Every June 21 is World Motorcycle Day, and you can bet that gay bikers around the world are celebrating. After all, motorcycles have been revving up gay culture for decades now.
In the United States, gay motorcycle clubs started forming in the 1950s, forged in the fires of McCarthy-era homophobia and anti-gay police raids, as USC Today reports. These clubs represented not only some of the first gay organizations in the U.S. but also some of the only spaces where gay men could gather safely. Marlon Brando and James Dean were popularizing motorcycles as a symbol of macho-man cool at the time, and masculine gay men followed suit.
“Motorcycle clubs were a way of saying gay men can be more masculine than straight men,” Joseph Hawkins, former director of the ONE Archives, told USC Today.
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Los Angeles’ Satyrs Motorcycle Club, founded in 1954, and New York’s Empire City Motorcycle Club, founded a decade later, are still going strong.
“We ride together, we protect each other. When we ride in formation, we are a well-oiled machine,” Chaz Antonelli of the ECMC told Vice in 2015. “We watch out for people on the road; when we change lanes, we make our presence known.”
And it wasn’t long before early gay motorcycle clubs—and the artwork of pioneering illustrators like Tom of Finland and Dom Orejudos (a.k.a. Etienne)—gave rise to leather culture and its standard uniform of tight jeans with leather jackets, chaps, and boots.
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And these days, leather culture is thriving—and becoming more diverse than just cis gay white men—while biker gear has become especially popular among those with leather fetishes, as you’ll in the pics below. (Biker gear by Dainese seems especially popular!)
Without further ado, scroll down to check out self-identified gay bikers showing off their leather-clad figures. (And if you have a hog of your own to ride, please wear protection. Motorcycle helmets may not suit your James Dean vibe, but we want you alive.)
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