My speech from the 1997 Sydney Leather Pride Week debate at Kinsella’s in Sydney

Every day, at 11 o’clock, the Old Guard waits silently on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. At 11.30 the New Guard arrives, led by their Regimental Band. After a symbolic handing-over of the palace keys, the posting of sentries and other military formalities, the New Guard marches off along the Mall to take up their posts, and the Old Guard departs for the barracks …

This archaic ceremony has more meaning for our community than you might at first think — and not just because the old guard always end up at the barracks.

A "guard" is a body of people, such as soldiers, who guard a place against disturbance or intruders. Like the Buckingham Palace guards, the old guard in our community are charged with guarding our symbolic "palace keys" — our traditions, our community organisations, our history. And they must, in time, pass those "keys" on to the new guard if our community is to survive and grow.

Where do we find this mythical "old guard"? It would be easy to just label all the older members of our community "old guard," but I think there’s more to it than that. Whether you’re "old guard" or not depends less on your age or your experiences than on your attitude. There are some longstanding members of our community who are very "new guard" in their outlook, and there are some new players with "old guard" sensibilities.

By "old guard sensibilities", I mean a whole range of characteristics, some of which are positive – their huge amount of experience, knowledge and skill – and some of which are negative – such as clinging to the regimented ways of the past, cliquishness, a tendency to hang on to old grievances and a resistance to sharing power with new blood. What we want to see is the passing on of those positive values to the new guard, without perpetuating the negative ones.

Today’s visible, vibrant leather community grew out of a hidden, secretive past. Until quite recently, the leather community was very much a closed shop – in the early days society at large (including the wider gay and lesbian community) looked upon leather sexuality with some distaste, and the leather community existed mostly as homogenous groups, which were strongly divided along gender and age lines, such as the motorcycle clubs.

While some of those clubs still exist, the leather community has grown and reached out into the wider community, and now includes people, like me, who have come into leather from other avenues.

To deal with the realities of being an essentially closeted community, the old clubs and societies developed a number of formal structures, codes and practices which defined their sexuality and made social interaction between members possible.

An example of this is the hanky code – at a time when we needed to stay hidden, the hanky code was an effective means of advertising your desires to the discerning few without drawing the attention of the disdaining many.

Presumably in those days the bars were also better lit, enabling the viewer to tell the difference between dark blue, light blue, mid blue, robin’s-egg blue, and teal.

A more important example of something left over from those old days are the principles of "safe, sane and consensual" sex that have long been established in our community. These principles were developed decades before the expression "safe sex" was coined, and they are still relevant today.

Our community today is growing and changing; leather sexuality is out of the closet and onto the streets, reaching new players who come from diverse backgrounds and who have a new perspective on their queer sexuality, new ideas and new codes. The challenge facing our community is the need to change and adapt to make these new players welcome, to pass on those positive values but to discard the old habits and ways which are no longer relevant. It is these questions of identity and adaptability that we will be addressing tonight.

Each of us has a different perspective on those issues, and each of us will speak from that perspective. Later you’ll hear Melissa "whip-crack-away" Longwill speak about her experiences as someone who identifies as neither old-guard or new-guard; George "please sir, may I have another" Zafirou will address issues of queer sexuality and gender panic, and Lloyd "stop it! that tickles" Grosse will look at the specific challenges of the future and propose some action for our community to meet those challenges.

I’ve been asked to speak here tonight as a member of the "new guard" but I have to say I never really considered myself part of either the new (or the old) guard before. I’m 33 years old, which doesn’t make me particularly young, and while I’m reasonably new to the leather scene, I’m not entirely green either.

I have a great deal of respect, and admiration for, the more established players in our community – they have a wealth of experience and ability that I can only hope to emulate. But I have little time for the internecine squabbles, the rigid formality and the cliquishness that I believe also characterise our community. I believe we should openly welcome difference, that there should be a place at our table for every player, whether they fit the established mould or not.

While leathersex is becoming more and more popular, being a member of the leather community is not. The image many outsiders have of us is that we’re a bunch of old men, fighting amongst ourselves for political advantage, making points of order and generally being dull. When I come up the stairs at the Barracks after a leather pride meeting, people say to me "How are the dinosaurs? What are they fighting over this week?" And these people are SM players, like you and me. They’ll all be at Inquisition next weekend, they wear leather, many of them have been on the scene for a long time. But they don’t see themselves as part of the leather community. And that’s a great pity.

Today’s leather community is no longer the homogenous entity it once was, with a strictly-defined membership and carefully codified rules. SM sexuality is now much more widespread: many of the boys on the dance floor of the Shift, and the girls on the dance floor of … wherever it is girls go to dance … are all practicing their own individual brands of leathersex. Some of the old guard here might dismiss these new players as mere dabblers, but they are players nonetheless and we must find a place for them and give them opportunities to develop the skills that will make them capable and responsible members of our community.

It is no longer acceptable for us to meet in private, to guard our knowledge and skills as if it were "secret leathermen’s business", or to exclude newcomers from our events. SM is part of the lives of young and old men and women from all walks of life; there are as many different approaches to it as there are players, and we can all learn from each other. It’s crucial to our survival as a community that we welcome these new players, and make ourselves relevant to them.

Regardless of whether we’re old guard or new guard, we’re all avant-garde. We’re sexual revolutionaries, pushing our own boundaries and those of the world in which we live.

And the first duty of the revolutionary is to survive.