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Chuck Renslow, Founder Of International Mr. Leather, Dead At 87

Renslow has been called a "bedrock" of Chicago's gay community.

Chuck Renslow, a stalwart of Chicago's LGBT community and the founder of International Mr. Leather, passed away June 29 from heart failure. He was 87.

Chuck Renslow/Facebook

A Chicago native, Renslow opened Triumph Gym in the 1950s, and scouted models for beefcake photos that appeared in mail-order publications like Triumph, Mars and Rawhide Male. (He and partner Dom Orejudos faced obscenity charges but they were eventually dropped.)

At around the same time, he converted Gold Coast, a bar in Chicago's River North neighborhood, into one of the first nightclubs catering to the burgeoning gay leather scene. "We were raided once in those early days, when you had to pay off," Renslow recalled. "The police came every month for their cut, the Outfit wanted theirs, and you'd do it."

From the website of the Leather Archives and Museum, which Renslow co-founded in 1991:

With Etienne murals adorning the walls, a leather/Western/uniform dress code for patrons, and a dark Pit downstairs, the Gold Coast set the standard for raunchy kink and gay sexual liberation.

The Gold Coast was the birthplace of motorcycle clubs and sex groups, but primarily it was a place for people to meet, connect, and explore their sexuality.

As the gay community stepped into the light, Renslow saw more opportunities, opening a hotel, health clubs, discos, and Man's Country, a bathhouse and entertainment venue with shops and a music hall, which opened on North Clark Street in 1973.

Renslow was also a vocal advocate for LGBT rights, helping to organize the first Gay Pride Parade in Chicago and taking over Gay Life, a struggling LGBT newspaper, until it shuttered in 1986.

By the late 1970s, the Mr. Gold Coast contest got too big for the venue and Renslow moved it to the Raddison Hotel. In 1979 it became International Mr. Leather, now an internationally recognized conference for the leather community, offering contests, panels, entertainment and more. It's estimated more than 8,000 people attended the 2017 IML conference in May.

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Even when homosexuality was still marginalized, Renslow managed to be recognized by the mainstream, earning recognition from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, serving as a delegate for Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential run, and dancing with another man Jimmy Carter's 1977 inaugural ball.

"He really was an incredible forebear of our movement, starting in the 1950s as an openly gay man and entrepreneur," Tracy Baim, author of Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow, told The Chicago Tribune. "He was one of five or six people from the pre-Stonewall gay movement who were the bedrock of the Chicago gay movement."

Renslow is survived by his partner Ron Ehemann, and two sons, Robert Wilke and Patrick Corcoran.

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