Thursday, July 26, 2012

RUMPUS (Seattle) • July 13–15

Over 20 years ago, Bill Houghton created Rubbout, a rubber enthusiasts weekend in Vancouver, BC.  I got into rubber in the late 1990s and started coming to Rubbout with the 8th year, while I still lived in the Bay Area.  I convinced Bill to let me put up a website for the event (and it is still up!) — all the advertising and outreach before then had been through paper flyers and rubber club newsletters.  (I have no recollection how I first found out about Rubbout, now that I think of it.  Maybe a flyer at the Loading Dock in San Francisco.)

It was coming back from Rubbout in April, 2000, driving back through Seattle to return to SeaTac airport to fly home that I firmly decided to move to Seattle.

As of this year, I have been to Rubbout 13 times, I think, only missing one year that I can recall.  For a few years, some of us have talked about replicating Rubbout in Seattle, but talking is about all we managed.  In 2011, we actually announced doing an event and then it didn’t come off.  This year was the year, though!

Several years ago, Seattle Men in Leather tried having SIGs — Special Interest Groups — where groups of members could focus around a given fetish or activity (like rubber) and get some communication and even monetary support from the organization without SML having to focus its board on the SIG topic.  The only one of these which got of the ground at all was a rubber SIG, dubbed RUMPUS (RUbber Men of PUget Sound; the alternate name considered was RUMPS), but we only managed a couple meetings before I got to busy to drive things and it went away.  But the name remained with me.

Scouting for the right time of year and weekend, I decided to target mid-July.  While other events also occur then — we overlapped onto Wet ’n Hot and Thunder in the Mountains — mid-summer is away from Rubbout, West Coast Rubber, and Mr. International Rubber, and most especially, it is warm enough for guys to be comfortable in latex.  In terms of weekends, Seattle Men in Leather has a 2nd Friday education session, a new 2nd Friday demo and social, and a 3rd Sunday brunch (with this time, 3rd Sunday being right after 2nd Saturday).  So presto, the core of a weekend event was laid at my feet.

And thus did RUMPUS play out.  In February for West Coast Rubber, I did up a postcard design and a “save the date” website (hosted off my SoundsKinky site), distributing more cards in April at Rubbout.  A variant design was used for the poster which went out in Seattle before the event.  Originally, there was going to be a registration fee for the weekend, processed through GLPW and benefitting some charity, but that went by the wayside as my busy summer got in the way of that level of planning.  I still did an online reg form, to gather some info for direct mailings next year.

The event itself consisted of:

We only had about a dozen rubber guys in total, but that was still enough to call this a successful first event, something to build up next year.  Special thanks to Bill Houghton as instigator of Rubbout and thus “grandfather” to RUMPUS; Scott and Daniel at Tribal Instinct/CockCircus for making it easier for RUMPUS attendees to go to those events; Reid and Marc for bringing down the rubber bondage equipment and running it on Friday night; Pup Gadget for taking the “pup” portion of the event and putting it together with almost no cycles needed from me; the Cuff Complex for letting us do the Saturday afternoon pup mosh; Tony at Steamworks for giving a discount to RUMPUS guys (and keeping after me to get things set up for that!); Boom Noodle and CC Attle’s for accepting us; and anyone I have forgotten.

RUMPUS will occur again next summer, although exactly when remains to be seen, based on the rest of my schedule as I learn it.  I hope to go back to the reg fee idea, which would cover admission to various events and raise some money for charity.

Sometimes at leather contest interviews, the question is asked “What will the title enable you to do?”, and no matter the answer, the judge’s response seems to be “Why can’t you do that without a title?”  Why couldn’t I get a rubber weekend to happen in Seattle in years before this, but I could now?  Because the title, and the active direction toward the International one, forced me to think more strongly about what I wanted to accomplish this year — including building stronger bridges between leather and rubber — and it got me to make commitments about events I wanted to do.  Would a Seattle rubber weekend have occurred without my having the Northwest LeatherSIR title?  I can’t say for sure, but because I ended up being the sole driver on the event in the end, there’s a good chance that it would not have.


Updated on August 2, 2012:

Touch-up edits and added links and poster.

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