About

By: Mr. Woodja Flannigan
Misfits Houston Lifetime Member

In the fall of 2011, the Misfits were trying to decide how to celebrate their 20-year anniversary, coming up in 2012. The Misfits did a Ball every year and on the 5-year anniversary of the club's founding, we would do a “run weekend” associated with it. But we knew we wanted to do something extra special for the 20-year anniversary. Attendance at The Misfits Ball was starting to drop off a little so we also wanted to do something that would boost attendance.

By this time a few members had started to spread the Misfits' reputation around the country by attending national events like IML and CLAW, and we wanted to capitalize on that. At the same time, athletic gear was starting to become prevalent at leather community events and bars, as was latex and neoprene, but there was some pushback as some in the leather community resisted expanding what was "leather." Around the same time, the Misfits befriended an athletic gear club in Austin, Austin Gears.

We wanted to host an event that was welcoming of all of the fetishes—and potentially draw a big crowd. A member had been kicking around an idea for weekend theme that would specifically be inclusive to all of the fetishes and brought it to the club: Gear, Leather, Uniform, Etc., and just like that, GLUE Weekend was born. Bonding our fetishes together, we had the ambition of eventually making it a major regional annual event like Mid Atlantic Leather, targeting the whole Gulf Coast as our region.

We also decided we wanted to sponsor a leather contest (Mr. Third Coast Leather) at the center of it, whom we would sponsor to compete at IML. We decided to hold the first—that we know of—athletic gear contest (Mr. Third Coast Gear). We threw in a rubber-themed pool party at Midtowne Spa, and a uniform-themed Sunday brunch with an invited speaker, which was run by Misfit Lifetime Members. The weekend wrapped up with the annual Misfits Ball Sunday evening.

The club put in a lot of work—and lost some core members—but pulled off a major leather event in less than a year, with internationally recognized judges, contestants from all around Texas and other Gulf Coast states, and attendees from all around the country. It was our biggest annual fundraiser to date, and a lot of fun.

And the next month, the club immediately got to work on GLUE II for 2013.