Judy Tallwing McCarthy
Judy Tallwing McCarthey is an Apache/Tewa, African American, and Irish activist, Leather Dyke, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
“An invisible minority leaves itself open as easy prey for those who would deny its freedom, its very existence!” Judy first spoke these words in her 1987 IMsL Contestant Speech. She has lived her life standing up against systems of racism, sexism, and injustice.
Judy was raised in an Apache encampment at the foot of the Bradshaw Mountains in Arizona. Trained from her earliest days to become her clan’s matriarch and educated in medicine by her grandmother, Judy has vivid early childhood memories of living in the desert with her mother, grandparents, and several aunts and uncles. She remembers cooking over an open pit, helping to hunt rattlesnakes, and making art.
Early in her life, Judy’s activism focused on the Native American movement and empowering women. Later, when the AIDS crisis decimated the leather community, she fought for research funding and ferried early AIDS medications across the country, delivering lifesaving drugs to the dying when federal and state regulations were holding them up.
She became the executive director of a domestic violence victims’ program in Washington and later opened a no-kill animal shelter. In 2006, she dropped everything and rushed to the rescue of people and animals abandoned amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina.
Judy is also an accomplished painter and sculptor. She regularly exhibits her art at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and some of her earlier works are held by the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Smithsonian.
Throughout her life, Judy has remained active in the leather community, mentoring those with less experience and raising numerous leather kids. She was one of the four original incorporators of the Leather Archives & Museum.
Judy has received numerous honors for her activism, leadership, and service. These include a Forebear Award from the Pantheon of Leather VI, the Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award, the Leather Leadership Award from the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Sir Leon Strange Memorial Award, the Ms. San Francisco Leather Legacy Award, the Leatherwoman’s Heart Award from the Southwest Leather Conference, and a Survivors in Service Award for her domestic violence work.
The Washington State Mr. Leather Organization bestowed upon her both the Leather Emerald Award and a Community Service Award for her work running Dandelion Dog Rescue.
Judy is a proud Onyx Pearl Luster Southwest and the matriarch of the House of Iron, the first Indigenous leather house.
