Identity, place, and erotic community within gay leather culture in Stockholm

There has been much recent attention to the relationship between the construction of place, identity, and the body. This paper examines some of these themes in a presentation of the gay leather scene in Stockholm, Sweden. Based on ethnography of Stockholm's only true leather club, it shows how identity and spatial location are implicated in one another. It also looks at social and cultural processes of containment and dispersion within leather culture, the creation of erotic bodies, and forms of erotic interaction. These processes are seen as reflecting features of the wider Swedish gay scene and society in general, which is sometimes less tolerant than it is imagined to be. Aspects of current and possible future transformations of leather culture and style are also briefly considered.