Fireside Chats and KNOTbound Ltd Partnership
Fireside Chats is an organisation in the USA committed to collecting, preserving and sharing Leather, LGBT and BDSM history. This is done through a series of recorded interviews with people who have founded and shaped that history.
The Chats seek to capture the memories, reflections, and experiences of Leather and BDSM community leaders. Hosted by Douglas O’Keeffe and presented in a talk show format, the Chats are sometimes done live on stage with an audience, through a video conference or privately. In a live setting, the audience has an opportunity to ask questions of the subject following the formal interview. For a video conference or a private Chat, the guest has the option of sealing the Chat until the occurrence of a specific event, date, or period of time. The footage of each Chat is preserved in The Leather Archives and Museum (the LA&M). Some Chats are also available online via YouTube or other online media sites.
Fireside Chat and KNOTbound Ltd have partnered in bringing Fireside Chats to Australia for a series of public and private interviews to honour Australian Leather and BDSM community leaders. KNOTbound Ltd will coordinate efforts by our Australian communities to identify people that have had a major impact on the development of Leather and BDSM communities in Australia and work with those people to set up interviews, some of which will be public events. Additionally, KNOTbound Ltd will help Fireside Chat with the logistics of travel, accommodation, engagement with our people, collection of expressions of interest and ideas for the Chats, venues for Chats, equipment and other arrangements that a project of this nature requires. In return, Fireside Chat will present the Australian BDSM Archives with copies of the chats and interviews which KNOTbound Ltd will continue to manage on behalf of our Australian communities and provide access to through our own archival media channels.
KNOTbound Ltd and Fireside Chats will be working to set up interviews to cover as much of the diversity in our Australian communities as possible. This means we will be looking for people from different geographical locations, different gender, role and sexual orientations and different areas of focus within Australian BDSM. While we would love to cover everyone and everywhere, at this time we have settled on twelve key interviews. Three of these will be public events with the other nine private. We will also be creating two lists of alternates in the event someone needs or wants to pull out of the chat or interview for whatever reason.
People engaging in the public Fireside Chats will need to comfortable with having the Chat placed on public media afterward and willing to be publicly acknowledged as a person within our lifestyle. Ownership of the chats will need to be passed over to both the LA&M and KNOTbound Ltd via release forms. Please contact us directly for more information on how the Chats will be released to and managed in both archives.
If you would like to tell us your ideas for the Fireside Chat project or make suggestions on people in our communities that would help show the diversity and depth of our Australian scene, please contact us through the contact form here and we will be in touch for further discussion.
You can find more about the Fireside Chat Program by visiting the LA&M Oral Archives. The Chuck Renslow Fireside Chat is a good example of the interview format and can be found here.