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Past Out by Liz Highleyman

Who was John Preston?
Author John Preston is perhaps best known for creating the archetypal leatherman, Mr. Benson, but he was also a pioneering Gay rights activist. Born Dec. 11, 1945, Preston grew up in Medfield, Mass. He discovered the Gay community as a teenager, escaping as often as possible to Harvard Square in Boston to purchase physique magazines, and visiting the Gay resort of Provincetown. After graduating from high school in 1963, Preston moved to Chicago to attend Lake Forest College. He became involved in civil rights activism, traveling to Alabama as a freedom rider and tutoring students in Chicago's slums. Having moved to Boston in 1969 in search of a Gay community, Preston chose to "come out with a vengeance" after an early lover committed suicide. After this, Preston moved to Minneapolis, where he co-founded Gay House (one of the first Gay community centers) and Gay Community Services. He was also a progressive Christian activist, serving as a member of the National Council of Churches' Task Force on Gay People in the Church; though he aspired to become an Episcopal priest, he abandoned the idea due to what he saw as the church's hypocrisy concerning homosexuality. In the mid-1970s, Preston moved to Los Angeles, where he was hired as editor of the national Gay publication, The Advocate, a position he held for about a year. In a quest to become "the ultimate Gay man," he then worked as a hustler in San Francisco before moving to New York City in 1978, where he immersed himself in the S/M underworld. He later recalled that his first bondage scene was with a New Jersey state trooper who tied him to a tree in a deserted nature preserve. In his East Village basement apartment, Preston wrote his best-known work, a short story featuring the imperious master Aristotle Benson and his slave Jamie. He submitted the story to Drummer magazine, and soon received a call from the publisher asking if he could turn it into a serialized novel. "Mr. Benson" first appeared in the May 1979 issue, and before long fans were eagerly awaiting each new installment. To the surprise of many, Preston left New York's bustling Gay scene a year later, donning oxford-cloth shirts and loafers and settling into small-town life in Portland, Maine, where he could often be found walking his dog, Vlad the Impaler. He had moved to Portland with his lover and slave, Jason Klein, but Klein soon returned to San Francisco; he died not long after as a result of an autoerotic asphyxiation accident. Due to the success of his Mr. Benson stories (published as a book in 1983), Preston himself was cast into the role of the archetypal Topman. But he eventually grew apart from the leather scene, which he felt had been "overtaken by sightseers." He later acknowledged that in writing about that world, he helped popularize it. "Once the gates were open, the mystique began to erode," he wrote. "Leathersex has gone the way of all politics, it's lost its edge." In 1987, Preston, who had become a safer sex educator, learned that he himself was HIV-positive. Dismayed at the diagnosis, he could barely write for more than a year, but then went on to edit Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS (1989). "I certainly found my own imagination rightly constricted by the idea of a deadly virus that was spread by sexual intercourse," he wrote. Preston brought sex writing into the realm of serious Gay literature, always resisting pressure to recast his pornography as "erotica": "The only difference is that erotica is the stuff bought by rich people; pornography is what the rest of us buy," he said. But while much of Preston's work was devoted to sex, he wrote widely in other genres, including a 1984 novel, Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, a series of adventure tales featuring Gay undercover ex-Marine Alex Kane, and a syndicated column about Gay life in Maine. He also edited numerous anthologies, including Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong (1991) and Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write about Their Lives Together (1994, with Joan Nestle). He regularly attended the annual OutWrite conference, was an active member of the National Writers Union, and mentored younger writers. His 1984 collection, I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love, was among the works confiscated at the border by Canadian customs; he supported the lawsuit of Vancouver's Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium, but died before he could testify at the 1994 Canadian Supreme Court trial. Though quite ill from complications of AIDS, Preston continued working on his final two anthologies from his hospital bed. He died at his home in Portland on April 28, 1994. A decade after his death, Preston's impact on the leather world endures - in the words of columnist Jack Rinella, "He gave it existence in the minds of thousands of readers, gave image to the dreams we all thought and to the men for whom we searched." Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can be reached care of this publication or at PastOut@qsyndicate.com.