Paul King
Committee Chairperson & APP Treasurer

Over Memorial Day Weekend, the Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M), with cooperation from the Association of Professional Piercer’s Body Piercing Archive (APP, BPA) launched a month-long fundraising campaign for the preservation of piercing pioneer Sailor Sid’s archive.

Through our joined efforts, the project will achieve:
1. Creation of an online exhibit. This project will put an immense amount of “paper only” photographs, films and documents online, available for research and casual use.
2. Preservation and conservation of important history. The Sailor Sid collection at the LA&M is currently in a fragile physical state. Many hours of carefully removing photographs from harmful photo pages and cataloging papers will be required to keep this collection available for generations to come.
3. Digitization. Photographs, films, letters to and from Sailor Sid and other records will be digitized using archival quality scanners. The project will also allow for reel films to be sent to digital facilities to make them available online.

Recognizing the urgency for saving this fragile historical piercing collection, the APP’s Board of Directors has committed to assisting LA&M in this common cause. This support includes a generous matching grant of up to $5,000. While the archival work, digitization, and exhibit creation will be conducted by the LA&M, the amazing resources in Sailor Sid’s collection will benefit leather and piercing aficionados alike. By joining forces, the LA&M and APP are both excited to see this collection come to life as well as be protected for future generations.

About Sailor Sid…

Sid Diller, better known as “Sailor Sid,” got his first tattoos and piercings while serving in the Coast Guard during World War II. Famous for his extensive genital piercings (reportedly over 100 in the penis and scrotum), Sid worked predominantly on gay men, mainly from his Silver Anchor studio in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Sailor Sid did it all: Prince Alberts, ampallangs and apadravyas, frenums, lorums, and any other part of the male anatomy. When Sailor Sid passed away in 1990, his collection of personal papers and effects related to his piercing career were entrusted to Jim Ward, founder of the original piercing studio, Gauntlet. Ward donated the collection to LA&M in 1997, where it has remained in climatecontrolled storage ever since, largely inaccessible due to lack of processing resources.

The collection itself is extraordinary in its scope. Sid kept meticulous records of his piercing work, documenting his procedures with hundreds of Polaroid photos, many identified with time, place, and subject neatly typed on labels. In a testament to Sid’s seemingly endless creativity, these pictures are stored in hand-made “binders,” crafted by Sid out of wood, string, bolts, and wingnuts. In addition to the photographs, the collection includes pages of his personal correspondence (Sid was a tireless letter-writer), various magazine and newspaper clippings on the history of piercing from publications as diverse as The New York Times, National Geographic, and Fetish Times, piercing instructions, 8mm films from his travels, floppy disks, slides, and even comic strips he saved.

But the collection is in urgent need of protection. Based on a cursory inspection of the collection, it has already become clear that there are some pressing preservation concerns due to its age:
• Homemade photo albums are an impressive display of ingenuity, but they aren’t the best option for long-term storage and preservation.
• Yellowing newspaper articles and correspondences need to be photocopied
• Photographs need to be transferred to archival quality sleeves
• Digitization of the 8mm films is an increasing concern due to their delicate condition.
• Importantly, the collection remains unprocessed and uncatalogued. The accessibility of the collection is extremely limited.

Info about the LA&M:
The Mission of the Leather Archives & Museum is: “The compilation, preservation and maintenance of leather lifestyle and related lifestyles [including but not limited to the Gay and Lesbian communities], history, archives and memorabilia for historical, educational and research purposes.”

The Leather Archives & Museum is a library, museum and archives pertaining to leather, fetishism, sadomasochism, and alternative sexual culture and practices.

The museum is located in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood on the far north side of the city. The 10,000 sq. foot facility houses a collection containing original erotic art from artists as diverse as muralist Dom Orejudos (who worked under the name Etienne), Robert Bishop, Tom of Finland, and Robert Mapplethorpe and artifacts from individuals, groups, sex clubs and events, such as The Mineshaft in NYC, Fakir Musafar, and San Francisco’s legendary Catacombs, just to name a few. Other features of the museum include:
• Eight exhibition galleries
• The 164-seat Etienne auditorium
• The Leather SINS Screening Room
• A 600 sq. foot reading library to house the research collections (published books, magazines, scholarly publications, films and electronic resources)
• A 1,425 sq. foot climate controlled storage space for archival contents (unpublished papers and records from notable activists, artists, businesses, and organizations)

The institution was founded in the early 1990’s with the motto, “Located in Chicago and serving the world”. Today, LA&M’s programs continue to uphold this dictum by making collections available outside of Chicago through social networking, digitization, traveling exhibitions, and loaned exhibitions. Social media also plays an integral role in LA&M’s outreach, with a combined audience of over 20,000 followers though its presence on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, FetLife, and YouTube, or through the website www.leatherarchives.org.

LA&M’s Jakob VanLammeren (Archivist/Collections Librarian) holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science with a focus in Archives from Dominican Uni-versity. Since being hired full-time in July 2013, Jakob —has established priorities, completed the arranging and describing, and/or managed the completion for over a dozen collections; developed, revised and created written procedures for archival processing and work plans; created catalog records, provided ongoing supervision and management of volunteers and interns, and given tours and presentations to student groups and/or organizations.

— article co-authored by Leather Archives & Museum and Body Piercing Archive