Rover's Column from the December 1973 issue of California Scene Magazine

These images are curtsey of The Colors of Leather web site

SOURCE: The Colors of Leather web site formerly located at http://www.colors-of-leather.com/.

Thanks to The Colors of Leather web site (now defunct) for the discovery, the trivia, and the images. It had been "an on-line archive of Club Patches and other memorabilia."

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The Mythology of the "Old Guard"

If people start telling stories not as they were, but as they would like them to be, that procedure can be used by anybody for any purpose. So I think that we need to be consistent in the truth.
- Robert Bryan, Stonewall participant

The Mythology of the "Old Guard"
Old Guard? If You say so. By Joseph W. Bean
The Old Guard History, Origins and Traditions By Guy Baldwin, M.S. (from The Ties That Bind)
Old Guard, New Guard By Gayle Rubin
The Myth of the Old Guard By Jack Rinella
Multiple Tops: Master, Mistress and Daddy Makes Three By Master L.J.E. An Old Guard view of 'Net Generation polyamoury.
Marginalia on the Old Guard, Leather Traditions, and BDSM History by Ambrosio contains "Leather's Military Heritage," "Six Contrasting Definitions of the 'Old Guard,'" "Napoleon Bonaparte's Imperial Guard," and "What was the First Use of the Term Old Guard in a Leather Context?"
- Rover's column in the December 1973 issue of California Scene Magazine: Earliest documented use of the phrase "old guard" in a Gay Biker --- and possibily Leather --- context (depending on whether you think Gay Biker qualifies as Leather.)
Why Old Guard? by David Masterson

If we are demanding that our history be respected, then we have to respect it ourselves. You have to apply the same criteria to our history that it be worthwhile, that it be accurate, that it be well-researched. We should recognize our warts as well as our flowers, as it were.
- David Carter, Historian