VML GRUNT Posters - Art, Support, and Community

It’s common for a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) to reduce executive function, this can have a number of downsides; anger, emotional outbursts, challenges or even inability to plan and coordinate, challenges with rational decision making, and reduced inhibitions… In my case that last one has a silver lining. After years of being on the fringe of the local Leather and Kink community I dove in.

A good friend on the Vancouver Men In Leather (VML) Board happened to show me a pic that the group was planning to use for their monthly pub night - GRUNT.  It was an ok for a facebook picture, but maybe a little soft for an event poster - it needed a little jeuje/zhuzh… however you spell it. The image got stuck in my mind’s eye.  Something that happens more since the injury.

So I drew it.  Then I remember that I’d seen the model in a set of really hot leather gloves, that would compliment the latex apron and boots - the night’s theme was “Leather and Rubber” after all.  I wasn’t sure that the model would be cool with being a work of art, so I went with a gas mask, an asymmetrical deal.  The mask was either pulled from imagination, or potentially the weird eidetic recall that seems to be the one superpower that came with the brain injury.  That ability would be great if it were consistent, instead images really just get lodged - so I may as well draw them.  Most of the time they are not useful images, except I now can read my social insurance number when I need it.

I a little text, and a date, and we had a relatively passable Grunt Night poster.  It felt good to do something that… that well I could do.  So much of my TBI recovery had been struggling to regain what I had lost in terms of ability to work in my previous (or similar roles), speech, walking, energy levels, co-ordination, durability… it’s a long list.  What felt even better was being able to contribute in a small way to a group that has been very supportive to me on my tandem journey of recovery and coming out “leathery”.