I met Gary Taylor when he was at his self-described “peak of the curve.” He was running two of the earliest Gay BBS networks, Oracle and Skinner Jack’s Bath House. I was new to Los Angeles and hanging out at Griff’s (eventually to become The Faultline) when this tall, bushy bearded leather clad biker with a rich baritone voice swaggered onto the patio and drew the attention of everyone there. I was still pretty green, but I was drawn like a magnet. As Gary put it, “Timmy brazenly propositioned me.” He rebuffed my first offer but told me to call the following afternoon if I was still interested in meeting. I did. Three months later, he asked me to sign his slave contract. One weekend after that, he suffered a motorcycle accident that turned me into his caretaker for the better part of a year, until an editorial job led me from California to Tennessee. I eventually chronicled much of our first evening together in the short story “He Thinks of Me as Him.” If it weren’t for people like Gary Taylor and the late Paul “Papa Bear” Sehm, I probably wouldn’t have written the book Black Gloves White Magic or started Vulcan America Magazine.

It’s amazing what you can learn about a man who needs constant attention. We took him from the hospital back to his home shortly after the Rodney King Riots. It was there that I learned about the depths of Gary Taylor. He was a highly imaginative writer, and his “SM Time Machine” was a great fictional series that ran periodically in The Leather Journal. He recorded and sold an SM Audio cassette called Suspension. His photography was exhibited in galleries and also in TLJ. He lived to dazzle, which explained why he loved both to work at KPFK and to appear in the porn flick Skinner Jack’s Bedtime Stories (re-titled At Skinner Jack’s for DVD release). He’d done time with The Los Angeles Free Press. When the infamous “Slave Auction” arrests at the Mark IV Bathhouse on Melrose Avenue took place in April 1976 (for "violating" a nineteenth century California law against slavery), Gary was among the detainees. He loved adventure and risk, from the motorcycles to the skydives.

The risk was not without consequence. He had two separate motorcycle accidents, including the one that broke his leg while I was under his collar. He was gay-bashed on Santa Monica Boulevard, resulting in scars to his face and a ruptured diaphragm which caused intestinal blockage and necessitated urgent surgery to save his life. He spent time in prison for photographing models that turned out to be underage. An accident from a fall resulted in paralysis from his stomach down, which kept him confined to a care facility in Rialto for the last six years of his life.

But he probably moved more people into kink without them knowing it in the 90’s as the proprietor of the “Skinner Jack’s Bath House” BBS. In the early days of dial-in computer chats, before AOL, cable modems and broadband, you typed messages to each other and waited for the man at the other end to type one back. It also was a narrow-cast of characters logged in, since this was an SM based audience. It meant that you were more than likely chatting with not just another Leatherman, but a Leatherman who was local. I remember the excitement of going to The Bullet in North Hollywood with Gary to user meetings, and watching how they treated him something like a rock star. With his numerous tattoos and piercings, he certainly stood out. And with his devil-take-the-hindmost attitude he often carried it off.

Those tattoos spoke to his eclecticism. He divided his body canvas into yin-yang, with that symbol at the center of his chest. One his right were the images of the intellect (including Einstein), on the left, the carnal. His left chest tat was a beautiful man shackled to a gigantic penis, the right, Haley’s Comet. His piercings were the most I’d seen on any man, and this was in 1992, before every goth kid worth their salt was in competition for the most punctures. He was getting rings in delicate places while most of them were in their little black diapers.

It breaks my heart to know that he died alone in some stupid hospital room after a staph infection struck him suddenly. We had spoken on the phone maybe a couple of weeks before and he was excited about a successful surgery to remove cataracts that offered hope to get out of the care center and back to Los Angeles. He still regarded me as his boy and had never taken on another relationship after ours had ended; I was looking forward to seeing him at a possible book signing in California. There wasn't a hint that tragedy was on the horizon. Gary Gordon Taylor was a troubled soul with a big heart, refusing to compromise and often paying the price. I hope they had a big-ass Harley waiting for him in the place where wheelchairs aren’t the main mode of transportation. And where I hope to one day be able to walk up to him and say “Master” before I climb on that bike.