Welcome to the Journal

Today we're opening the Journal. It's a place on Real Kink Men for writing about the scene: how to get into it, how to stay safe in it, and what's happening on the site.

I wanted it because the same questions come up again and again. Where do I start with leather. What do I say before a scene. How does Radar decide who sees me. Good answers exist, but they're scattered across old forums, group chats and whoever you happen to meet at the bar. I'd rather they lived somewhere you can find them.

What's in it

New pieces go up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They fall under seven topics:

• Site news: what we've built or changed, and why
• Scene guides: first steps into a kink, gear, the tribes
• Safety & consent: negotiating, meeting people, looking after each other
• Health: sexual health, written carefully and pointing you to real clinicians
• Community: the people and the culture
• Events: what's on and how to get there
• How-to: getting the most out of the site

Everything is written to be read by an adult who plays, or wants to. Frank, kink-positive, and never explicit.

You choose what reaches you

You can follow any topic. For each one you follow, you decide where new pieces go: your feed, your phone, or one email on Sunday with the week's pieces in it.

Site news is followed by everyone to start with, because some of it affects how you use the site. You can switch it off.

Once in a while there will be something big enough that I want everyone to see it. Those get pinned at the top of everyone's feed for two days. That happens at most once a week, and I'll keep it rare.

A promise about sponsored pieces

Some pieces may be paid for by someone else. When that happens, the piece is labelled Sponsored and says who paid. A sponsored piece is never pinned for everyone and never sent to your phone as a push. You will always know what you're reading.

Comments live in the feed

Every piece has a post in the feed, and that's where its comments are. Disagree, add what we missed, tell us about your own first time at a leather bar. The best corrections will come from you.

Where to start

There's already an archive to read. A few I'd begin with:

• Negotiating a scene: a checklist you will actually use
• Leather 101: where to start without buying everything
• Meeting a man from the site: the safety checkup, step by step
• Circles are open to everyone: what changed and what didn't

If you read in an RSS app, the Journal has a feed at /journal/feed.xml.

Later on

The long-term plan is video from the scene: events, people, places. I'm not putting a date on that. When it's ready, it'll show up here first.

For now, open the Journal, follow what interests you, and tell us in the comments what you want us to write about next.

Ryan