Dusk's Links
http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/ Disability History Museum: Library. An amazing collection of primary sources on topics related to disability. Here's part of the keyword list, to give a sense of its variety: Native American nativism navy neglect neurasthenia New Deal newsboys newspapers nomenclature normalization nursing Among the keywords are prostitution and sexuality. The site includes tasty titles like "Astounding Disclosures! Three Years in a Mad House" (1851). A tip: The longer documents are divided into pages, but if you go down to the bottom of the page and click on "Printer Friendly," the full document will appear on a single page.

Ooo! Very cool! Adding. :)

Home Guard Pocket Manual. Just in case your characters ever have to go to war. A beginners' manual to firing war guns, written in 1944. Includes bayonet training. http://met.open.ac.uk/group/jwl/hg_manual/homeguard.htm British Pathe. Online newsreel footage from 1896 onwards. http://www.itnarchive.com/britishpathe/

Updated! :D

Kathryn Lively's Content Producer Page. Advice on various topics, including publishing (especially e-publishing), from the publisher of Phaze.

She has lots of good tips on that site. Thanks for posting the link, Dusk. :-)

Dusk - didn't you have a link somewhere on the Leatherman's Code a few years back? Does anyone remember this and could direct me there?

I'm afraid I don't know of a leatherman's code. Do you mean the Leatherman's Handbook? Here's the original, 1972 edition, and here's the 2000 edition. The sequel is also interesting: the Leatherman's Handbook II (2007 edition).

It had to do with the handkerchiefs. Hmmm I wonder where I read it then.

And most of the colors aren't used. (Rumor has it that they started as a joke.) In the gay leather community, the most common are light blue (oral sex), dark blue (anal sex), grey (bondage), black (SM), hunter green (daddy/boy), red (fisting), and yellow (watersports). Incidentally, I hear that the hankies were worn by regular gay guys during the Sexual Revolution (gives you some idea of what the seventies were like), but now they're pretty much the province of leathermen and leatherwomen. What story are you working on, DarkMarguerite?

It's a near future dystopia where the 28th Amendment outlaws sexual aberrancy. Its original intent was against rapists and pedophiles but it grew to encompass adultery, homosexuality…etc. I thought of using the hankies in an underground club scene.

Well, leathermen don't have a club scene. :) What they have are clubs ("club" in the ordindary sense of the word: "an association dedicated to a particular interest or activity"). Depending on the nature of the club, the members might have a playroom, but the reason I know next to scratch about the club scene is that it just isn't part of leather culture. Traditionally, the places where leathermen played were on runs (like motorcycle runs - in the early days of leather, it was handy to play *way* out in the wilderness, where the police couldn't raid you), in leather bars (think the back room in "Torch Song Trilogy" and "Queer As Folk"), and in bathhouses. Back rooms and bathhouses aren't as common since the AIDS crisis, but a fair amount of making out still takes place at leather bars, and runs are still popular. However, leatherwomen tend to be involved in the pansexual club scene. Or perhaps you could show a society where things have evolved enough that leathermen are now hanging out in pansexual clubs. Or maybe the heterosexuals had borrowed the hanky code - there's been a lot of borrowing back and forth between gays and straights in recent years. But you'd have to make clear that this was an evolution, or any knowledgeable reader would say, "Wait a minute."

Homosexuality is illegal in this culture, so I'm working on creating a behind the scenes places were people could go, meet up, relax a bit, though I don't know if a scene at one of these places is going to even make it into the story. I know the main characters have been there in the past, but there's so much going on in the present. We'll see. I thought it might be an interesting element to add if I do have an underground, but then again, it's not something that I want to be too known either. If having a hankie in the pocket is going to raise red flags somewhere then it wouldn't be to safe of a practice.

Nice idea, using it as a code. Even in our culture, I doubt that many people have heard of hanky codes. You could have the practice have died away - enough that law enforcement agents don't know of it - and then be revived as a secret sign.