ABSTRACT
This address was delivered as the keynote speech at the Great Lakes Leather Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 30, 2000. Bean, a longtime activist, artist, and writer for and in the leather community, was at this time the director of the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago. The Rose Exterminator was written by William Carney and published in 1982. It belongs to a group of novels and short stories set in the leather community that began to appear in the late 1960s.
