For almost two years, self-described “pansexual dress-to-sweat party” Soft Leather has used Logan Square bar East Room as its home base. Founded by DJ Zain Curtis (aka Teen Witch), David Beltran of Chicago label and arts collective FeelTrip, and producer and promoter Johnny Love (probably best known these days from #HealthGoth and Deathface), Soft Leather is locally famous for its queer-friendly atmosphere, non-gender-conforming aesthetic, and boundary-pushing fashions, which start with assless chaps and ball gags and get wilder from there. It was “the hottest party up until it stopped,” says Beltran—the last event at East Room was January 30.
Soft Leather’s relationship with East Room was hatched during a meeting with Eastman, says Beltran, where the organizers pitched the idea for a monthly dance party open to all, “no matter flavor, taste, or color.” Love and Beltran say they threw parties at the bar even when East Room didn’t have the PPA license it needed to host live acts, circumventing that restriction by prerecording mixes a few days before each event and playing them from an iPod at the venue. (Eastman didn’t comment on those claims.)
Jack Collier, who makes music as Chemise Cagoule and has hosted Soft Leather as Jack the Lad, identifies as male but puts together party looks that span the entire gender spectrum. “Of course there were incidents where some of us would use the women’s bathroom,” he says. “You just learn when you grow up queer that you’re more likely to have an ally in a woman.”
Beltran, Love, and De Chalon say that somewhere along the line, the regular clientele at East Room must have taken priority over the patrons of Soft Leather parties.
Now that Soft Leather has lost East Room, Love says that “the only place for weird kids to go to is Berlin and Exit and sometimes Debonair.” (He prefers not to talk about Soft Leather’s new regular home because it isn’t a licensed venue.) To describe Soft Leather’s forced exit from East Room, he returns to the language of “culture war.”
