Leatherpride Belgium 2016

A review

Whenever I’m in the United States, I’m always amazed at how much bigger everything always seems in comparison to here in Europe: cars, buildings, burgers, you name it! But if Americans want to experience something both big and amazing in Europe, then I’d personally recommend a visit to Leather Pride Belgium in Antwerp. Usually taking place in February of each year, it’s both the place and the time where the European fetish community comes together and proves just on the side that we can actually match and even perhaps beat the US when it comes to indoor events and visitor numbers.

In contrast to the still bigger European fetish events in Germany - Easter Week or Folsom Weekend which are both big happenings in Berlin – the Leather Pride in Belgium is an indoor event, so it all happens under one roof: This place of sexual sin and fetish decadence is called the ‘Darklands’. So, no matter the weather, you can do some fetish shopping, have a haircut, eat a decent meal and have a professional photo taken for your recon profile, all in the same place. And once you’ve finished your errands, you can reward your eyes with a live porno on stage and other parts of your body with an orgasm in the dark sex labyrinth! And as you never have to leave the place until you’re ready to take the free shuttle bus back to your hotel, you’re also free to spend the afternoon walking around in whichever sexy outfit you please!

The whole event is definitely the most professional fetish event gathering we have in Europe and most definitely a match for Leather Pride Los Angeles, which I had the pleasure of visiting last year. Antwerp is certainly no Hollywood, but throughout the day the staff of Belgian professionals continually changes the stage-set to fit different show contributions. Yet as professional as they are three, they still place ‘community’ high on their list of priorities. You have something important you feel you need to share with the European fetish community in a way you cannot do it anywhere else? Ask nicely and they might give you ten minutes on their huge stage in front of the biggest fetish stage audience on the continent. Nowhere else in Europe can you reach so many fetish guys at one time in one place with only one sentence spoken into a microphone.

As a result, I was this year on the main stage at Leather Pride Belgium in Antwerp now for the third year in a row, to present my “Classic Meets Fetish” classical concert event in Berlin at Folsom Europe. I’ve been on many stages and done it all a dozen times, but I honestly cannot remember the last time I had been so nervous! There were so many guys in the audience, that I literally wanted to turn and Wesco my way out o’ there back into a corner!  I saw with my own eyes a huge difference in the audience numbers between the last few years and 2016. To check my eyes weren’t playing any tricks on me, I asked requested some statistics:  According to the organizer, (let me kiss his feet!) Jeroen van Lievenoogen, visitor numbers to the Darklands in 2016 were up by nearly a thousand on last year (1,400 in 2015 to 2,300 in 2016), and even BLUF remarked a huge increase in the number of guys who had noted their visit to Antwerp in their profiles (according to the webmaster Nigel, in 2010 89 members listed Antwerp as their leather-uniform destination and in 2016 it was 195). And amongst them, I heard several guys speaking American English …
At night the Darklands turns into a nightclub-darkroom not to be missed. And if you invest a little extra into getting a VIP pass, you’ll be spoilt with some free drinks and finger food to make sure you have the energy to make it through the night surrounded by hot, half-naked guys gyrating to the music of prominent DJs. With only a normal ticket however – which costs €25 at the door - you still get the chance to rub shoulders on the dancefloor not only with titleholders such as IML Patrick Smith, but also to flirt with Europe’s hottest porn stars such as Ale Tedesco, who’s in charge of the on-stage pornography and even for the first time showed an SM scene featuring a mean rubber-wearing domina with her male sex slave. The Mr Leather Belgium contest takes place on the same stage Saturday evening, so you also get the chance to have your say on which Belgian hottie you’d like to see wearing the sash for the coming year.

Every year  when I leave Leather Pride Belgium in Antwerp and return to Berlin – a city which is lacking in absolutely nothing when it comes to fetish -,  I always end up asking everyone around me why we can’t just do the same thing here. Es muss doch möglich sein! We too have a waterfront harbor and hangars which could hold thousands of sexy fetish guys from all nationalities and all ages, we have good DJs and everything else – but we don’t have what makes Darklands so unique: We’re not Antwerp! So, if you want to experience it, you’ll just have to go there. And it is absolutely worth it …

Tyrone Rontganger