“I grew up in Alberta, Canada and I was both a country kid and a city kid. I had been into leather ever since I was a little kid. I was stealing engineer boots when I was 8 years old. I was the little gopher boy for the biker shop; I used to go and run and get them soda pops and polish their bikes and hope that one of them would give me a ride on their bike and maybe, you know ….”

Gay & Lesbian Times: Where were you in your life when you met Tom?

Durk Dehner: I was, in many ways, a small-town kid. I was being mentored by one of the really great leather guys in New York at the time, Louie Weingarten. He really introduced me to people and then he got me into a leather contest, which, here it is, it was about a leather contest, except the leather contests back then were a little bit different than they are nowadays. The contests were not so legitimized.

GLT: You borrowed gear from friends and entered a leather contest at the Eagles Nest bar in New York. What was the contest like?

DD: I was on stage dragging guys up and making them serve me right on stage. It was very impromptu … and in the end I won the contest. As a result of that, I won a photo session with Target Studios, which was a male studio, where I got to meet Dom Orejudos, the artist Etienne. I was around 26 when I showed Etienne this little [bar poster] about a motorcycle run. It was a Tom of Finland drawing. Since I didn’t grow up around it, I had never seen his work, and so he told me: “That’s Tom of Finland and you probably would like him. Do you really like his work?” He gave me his address.

GLT: Etienne also encouraged you into another leather title contest in 1979.

DD: I was in the first International Mr. Leather Contest. The funny part is that Etienne wanted me to be in that contest because it was the first one. He created a big poster for the contest, and who was the poster of but his embodiment of me! So there I am, a human, with these huge, god-like posters behind us at this contest, and it’s almost, like, ridiculous to tell anybody this is me.

GLT: In your opinion, has openness about sexuality changed since then?

DD: I’m afraid things have changed, and they haven’t changed in the direction that I would prefer. For me, when I came into the leather community – I can even expand that and say the gay community – the motto was that you could be whatever you want to be within this space. You could act any way you want, dress any way you want. There was a level of permission that was vital. People were more willing to open up their boundaries. And people really valued it. They valued it so much that they didn’t have to toe the line according to certain rules and regulations that were in the outside world. I’m afraid that what I’ve noticed happening more and more is that our community is adopting all of the political correctness that the outside world had.

GLT: However, this sexuality and momentum gathering after Stonewall would soon be challenged forever by HIV/AIDS.

DD: Yes, we were then saddled with a hellish political situation where we were fighting for rights on one level and fighting for lives on another. The contestants and winners got pulled into becoming these advocates for political and social change, and it really destroyed their ability to just be wonderful sexual hedonistic men. Now, mind you, a lot of people would say, “Don’t you think it’s the opposite, that you were actually able to expand yourselves beyond being just hedonistic sexual guys and be something that was more substantial and life-changing?” and I can’t disagree with that.

GLT: So if you don’t disagree, why make the point about these leaders being sexual icons?

DD: We have not learned from our ancestors about how to protect and guard things that need to be kept secret – that need to be kept mysterious. If you have something that is sexual and you take it into the broad daylight when it has only been seen at night, you demystify it. We had a whole sexual life that was private to us. But with AIDS, what happened was that it got served up to the public completely, so that they knew everything that we were doing. So there wasn’t anything that was mysterious or private, and I personally think that keeps the beauty of it together. That keeps the heat of it going.

GLT: Tom’s art has a role in glorifying the male to a godly level. How is that image to be received as art?

DD: I don’t want to ever get into analyzing his work. Who knows what happens. The one thing that he allowed was to give himself total permission to do anything he wanted to in his work. He felt like he did not have to stand by any kind of standard because he held his stuff as fantasy, and he gave himself full permission. I think you have to give artists this kind of permission to allow them to do whatever they do with what they create. Meaning, it might not have even been healthy that Tom put the male on such a level, but sometimes artists need to be able to do that so they can build these monolithic creations – like when we see the sculptures of the Roman Empire, ones that glorify the male – they have to have the kind of vision of an artist of Tom of Finland’s size to really pull it off.

GLT: Do you consider Tom’s art to have an influence on the leather community? Would you describe it as gay “leathermale” art?

DD: Actually, that’s a misnomer because if you look at the whole body of Tom’s work, it was not leather. It was the leather community that actually took hold of him and really loved his work; they used it all over the world and he became popularized by that means. There is a really broad range of [Tom’s] works. There is an exhibition of his preliminary drawings that is traveling in Europe right now, about 20 of his finished works, and very few of those are leather oriented.

GLT: Did he draw females?

DD: I say that there is actually no sense in us saying he did draw anything else because the fact is that 99 percent of all of his drawings of females look like bad, rather hefty milkmaids. They are transvestites at 7 in the morning.

GLT: Harvey Shipley Miller, director of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, said that Tom of Finland is one of the five most influential artists of the 20th century. This is a major accomplishment for the foundation. Congratulations.

DD: Influential. And that means that he influenced more of our culture, more of our people, more than other artists, than anyone else. He said that the interesting thing about Tom of Finland is that his influence transcended into the culture. And that goes back to what you were saying. Guys started to become Tom of Finland art – the look, the leather cap, the leather jacket, the whole uniform. He would never take ownership for that, but he used his artistry to create it….

GLT: The poster that eventually brought you together was pirated, as was much of his work. Tom of Finland was already a standard when you met him. How do you feel about an artist’s rights to his or her work, especially with the advent of the Internet?

DD: An artist owns their work. We tracked down a professor at a very major university who was taking Tom’s work and putting [the name] “Nick Steel” on it [and] sending it out into the Internet for quite a few years. The thing that bothered me the most about this was that there were younger people who were growing up who had never seen Tom of Finland and they would see this drawing on the Internet. They would think that this piece was created by someone else. That bothered me more than anything.

GLT: You were with Tom when fans shared how his art affected them. What was that like? What did they say?

DD: By and large, what they wanted to communicate was: “I want to tell you thank you so much for providing me with the kind of imagery and the messaging you had in that imagery – to make me feel good about who I am as a gay man, and that I can be a masculine gay man and am as much of a man being gay as any other man. I got that from your art and I want to thank you.”

Over and over again I got to hear this, so I said to him, “We need to set up a foundation to preserve your work, not because you’re the best artist in the world, but because of how you have affected so many people – you have changed their lives.”

He reluctantly and shyly said, “OK, I think you’re right.”

GLT: What are the foundation’s goals and projects?

DD: You know what, we are financially very strapped. We had to do major cutbacks at the end of last year and lay off people that had been with us for a long time because we didn’t have the ongoing revenue to keep them employed. We have not been a foundation that has been able to garner grants very easily from most of the granting organizations, even though Tom has achieved so much. We have been turned down by a lot of established granting organizations because they are afraid to put us on their list, since they don’t know how some of their donors will feel.

One of the things we want to do is to have digital files of all the work in our archives available so that curators from anywhere in the world can look at the work, and they can choose to borrow and use it so that it’s out in the world. We want our permanent collection traveling in exhibits everywhere.

GLT: Tell us about the art to be sold at the silent auction at the Mr. San Diego Leather Contest.

DD: I’m actually sending some beautiful, very large photo prints that were done by an artist from Texas who died in the AIDS epidemic. His name was Tank, and his collection was donated to the foundation by his partner after Tank passed away. That’s one of the things the foundation has been, a place where your work can [go] and people will know that it will have a home, be cared for and that they will not be forgotten.

Our motto is to preserve, to protect and to educate. So clearly the archives are all about preserving and protecting. We try to prevent it from being thrown away and disregarded, and educating is being out there in some force to actually show people that this work is worthy of them looking at, appreciating, hanging, buying – worthy of them respecting the artists that are doing it, getting the kind of credibility they deserve, and that’s what our art fairs have been all about. It’s a wonderful experience because anyone can come and find artists that they can just enjoy.

GLT: Last year, Leather Pride Week donated funds to the Tom of Finland Foundation, which I had the honor to present. The funds were split three ways: to general operating funds, to the archives (which operate without an allocated budget) and to the framing of art. Tell the readers about this unique way to make a lasting donation to the foundation.

DD: We have so much work that is waiting to be framed because it has been donated to us in a form that is not framed. That has to wait to have somebody willing to pay for the framing. They can even choose the one that they want [to frame], too. And what happens is that you can frame for a couple of hundred dollars on up, and then your name goes with that piece whenever it is exhibited.

Leather Pride Week kicks off in San Diego Thursday, March 8, with an All Club Night at the Joyce Beers Community Center, and culminates with the Mr. San Diego Victory Brunch on Sunday, March 18. The Mr. San Diego Leather Contest takes place Saturday, March 17, at Rich’s. See below for a complete schedule of events.

Proceeds from Leather Pride Week benefit the Tom of Finland Foundation and Being Alive San Diego.

If you believe that all erotic art should be preserved and honored, please consider supporting the Tom of Finland Foundation by calling 213-250-1685 or e-mailing administration@tomoffinlandfoundation.org. For more information about the Tom of Finland Foundation, visit www.tomoffinlandfoundation.org.

This interview is the first in an interview series called “Buster’s Barker,” an oral history project aimed at preserving the cultural heritage of our community leaders and elders. For more information, please email buster.barker@yahoo.com.