Emerging in the years after Franco’s death, when Spain was finally opening itself to cultural and sexual freedom, Leather Disco became part of Madrid’s first wave of openly queer nightlife. Operating in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, it was a hybrid of dance club and leather bar, where disco music, masculinity, and underground style met in a city just beginning to shake off decades of repression.
These were the years of La Movida Madrileña, when art, music, fashion, and sexuality erupted into public view. For gay men, spaces like Leather Disco offered something new and radical: a place to dance, cruise, and belong without hiding, in a culture that had only recently criminalized homosexuality. Leather, denim, mustaches, and mirror balls shared the same room, blending international disco culture with a distinctly Spanish sense of release and reinvention.
