First established in 1991 by Chuck Renslow, one of the producers of the International Mr. Leather contest, the museum began in a storefront location on Clark Street in Rogers Park in 1995. The museum's collection soon outgrew that tiny space, and a fund-raising drive was launched to enable the museum to purchase the location on Greenview. Though the local and national gay and lesbian community has been reliably helpful, Bean says, fetishists and leather aficionados are no more likely to be gay than those in the mainstream sexual population, public perceptions to the contrary. Probably about 10 or 20 percent of us are gay. Gay men have been extremely visible as kinky for years.
Straight people have a lot more to lose.
As it becomes clearer that fetishism transcends sexual orientation, it will become more accepted, Bean says. Those of us old enough to remember the civil rights movement know it's easy to compare the two, but we still need to know that everyone isn't going to love us. No one is expecting much of an uproar from the neighbors, despite the museum's unusual mission. The neighborhood is very diverse already, which helps. In its old, Clark Street incarnation, the museum was even included in a gay and lesbian neighborhood tour given under the auspices of the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs, which is as close to an official sanction as it is likely to get.