Slave auction gay
I Was Sold on the Slave Block
by ‘Treadwell Martin’
as told to Harry Harrison (1956)
I tried to twist aside, but the guard behind me twisted the chain until the handcuffs bit into my wrists. He pushed me forward. The sharp edge of the platform trim into my ankles and I stumbled and almost fell. I received a blow on the head for my clumsiness and was barely conscious of being dragged forward. The auctioneer’s cruel voice ground into my ears as he addressed the prospective buyers. A hard-faced Arab in the front row leaned forward and prodded my leg muscles, the way a livestock buyer would examine a horse.
The whole scene seemed unreal and ancient like an illustration from Arabian Nights, a slave market right out of the black ages, complete with smoking lamps, Arab buyers and chained rows of slaves. But this wasn’t history – it was happening right now in the year 1954, and it was happening to me.
I was being sold on the block as a slave.
Most American Negroes, like myself, are only three or four generations removed from slavery. My great-grandfather was a slave, but I know I never think of it any more than an American of Russian descent worries about hi
On April 10, 1976, the Los Angeles Police Department staged a massive raid on a leather-community fundraiser at the Mark IV Baths. The event offered consenting SM enthusiasts who agreed to be auctioned for role-playing as slaves, with proceeds from the winning bids going to the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center and other gay charities.
Deploying helicopters, buses and dozens of cops — and bringing along television news crews — the LAPD invaded the gathering. Nearly 400 people were detained and 42 were arrested, including John Embry, the publisher of the leather magazine Drummer, and the first "Mr. Drummer" title-holder, Val Martin, who served as auctioneer. The police released public statements claiming they had halted an actual slave auction and portraying the participants as dangerous perverts.
Val Martin later recalled, "We repeated many times what the [playful and charitable] purpose of the auction was. They made us lay on the ground, hands on our necks. They treated us like animals.... They were taking pictures, calling us names."
Ultimately, the district attorney charged only four of the participants, transforming th
THE SLAVE AUCTION. A Strange Story by the Last of the Auctioneers. Plenty of Queer Experiences—Girls from Chocolate Shade to Nearly Colorless Northerners the Hardest masters.
[Boston Herald.]
“Yes, sir, so far as I know, and I think 1 know all about it, I’m the last living delegate of the profession—the las* man alive in the Merged States who made a business of selling niggers from the auction block. I’m 72 years old now, and I guess my time has nearly come.” Thus spoke old Jack Campbell as he filled his glass for the fourth second at a Broad street bar, and leaned back against the counter to open up his budget of reminiscences. “I went into the slave auction business in 1835, and never quit it until the war broke out. I have sold niggers in Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Louisville, Mobile, Fresh Orleans, Memphis, and all along in the other towns of the south. I don’t puff my own trumpet —you know that on their possess merits modest men are dumb—but I can say that Jack Campbell had the reputation for showing up the good points of a ‘buck’ or a ‘wench’ and drawing out offers that made him in demand wherever there was a big sale. “The nigger traders hold made me explore 500
White Male for Sale
White Male for Sale (2021)
White Male For Sale is a conceptual NFT project. The NFT is a perpetually looped 00:01:10 video of a white male on an auction block on a street corner in a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. The undertaking incorporates a live auction of the NFT video.
When NFTs broke into the public lexicon, the “F” in NFT—Fungible—resonated strangely for me. NFT’s are Non Fungible Tokens that confer uniqueness to digital artworks. But I heard the term fungible in connection with its use by scholars of the history of slavery. People are inherently non-fungible. But as slavery became an integral part of developing capitalism, enslavers sought to turn people into commodities and construct them fungible. In the 16th – 18th century the Portuguese and the Spanish used a system called Pieza de India through which people were quantified and valued in relation to an idealized slave—or a “piece of India.” Later, in the ledgers of 18th-19th century American slavers, people are referred to as No. 1 slaves, No. 2 slaves, etc.—a means by which unique people, for example a 35 year old healthy male skilled in ca