![gay men having sex in leather gay men having sex in leather](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/10/24/1382624072849/Silhouette-of-two-men-emb-008.jpg)
(Colomina and Bloomer 1992, Pilkey 2015, Gorman-Murray 2006, Cook 2014, Gorman-Murray and Cook 2018, Pilkey et al. Does the study of queer interiors help us to see respectable, or as some would perceive it ‘homonormative’ lifestyle, or do we seek to identify a potential for liberation through anti-heteronormative lifestyles? Literature on queer domesticity frequently replicates assimilationist and exceptionalist positions within histories of queer activism and academia. There has been much at stake in the representation of domestic homosexuality. This builds on research into queer domesticity that has attempted to challenge some of the normative biases in interior design history. These fragments do not amount to a comprehensive history of the dungeon, but indicate how understanding the social aspects of making can tell us about the development of the leather identity, and the contribution of the leather community more broadly to the development of the home in the late twentieth century. Available sources include furniture catalogues, DIY advice, and personal archives which reveal how men in the BDSM and leather scenes built home dungeons in America from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. With an emphasis on the late 20 th century, these materials form only a partial insight into the development of the sex dungeon – but the forms of community organization in the leather scene make it a significant one. This paper focuses on dungeons produced by members of the US gay leather scene, with reference to materials held at Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum. Additionally, sex dungeons may easily be dismissed as unrepresentative of broader trends in the history of the interior: it is difficult to know how many people have access to a home sex dungeon, both due to privacy and the class dynamics of how and where sex dungeons might be. Larger public audience through social media. The issue of privacy makes researching the history of the domestic sex dungeon a particular challenge, as it is only recently that such interiors have reached. As several authors have pointed out, the historical study of interiors is met by challenges relating to the retrievability of material, the fact that they are often in use or modified, that they are immobile and that they are usually private (Lees-Maffei 2008, 18, McKellar and Sparke 2004). The intention of this article to investigate the development of a type of “room” that is largely absent from histories of interior design. In short, they are an expression of a very specific kind of cultural capital that is bound as much by class as it is by identarian politics. In this example, the home sex dungeon seems absurd because it is no longer an example of a cultural expression of a sexual subculture, but more broadly as a socio-economic phenomenon that is subject to social and aesthetic possibility formed by cultural experience and financial means. The design scheme at Maple Glen does not distinguish between office, kitchen, snug or whipping bench, meaning that kink in this house is inferred as mechanistic, routine, something to do after the cleaner has left and before the kids get back from school. ( The Guardian, 11 February 2015)īradshaw’s reference to ‘aspirational’ furnishings such as Conran, Condé Nast and Nespresso highlights a key design issue for domestic sex dungeons that does not apply to commercial sex premises: the condition that the mundane and the perverse must sit side by side. It is…like being bent over a Jasper Conran pine-effect table and having your bum smacked with a copy of Condé Nast Traveller while the Nespresso capsules go all over the floor.