Warning: This story contains full frontal nudity — not in images, that is, but there is explicit sexual language.

The Leather Archives and Museum occupies an old synagogue on Greenview Avenue, just north of Devon. I pass it nearly every day on my way to Devon Market or Eve’s Cleaners, but I had never been inside until Sunday, when I attended a Kink Klass in Fire Flogging, which is the art of teasing a willing victim with a flaming cat-o’-nine-tails.

“Are you in the BDSM community?” the man at the front desk asked, even though I was still dressed in my church clothes: a blue oxford, tan slacks, brown wingtips.

“No,” I said, “I live in the neighborhood. I’m in the Rogers Park community. What does BDSM even stand for?”

“Bondage, Discipline, Sadomasochism.”

Those were some of the fascinations of Chuck Renslow, Chicago’s proto-leather daddy, who founded the museum in 1991 in an Andersonville storefront. Renslow also founded Chicago’s first leather bar, Gold Coast, in 1958, and the International Mr. Leather competition in 1979. (Even a square like me has something in common with Renslow, who died in 2017: He was a member of my Masonic lodge. The Masons are an all-male outfit, so there a quite a few gay members.)

“Chuck kind of coalesced a lot of that in Chicago,” said executive director Gary Wasdin, a bearded, bellied man with a fully tattooed right arm and tiny yellow shorts. “International Mr. Leather makes Chicago this hub for the leather community.”

The museum moved to its current location in 2000, once the home of Congregation Kesser Maarev, which constructed this building in 1927, and moved to Skokie in 1994. It’s kind of a leathery neighborhood: Near the corner of Clark and Devon are two leather-themed bars, Jackhammer and Touche, and Leather 64Ten, an emporium selling whips, chains and collars.

“It was just finding a neighborhood that would be accepting and tolerant but affordable,” said Wasdin — as good a description of Rogers Park as any.

Next to the front desk is a glass display case containing the books Fist Fugger and The Anal Lovers. Downstairs, in the museum itself, are leather vests, a spanking bench, whips, forceps, rectal dilators, and stainless steel dildos, and a painting of a blond Adonis spanking a younger man.

The Fire Flogging class took place in the Etienne Auditorium, which is decorated with paintings of leather-clad 1960s rough trade by the mononymous artist, who was Renslow’s lover.  It was obviously once the sanctuary of. The instructor was Master Leather Redux, a short Filipino woman in a black t-shirt, a camouflage skirt, and black boots. Her victim-to-be, a.k.a. her “bottom,” Rachel, wore a little black skirt — for the moment.

“Trigger warning,” Redux said: “There’s going to be some whips, floggers, nudity, lots of swearing, and fun.”

So what is fire flogging? It involves hitting another person with kevlar strips of fire.

“Fire flogging is a form of edge play and definitely not for everyone,” Redux said.

(Wiktionary: edge play [BDSM] Any sexual activity involving the risk of physical harm, such as bloodplay or asphyxiation.)

Redux displayed and described the tools of her craft: fireproof headgear, goggles, fire extinguishers, whips, alcohol, and sterno — “I’m a big fan of sterno.” Then she gave Rachel an order: “Get naked, bitch.”

Rachel stepped behind a screen, pulled off the little black dress, and emerged fully naked. Redux started the action by punching and slapping Rachel’s back. Like most bottoms, Rachel has permanent scars, which she had treated the night before with lotion. She made other preparations, too: “I am not a hairy person, but I shaved the night before in places I don’t normally shave — like, everybody has a little hair on their tummy. I don’t normally check that, but for this purpose I do now, because last time we did this in a dungeon, I could smell a little burning.” So what was she getting out of this?

“What does it feel like?” Rachel asked rhetorically. “It feels like you’re standing up against a campfire” — which sounds like a warm, pleasant sensation.

Redux whipped Rachel’s buttocks and cracked a whip on the floor. Then she called on a firefighter in the audience to act as a spotter: “Fire Bitch, come on up here.”

Redux soaked her whips in alcohol and held them over the sterno can, igniting a flaming Medusa. She flicked the flaming cords at Rachel – not quite on her skin, but close.

“I get an inch or two away,” Redux said. “That’s not my style.”

“She does hit me with it at the very end,” Rachel said, “but that’s when it’s been extinguished.”

For fans of edge play, the museum holds Kink Klasses the first Sunday of every month. There’s a big one coming up in December.

“December is Fistmas!” Redux shouted, to cheers from the 60 or so kinky people in the auditorium.

According to a flier handed out after the event, the klass is “Merry Fistmas: Fisting 101 — It’s Not Just for Porn Stars.” 

I started the day at Edgewater Presbyterian Church, singing hymns and taking communion. (They probably won’t want to be mentioned in this article.) I ended it at the Leather Archives and Museum — another building originally constructed for worship — watching a dominatrix flog a naked woman with a flaming whip. In this modern world, when religion is in decline, and churches and synagogues are being repurposed for all sorts of, ahem, secular activities, kinkiness is next to godliness. I wonder what the rabbi would think.