Old Guard, New Guard?

by Lord Saber

I've noticed since I've been online a real trend for Doms to claim they are "Old Guard." And too when I first started going online, virtually all the submissives I chat with would call me Sir. This threw me a bit at first, since no one I know in the "real-life" scene calls me that. They call me by my real name and that's fine. I don't expect anyone to fall to their knees and call me "Master" or "Sir" just because I'm a Dom! This protocol of calling a Dom "Sir" or a Domme "Ma'am" probably dates back to so-called "Old Guard" policy and seems to be something the "onliners" started doing without having a concept as to why it was done originally.

But it seems in people's haste to call themselves "Old Guard," just who are the true "Old Guard?" Are they the gay leathermen of the late 1940s and 1950s who adopted protocols they got from their military background serving in WWII? Are they the people of the 1970s like Cynthia Slater who helped found Society of Janus? Or the folk of the 1980s who helped popularize SM? Or is it people like even myself who first got involved in this scene back in the early 1990s and can now be considered an "old-timer"?

My friend Jay Wiseman (of SM101 fame) and I have spoken several times about this topic. Here's what he has to say about this "Old Guard trend."

"I do think that there is very definitely a tendency nowadays to romanticize and idealize "The Old Guard" people -- and it does seem like the less first-hand knowledge someone has about them the more pronounced this tendency often is. A large part of the problem is that entirely too few of the "old guard" people are still alive, and the void thus created allows people to project their fantasies, however unrealistic, with relatively little risk of credible correction."

Very well said. I've seen this kind of behavior often online and to a lesser extent in the so-called real world, and I've often wondered why.

Jay's reasoning on is that "I think that there is often a certain yearning for status, and that people can attempt to achieve this status for themselves in an often sort of ex-post-facto way by claiming to follow "the old guard teachings" -- but exacty what these teaching are, who taught them, why _that_ person is entitled to be considered an expert on "the old guard" and, most importantly, exactly how these teachings are "better" than the "newer" teachings is often very, very unclear."

And herein lies the problem. Just what REALLY is Old Guard? I've heard it said by long-time members of the San Francisco scene that anyone around today who says they are Old Guard most probably really aren't! Perhaps the people that call themselves "Old Guard" do this because the term evokes an automatic type of respect among others, especially submissives who long to hear what the "good old days of Old Guard" were like.

Truth is, there probably really wasn't ONE TRUE WAY of doing Old Guard, that several different "families" around in these so- called "olden days" probably had some main ideas and protocols they followed, but developed variations on the "Old Guard" theme, sort of like Baskin-Robbins' 31 flavors of ice cream!

Joseph Bean, of the Leather Archives and Musuem in Chicago has written an essay called "Old Guard? If You say so." He address this confusion about what is or isn't Old Guard at one point in his essay:

"It's all become so much more complicated than it used to be, and so very much more complicated than it ever needed to be... Let me point out that there is nothing at all new about this question."

In his essay Joseph goes on to talk about the changes that went on in the gay leather "families" of the 1960s and later.

"Order and acts of respectful mutual recognition are contributions of the club-men from which we have derived what is conceived today as The Old Guard. That is, the current Old Guard was the new form of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The (now so-conceived) conflict between the values of the two groups came to a head any number of times, with the businessmen usually deciding the compromise."

As to the question of what actually IS Old Guard, here is Joseph's answer:

"The truth is that the Old Guard as is it conceived and spoken of today is mostly myth. Some of the forms are genuine and have history, but they never had the kind of universal acceptance and weight they are given in "memory." That is not a problem! If inventing a way of life that is loosely (and sometimes comically so) based on the behaviors of the "Old Guard" results in a myth that can breathe and have value in the lives of leathermen today, so be it."

There certainly is nothing wrong with the desire to learn more about Old Guard or any part of our scene history. In fact, that's one of the reasons I spent over a year working on writing the Society of Janus history. I felt it was important for everyone to know about our past. However I am uncomfortable with anyone calling themselves "Old Guard" without really knowing what the term means or knowing much about how Old Guard first started.

Last summer, I came across an excellent essay about Old Guard on a web site. I felt this was an individual that truly knew and had respect for a part of our past. Then last month I was very disappointed to find out the author of the piece was a phony, a "closet abuser" posing as a Dom and no doubt using the "Old Guard"
moniker as a way to attract unsuspecting subs.

While this incident is most likely a very isolated one, I would recommend using a little caution towards anyone claiming to be "Old Guard." Ask questions of the person, asking why they consider themselves to be Old Guard, where they got their knowledge of Old Guard from, and also ask them to give you some history about it.

If they refuse to answer any of your questions for whatever reason or give you answers that sounds suspect, I would at the very least take that as a red flag and look elsewhere.

I recommend a couple books that cover a little bit about Old Guard. These books may or may not be out of print and you may have to do some searching either in used book stores or on the net to find them. One is LeatherFolk by Mark Thompson. Two others are Leathersex by Joseph W. Bean and The Leathermen's Handbook II by Larry Townsend.

I also have a page on my own web site devoted to SM history, where I have links to a handful of essays about Old Guard. The URL is http://www.tdl.com/~thawley/history.htm .

I wonder as we start this new century and millennium what will be considered "Old Guard" in 25 or even 50 years.

LS