About BlufBear
I write as a gay man in my mid-40s, but more than that, I write as someone still learning to unpick the knots that shame and desire can tie together. My pen name is BlufBear, a nod to the Breeches and Leather Uniform crowd where I first found belonging and expression. But that identity didn’t arrive neatly. It came layered in fear, yearning, and the long echo of rejection.
Leather has always called to me, even before I had the words to understand why. My great-grandfather, was a shoemaker awarded a CBE for supplying boots to British troops during wartime. My father inherited the family business, City Leather, and though it closed in the early 2000s, the smell of hides remain hardwired in me. I sometimes joke that leather is in my DNA, but I don’t say it lightly.
I grew up in a world that wanted boys to be tough, rough, and straight. I was a soft, bookish kid. I preferred needlework to football, netball to rugby, and yet was made to feel that those preferences were wrong. I remember being scolded for dancing, warned that my absent father would think I was a “sissy.” I stopped going to the afterschool club where I expressed my authentic life out of fear of being perceived as different. From an early age, I learned to mask the parts of me that felt too gentle or too feminine. And I learned to crave the approval of those who made me feel unsafe.
Leather became my armour. Watching Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his black leather blazer and pants, or the cool boys at school in their biker jackets, I saw masculinity that was dark, confident, and somehow seductive. When I made friends with Stuart and Jacob (names changed for their privacy) it wasn’t just friendship I sought. I wanted their attention, their jackets, their approval, their love. Jacob took me to metal gigs, and in 1998 I went to Ozfest in Milton Keynes wearing my first side laced leather biker trousers and a dog collar from Leicester Market. My dad dropped me off to another gig one night, eyeing this same outfit and remarking I looked gay. He wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t ready to say it yet.
I came out at 19, at university, after a short-lived and confusing relationship with a girl. My teenage years were all about fiting in and repressing my “perverted” desires. The words finally came, and with them, freedom, but not without cost. My leather identity remained mostly private until I bought my first motorbike in 2005. Things shifted again when I moved to London in 2008 and began exploring the scene properly. It wasn’t until I found my way to Recon London New Years Fetish party that I finally felt what I had long been searching for: acceptance, solidarity, and men who didn’t mock but nurtured.
Those years were intoxicating and tumultuous. My sexual awakening was as much about healing as it was about pleasure. I began to recognise how my attraction to hypermasculine men, the bikers, the doms, the silent types, was tangled with years of rejection, with a longing to be seen and loved by men who had always turned away from me. In some ways, I was trying to win back my father, or those boys at school, or the straight men at University I could never quite reach. My leather was not just a fetish. It was a shield, a script, and a scar.
But understanding that has been liberating. I no longer need to judge myself for where my desires came from. Nor do I need to perform masculinity to feel valid. I’ve learned that loving leather doesn’t mean rejecting softness, and that strength and vulnerability can coexist. The danger isn’t in our kinks or aesthetics. It’s in the internalised homophobia that tells us only certain kinds of queer people are acceptable.
That’s why I write. I share these reflections not just to tell my story, but to challenge the narratives that still dominate queer spaces. We see it in Republican conferences packed with closeted men on Grindr while they legislate against our rights. And locally, I see it here in County Durham in the hypocrisy of the right wing rent-a-gob, who proudly wears the badge of a “respectable gay” while using his political platform to advocate for banning Pride flags. Shame is a quiet poison, and it makes people do cruel things in the name of acceptability.
This blog is my resistance. It is a place to own my history, my leather, my contradictions. To celebrate queer joy in all its forms. To honour the freaks, the femmes, the bears, the boys in eyeliner and those in breeches. And to remind anyone reading: there is no wrong way to be queer, only unexamined ones.
BlufBear 