The Academy Training Center: Iconic Place
The Academy Training Center was a private facility, operating from 1987 through the late 1990s in Missouri and later Georgia, where founder Chip Weichelt staffed real off-duty police officers, prison guards, and military personnel to deliver consensual, non-sexual incarceration and interrogation scenarios for gay clients. Jack Fritscher went undercover as a client to chronicle the experience firsthand in his 1990 Drummer cover feature “The Academy! Incarceration for Pleasure,” and later situated the Academy within the broader arc of gay leather culture’s fascination with authority and control in his book Gay Pioneers, tracing a line from the LAPD’s 1976 raid on the Drummer Slave Auction through to Weichelt’s institution as a consensual reclaiming of that same erotic dynamic.