally torn the community apart.”
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition September 27, 2013.