CLAW News
The Board of Governors of the Leather Hall of Fame (LHOF) is pleased to announce the 2012 inductees: Guy Baldwin, Sam Steward and Irving Klaw.
Guy Baldwin is a Los Angeles-based psychotherapist, author, activist and educator specializing in issues of particular relevance to the BDSM and leather communities, and more generally in issues relating to non-hetero-normative practices. He won International Mr. Leather in 1989. He is co-founder of an Internet-based professional referral resource, the KAP list, now administered by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. He continues to teach at various lifestyle events across the U.S. and Canada.
Guy Baldwin will be at CLAW 11 to accept his award and participate in the event. Be sure to get a CLAW Premium Package or a brunch ticket to be at the LHOF awards ceremony on CLAW Sunday.
Sam Steward (1909-1993) was an academic, novelist, historian and tattoo artist born in July of 1909. Steward maintained a card index he called his “Stud File” that documented a detailed account of his sexual experiences in vivid and often very funny detail. In the 1940s and 50s, he worked extensively with famed researcher Alfred Kinsey as an unofficial collaborator. As tattoo artist Phil Sparrow he mentored both Cliff Raven and Don Ed Hardy. He wrote several books of BDSM fiction under the name Phil Andros.
Irving Klaw (1911-1966) was one of the principal publishers of heterosexual BDSM erotica from the late 1940s to 1964. Klaw produced photographs, cartoons, films, and digest-sized booklets with bondage, fetish, and female domination themes. He drew from the expertise of members of the early heterosexual kink subculture to create materials that he sold, primarily through mail-order, and also purchased work from a variety of talented artists such as John Coutts, Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton. He was subject to periodic harassment from law enforcement agencies and congressional inquiries dating from 1950, and in 1964 was convicted on 65 obscenity counts which, although the conviction was later reversed on appeal in 1965, led Klaw to cease publication of kink materials. The family business that he founded continues today.
