When considering the tradition of bootblacking or its history, it becomes necessary to begin that discussion with a definition of bootblacking itself. Bootblacking is the act of caring for another person's shoes while they are in them. While that is a simple definition, it leaves a lot of room for the other things that actually take place.

There are some things that, although common sense, are rarely brought up in the same breath as history. Sexuality or the sexual politics often has a larger effect on things than most historians are willing to give credit for. When we talk about the history of bootblacking, we should also know that it includes in our definition that it involved a large amount of sexual overtones. So, let us add to the definition the sexual seductions which are a result of the act of caring for another person's shoes while they are in them.


So where can we place a starting point for this thing that we call bootblacking? It might be possible to place it as early as the Hellenistic period and the care that a military page would give to an officer, but that may be stretching the definition a little too far. A better placement of a starting point would be the industrial age, due to the fact that boots were becoming available to more people outside of the of the upper class and the military. The second factor that makes me believe that this would be a good place to source this definition is the start of the Red Jacket Brigade.


The mid-1800s brought the industrial revolution. With the increased urbanization came big city problems: long working hours, crime, unhealthy living conditions, poverty and a relaxed morality. These conditions allowed for circumstances that required a wholesale reorganization of social order. The rate of orphans and abandon children increased and the concentration of those children in urban areas lead to new problems that the socail system of the time was complete unready to deal with. These young adults found it necessary to use new skill in the process of surviving the new age. Two of those skill that will come into play here is bootblacking and prostitution. In an article for a London paper, Charles Dickens wrote:


“A long and uneven war has been waged for many years between the various members of the shoe blacking fraternity. The factions that divide those who look to our boots for a mode of livelihood are wonderfully numerous. There are boys who maintain that no able-bodied man should seek to clean boots, that this work should be monopolized by children ... Useful, though perhaps unfair, patronage is according to the members of the Bootblack Brigades. These are the orthodox of legitimate boot-blacks, and they consequently find favour in the eyes of the police. The policemen, who is essentially a lover of order, an admirer of discipline, cannot understand why, if a boy wants to manipulate brush and blacking for a living, he should not join one of the brigades ... The Boot-blacking Brigade movement was started in 1851, when 36 boys were enrolled, and they earned during the year 650 pounds."


So we might take some things from this. There was a need to have the local police enforce the monopoly that the city government had established. But why was it established? The biggest reason that I have found is that it was a method for the boys to be able to pay for room and board in the orphan houses of the time. In saying that, we need to remember the things that Dickens would become famous for writing about — namely, how bad the industrial revolution was. One of the other reasons for licensing the bootblack was as a method to keep down crime and prostitution that was rampant during this time. If all the bootblacks had to wear identifying jackets and live in orphan houses, then it would be easy to find one that had gone bad. Something that, I am sure, worked excellently. I am making a large assumption here, but I believe that bootblacking was a front for male — or more than likely, boy — prostitution. Because of the positions necessary for the service to occur, the bootblack would be on his knees and the person receiving this service would normally be standing.


To say that there was a direct link to what goes on today would be incorrect, but this is what I believe to be the best starting point for the idea of mixing bootblacking and sex, which led to what is done today. The boot blacking brigades lasted until the 1890’s; the children doing this job moved through the western world, especially to places like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington DC. To my understanding, the way that prostitution has always worked is as an oral tradition — one pro showing another the ins and outs of the profession. It could be assumed that this is true for all street professions and that bootblacks were trained from one generation to another. The methods of seduction that would be the cause of bigger tips, I am sure, were also handed down.


It is known that as early as 1910 the Chicago Vice Commission recorded the existence of whole ‘colonies’ of queer meeting places including a queer street gang calling themselves ‘The Bluebirds’, whose headquarters were in Grant Park. Large cities especially in the US were gathering places for people feeling out of place and looking for economic betterment but also to find personal freedom and anonymity by escaping from a more traditional society. It can be assumed that if the Vice department is a major city was noting the exsitance of Homosexual community it was not just for morality against homosexual lifestyle but due to the fact that had to deal with prositution and drugs that were a part of that scene. This also gives me leave to imagine that there could have been young boys that sold oral sex and shoe cleaning services in these ‘colonies’ of queer meeting places.


Meanwhile, a seperate track was also occurring in the military. The gay subculture that flourished in the naval town of Newport, Rhode Island in the 1910s was neither dark nor secret. The gay sailors who called themselves ‘the gang’ had their headquarters at the Army and Navy YMCA, which was common knowledge to everyone in town for many years, where they had dinner with one another before going out cruising. The queers flaunted themselves openly, loudly talking about their affairs while walking together in the street, even wearing make-up while at work in the naval hospital and refusing to conform despite harassment. Everyone knew there were ‘floaters’ who ‘followed the fleet’


We need only to look at the history of Mr. Puckett of Atlanta, Georgia, who died in the summer of 2004 at the age of 88. At the time of his death, he was one of the oldest public Leathermen who could speak about the first generation of Leathermen who came from of the post World War II era. Mr. Puckett spoke about how he had some of his first erotic experiences from the smell that overcame him when he was shining the shoes of an upperclassman at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. In a personal interview, he told a story of how he entered a state of erotic bliss during a shine; this erotic bliss was due to the nature of the interaction with this upperclassman. This was part of a defined ritual of hazing for the upperclassmen to impose their will upon the junior classmen, and in the 1940’s, there were really no limits to these interactions. Mr. Puckett spoke of how the performance of personal service would be one of the acceptable excuses for two men to be alone and engaged in close “personal” contact. Gay and forward upperclassmen would often use this power as a method of hunting, which Mr. Puckett implied was part of his first homosexual interactions at the college. Due to the fact that shining this upperclassman’s shoes was imposed upon him as a subservient act and while performing this act he was treated as an inanimate object, he knew that the intent of the upperclassmen was to degrade him and minimize his existence to an object meant for shining shoes and the sublime actions that could go around that action.


These two tracks for bootblacks are readily apparent though the 1950’s and early 1960’s, until the style and economy allowed for people to start developing disposable footwear. People stopped going to shoe shines or bootblacks as much as they were before. The introduction of canvas shoes also lessen the need for bootblacks. Bootblacking started to be limited to the working class industrial workers and, more importantly, the military, which was going though an era of high-shine fashion with their boots. This would lead to the Leather lifestyle and the movement of bootblacks from the outdoors and into the leather bars and to the history that we know today.