Education
He attended the prestigious Peddie School, and was stationed as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of Air Intelligence Squadrons for nearly five years with the United States Air Force in Germany (1950–1954).
He attended the prestigious Peddie School, and was stationed as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of Air Intelligence Squadrons for nearly five years with the United States Air Force in Germany (1950–1954).
The Leatherman"s Handbook was the first book to publicize BDSM to the general public--it was a paperback book widely available on newsstands and at bookstores throughout the United States. Growing up as a teenager of Swiss-German extraction in Los Angeles a few houses from Noël Coward and Irene Dunne, he ate cookies with his neighbor Laura Hope Crews who was Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind. Completing his tour of duty, he entered into the 1950s underground of the then small Los Angeles leather scene where he and Montgomery Clift shared a lover.
With his degree in industrial psychology from University of California, Los Angeles (1957), he worked in the private sector and as a probation officer with the Forestry Service.
He began his pioneering activism in the politics of homophile liberation in the early 1960s. Newsletter, the forebear of Drummer Magazine (1975).
He lived in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, the center of the Los Angeles leather scene (the equivalent of the SoMa neighborhood in San Francisco). As a writer and photographer, he was an essential eyewitness of the drama and salon around Drummer in which his novels were often excerpted.
His signature “Leather Notebook” column appeared in Drummer for twelve years beginning in 1980, and continued in Honcho to Spring 2008.
His last novel, TimeMasters, was published April 2008. His last writing was Who Literature up the Literature of the Golden Age of Drummer an introduction to Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer (June 2008).
In 1972, as president of the ‘Homophile Effort for Legal Protection’ which had been founded in 1969 to defend gays during and after arrests, he led a group in founding the H.E.L.P.