I'm a leather man in my 30s who has been in the scene for a decade. I feel like the old guard traditions are dying out and younger kinksters don't know or care about leather culture. Am I wrong?

Old-guard leather culture, with its formal mentorship systems, earned titling, protocol-driven hierarchies, and strong emphasis on community service, developed in specific post-war gay male communities and carried deep meaning tied to that context. Those structures were also sometimes exclusionary and rigid in ways that later community generations pushed back against.

What has happened since is not a simple decline. Many younger practitioners have little interest in formal leather protocols but have deep engagement with the values those protocols expressed: respect, mentorship, craft, service, and accountability. The container changed; what it was meant to hold is often still there, expressed differently.

There are also active leather organisations, titled community leaders, and old-guard practitioners across most major cities who are working deliberately to transmit both history and tradition to newer community members. The leather archives and leather title systems in particular have seen renewed interest from people who want to understand where their community comes from.

The experience you are describing, of being in a space where the history feels invisible, may be more a function of which specific spaces you are frequenting than of the community broadly. Leather bars, leather title competitions, IMsL and IML events, and old-guard mentorship communities all maintain the tradition actively.

The frustration is real and shared by many people in your position. The most common advice from people who have navigated it is to become the transmission rather than waiting for it: teaching what you know explicitly, building mentorship relationships with people who are curious, and treating the tradition as something you carry rather than something you watch disappear.