Mid Atlantic Leather Weekend

Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend, known to everyone as MAL, is the big American leather gathering of the winter. Centaur M.C., a Washington motorcycle club, produces it over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend each January, and the 2026 edition was billed as the 41st. For close to two decades its home has been the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, where the lobby turns into the main social space and fills with people in harnesses, rubber and full leather, many of them not even staying at the hotel.

The weekend runs on several tracks at once. Inside the hotel there is the Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather contest, the Leather Cocktails mixer, a large vendor market for gear, the ONYX auction and gear show, kink demonstrations, bootblack chairs, pup and cosplay meet-ups and support groups. At night, outside producers such as Kinetic run the ticketed dance parties, so check who sells what before you buy a pass. Over its Hyatt years MAL has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, Metro Weekly reports.