Authored By: robin

The first weekend of June, four of the Leather Heart Clan attended Tournament, the annual run of the Knights of Leather of Minneapolis.

The Knights of Leather has been organizing this event for 25 years. The club itself is ~30 years old. It started as a lesbian leather club, but the members gradually migrated to the major GLBT centers on the coasts until the club got down to two members. They decided to open it up, first to gays, then to hets. Ever since, they’ve been one of the oldest pansexual leather clubs between the coasts. Their brother club is the Atons, a gay leather club that started out with a MC focus, and has since added many non-rider members.

Tournament has always been held at a state park two hours north of Minneapolis. There are 5 clusters of primitive cabins (no electricity, plumbing or fireplaces) each surrounding a meeting cabin (equipped as dungeons) and a shower/bathroom cabin. Central support buildings include the main dining hall, staff cabins, infirmary, central bath house, etc. They take over the whole campground, which has a capacity a bit over 100. With a 25-year history at the camp ground, the rangers trust the group and leave them alone for the weekend. Every year they have a waiting list.

The weather is completely unpredictable. This year had a late spring, so everything was in bloom and the overnight temps fell to 40. It rained Friday late afternoon (we drove through a hail storm on our way!), but the rest of the weekend was fine. The cool temps kept the mosquitoes down a bit, but ticks were everywhere.

It’s an extremely well organized event: professional catering for the formal dinner Saturday night, good and healthy food for all meals and snacks, well equipped dungeons in the meeting cabins, which are in use continuously. Jack and Mistress did 3 presentations (JJ was demo bottom for two, and robin also was demo bottom for one) on Saturday, so we didn’t get to see any of the other presentations. Topics sounded good, though.

Play was amazing. On Friday night, robin wound up strapped to a tilting frame/table thing, while Mistress and a switch we met co-topped me, concentrating on nipple torture, CBT, and the TENS unit applied to the cock and prostate 🙂 Meanwhile, in another corner of the dungeon cabin, there was some rope bondage going on (first time rope virgin got her arms and one leg tied together, then partially suspended, then extensively diddled and dildoed…. Saturday at breakfast, there were lots of bruises and marks on display …

In the dining hall was a message board, which included notes such as, “gang bang in Cabin A tonight at 11” etc. etc.

It was particularly cold Saturday night, and us thin-blooded Dallas types chickened out on play. But it didn’t slow down the natives! Lots of stories heard Sunday morning!

Competition for Pig of the Run was fierce! Everyone got a 4×6 card to be signed by all your play/sex partners, with extra points allocated for play with one of the full-patch Knights. The top three competitors had BOTH sides of their cards completely filled with signatures!

The most remarkable thing about the Knights and their friends is the great, friendly, sex-positive leather culture of the group. That’s why we love them so much, and why we’ve given them our colors, and why we’ve been back so many times. The full range of ages and gender definitions were attending. A remarkable run!