Before I arrived, we talked about my travels so far and how sex had become such a cultural focus. I told her about the mail I received and she wasn’t surprised. A new era of sexual experimentation had clearly taken hold, she said, and not just by the usual suspects of free-love hippies and dissolute hipsters with too much money, but everybody from all walks of life were starting to show up at the Wet Spot seeking information about sex that heretofore had been considered edgy and rare. She wasn’t sure exactly why this was happening now—we talked about the Internet and pop culture, but these didn’t seem completely satisfying—just that over the past five years or so, her clientele had boomed. The Wet Spot now had eight thousand members in the Seattle area, the eldest eighty-one years old. All of them had redefined “normal” for themselves. Allena was most excited by the center’s new status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Many companies in the area have programs that match employee contributions to 501(c)(3) charities, and Allena was joyful from knowing that companies like Microsoft and Boeing, both of whom have employees who are Wet Spot members, could help subsidize the organization’s operations.
“Bill Gates is going to be supporting Sex Positive!” she said several times. This was a sign to her that sex-positive culture, a vague term that implies a celebratory attitude about all kinds of sexual variation among adults, had arrived and was now an ineluctable part of mainstream life in America.
On the afternoon of my arrival in the city, I drive over to the Wet Spot. It is situated not far from downtown Seattle almost under a bridge overpass. From the outside, it’s not much, just a white concrete-block building with a rutted, mainly dirt, parking lot and a small sign by the steel front door saying SPCC. Not just anybody can walk in. A small reception desk inside the front door is always manned and there is paperwork to fill out and identification to provide and releases to sign stating you know what you are in for.
People are also asked to provide a name to be used by the organization in case they prefer their real names never to be spoken. There are a few prominent citizens who belong despite the risk that some unscrupulous fellow member might contact an employer, say, and out a member. The fake name option is a layer, albeit thin, of protection. I fill out my paperwork and show my identification. I promise to abide by strict confidentiality rules.
Despite never having seen Allena in person, I recognize her right away. Though a half-dozen or so other people are here, late in the afternoon, nobody else could possibly be her. She runs up to me and gives me a hug as if we have known each other for years.
Allena shows me around with all the pride of a woman who has built something from virtually nothing. She and her volunteer staff overcame the obvious social and political barriers, and constant financial troubles, to create a place Allena feels is safe and welcoming to everyone. The club resembles spaces I have been in before, places where under-the-radar rock bands play for one hundred cognoscenti. I saw Liz Phair a long time ago in a place almost exactly like this. A small snack bar with soft drinks and bottled water and juices is built into the wall closest to the front of the building. Facing inward, three rooms line the right-hand side: Allena’s office, a small library offering reading materials on sex, and an operating room with medical equipment.
The operating room isn’t just for show. When I ask about it I am told that they “don’t actually remove any organs or anything” but small bits of tissue might be taken or incisions made. (If you want some serious operations, you’ll probably have to go to Mexico. They do amputations down there. A few years ago, a guy with an amputation fetish died in a San Diego motel room after his leg was cut off in a Mexican clinic. You could say he had a paraphilia.)
The far left side of the building has a small shower and locker room, an after-care room with a futonlike bed where subs recovering from a sub-space trip can be comforted, and a play space with BDSM gear. A custom-made steel and wooden bondage bed, more gear, and a cubicle with a regular bed where people can have sex await in a back room.
I have come this evening specifically for the Fire Play seminar. I’m not sure what fire play is, and having learned my lesson after the cock-and-ball torture incident, I have not asked for details. But Allena tells me I’ll love it because it is one of the edgier modes of BDSM action. I will learn from a man named Paradox. I find some of these BDSM names a little annoying, like Dungeons and Dragons identities, but Paradox has a good reason for adopting his BDSM handle. He is the forty-five-year-old dean of libraries at a major state university where the administration has no idea their dean is well known in BDSM circles for lighting naked women on fire. Paradox thinks this news might cause consternation because at his previous university, a large midwestern institution, somebody outed him to higher-ups. That partially explains why he moved jobs.
As people begin arriving for the seminar, I think I notice a type. A short, muscular, bald man in a canvas kilt and Doc Martens stands off to one side. He introduces himself to me as Fandar. Another man, tall and bald (the same guy I will see later punching the woman’s thighs), arrives wearing a black leather tricorn hat, a silky black poofy pirate shirt, leather pants with a codpiece attached, and leather boots that extend over his knees. The T-shirt on a large woman reads: “I let my mind wander and it never came back.”
“These are Renaissance fair people,” I say to Allena.
“Oh yeah, and sci-fi geeks. Totally. I know I was. It’s all about fantasy.”
We all settle down into folding chairs in the middle of the Wet Spot. Paradox begins. “Fire touches our inner core, our animalistic side, our fear. But it also touches our intellectual core…”
I spent a half hour talking with Paradox while he set up and he seems like a fine person. Everyone here seems nice. Once again, I am amazed at their openness. They know I am not one of them, necessarily, and yet here are people who no doubt have reason to fear condemnation, who fully realize their sexual tastes are different from those publicly expressed (though perhaps not privately indulged in) by most people, and yet they will answer any question, tolerate any intrusion. Still, I’m bristling.
At first Paradox was afraid to play with fire. But nine years ago, a dom in Nebraska (a dom in Nebraska? I’m not sure I ever expected to hear that exact pairing of words) taught him how to do it safely, and ever since he has considered it “one of the more fun aspects of BDSM play. This is very much edge play,” he says ominously. “It is very easy to screw something up badly. With this stuff, safety protocols are all important…Play with fire long enough, you will get burned.”
Fire and nudity are two things I would have thought are best avoided in combination, but Paradox keeps emphasizing the fun. He starts with a list of safety precautions, explains the importance of using 70 percent isopropyl alcohol as our fuel source (30 percent of it is water that acts as a barrier between the alcohol and the skin), and explains why the head of the submissive should be covered: burning hair puts a damper on the mood.
Still, “a male submissive I knew in Kansas, a big bear of a guy with a hairy back, loved to get torched across his back because for the next two or three weeks, he felt it as it grew back, and it itched like all get out. That was a turn-on for him.”
Paradox is a handy fellow. He makes much of his own equipment, mainly from stuff he finds at Home Depot. Bob, of Bob and Melissa, told me he calls the store “Dom Depot.” Paradox says he walks down the aisles looking for “pervertibles,” hardware ostensibly for one use that, with a little imagination, can take on entirely different uses. For example, a few wooden dowels, some cotton batting, and string can be used to create “fire wands,” small torches. Paradox has a half-dozen of them arrayed on a stand next to a table where his demonstration model, Jenny, is lying topless, a long skirt still tied around her waist. Each one of these constructions must have taken Paradox fifteen minutes to create, and that was after the trip to Home Depot. Yet the flames will last seconds. BDSM is a lot of work, which may be one reason why I’ve never taken to it. I’m more the �
�feed me grapes and bring me wine” sort of hedonist.
First, Paradox applies flaming Q-tips to Jenny’s naked back. This is the “warm-up period.” He rubs them up and down her spine until the flame dies, then repeats with another, a series of blue and yellow dancing fairies tripping up and down her body.
Next he lights his fire wands and gently beats Jenny. The flame wooshes through the air, the wand hits Jenny with a thud, and the wand goes out, usually after one or two hits. Jenny stands up. She’s a short, fleshy young woman with a number of healing bruises. Paradox whaps her, not very hard, with the fire wands, and I look around to watch the dozen or so people observing Jenny being hit by the wands and the flames. They like what they see, but I sense no erotic charge at all.
Fire wands are just the beginning, the easy intro. Over the next half hour, Paradox uses canes, exploding flash cotton of the type used by magicians, and then twin floggers made of Kevlar that he soaks in alcohol, lights, and uses to flog a naked Jenny as she stands up against a big wooden X. Allena dims the lights so we can appreciate the full effect of the whirling, flaming floggers.
“Whoa!”
“The sound is just so great.”
“Cool!”
“That is awesome!”
Woosh, woosh, woosh, the floggers fly in big blazing circles, hitting Jenny and then wheeling back in an arc of fire.
For his pièce de résistance, Paradox lays Jenny back down on the table and forms trails of alcohol in patterns across her back, butt, and legs. He orders the lights dimmed. Then he fires up a violet wand and lets the blue and yellow sparks zzit zzit through the air. The glass tube at the end of the wand glows purple. Holding it just above her back, he activates it again and a spark flies from the glass tip onto Jenny’s back, igniting the trails of alcohol.
“Aww! Brilliant!”
But he’s not done. While she is still lying down, Paradox uses soft wax to form a bowl on the small of her back. He pours in some alcohol and lights it. Jenny has become, one audience member says approvingly, “a human candelabra!”
“That is so sexy…”
As a brief encore, Paradox gives everyone a quick lesson on fire cupping, the practice of using Chinese glass cups to create a warm suction on the skin. He places a cup where he wants it on Jenny’s back, lights a match, lifts the cup slightly off her back, holds the flame under it, removes the flame, and then tips the cup back fully onto her skin. As the air inside the cup cools, it sucks the skin up into the resulting vacuum.
“Gwyneth Paltrow does this,” Paradox informs us. The effect is like giving somebody an enormous hickey. “You will get a very nice bruise there.”
“The smaller cups are great on nipples,” Paradox says. “This is a very fun thing to do, especially if you have somebody who is lactating.”
“You are a very sadistic daddy,” Jenny says, smiling. Paradox glows at the compliment.
“Aren’t you worried about the bruising?” I ask Jenny.
“Oh no,” she says. “I like to be marked.”
After the seminar has concluded, Allena introduces me to Debra and Craig, a middle-aged couple who don’t resemble the others in the room. I don’t see them attending any Renaissance fairs. Debra is petite, thin, elegant looking. Her nails are perfectly manicured, her lips glossy. She is wearing a glittery camisole top and black pants. Craig is tall, thin, blond, handsome, and well dressed. When Debra tells me they are both fifty-six, I frankly don’t believe her. I’m not sure I would believe forty-six.
“They’re in town just for the night,” Allena tells me, “and I thought we’d all go out to dinner, with Paradox and Jenny and my boyfriend Jim.”
I pile into Allena’s car with her and Jim, a fellow who produces online bondage porn, and we drive a short distance to a seafood restaurant on the water. We sit at wooden tables and order beers.
Craig and Debra are unmarried swingers from Illinois briefly visiting Seattle on an extended trip that has included a visit to Paris and swing clubs there. The Wet Spot isn’t really their typical scene, but both of them have set off on a sexual odyssey of their own and are trying new things.
Debra is a school psychologist in a small Illinois city. After she and her first husband divorced, she “saw the divorce as an opportunity to reinvent myself” and she did it partly through swinging. When she married again, she and her second husband began visiting a club called Executive North in Mount Prospect, Illinois. That was where she met Craig, a prominent businessman in the Chicago area, and his wife. The four of them became friends, but, she insists, that friendship had nothing to do with why either of them divorced their spouses. She and Craig aren’t exactly exclusive now anyway—they don’t even live very near to each other.
Swinging for Debra is a way to receive positive affirmation and feel good about herself and others. She’s not a BDSM aficionado—“I am not into pain. I have a strict ‘no pain’ policy!” For her, swinging “is all about intimacy.”
She says this like trading partners in a sex club and intimacy should seem naturally linked concepts in my mind, but I confess that I don’t get it. Intimacy would seem to imply at least a little exclusivity for at least a little longer than two hours.
“When you are naked and sharing intimate parts of yourself, those experiences are very intimate to me. We all have a great need for intimacy. Our society,” she continues, “works against intimacy.” We are atomized and harried, technologically plugged, and humanly unplugged. “So this is about trust and respect. There is no other place where you are so vulnerable and others are vulnerable as well.” This is why she prefers the nude environments of swing clubs like the ones in Paris.
Craig has undergone a profound change in his life, just as Debra has in hers. There came a moment, he tells me, about a decade ago, “when I realized that the culture would kill me if I did not become what I am now.” I don’t know what that means. What is he now?
In a world in which people are not touched nearly enough, he says, one in which the prevailing attitude is about restriction and regulation and sin, we have become starved for intimate contact with other human beings, one of those things that make us human in the first place. All his business dealings, his success, his religious background as a Lutheran, never once helped him become the loving, sensitive man he is today. Now he wants to share that intimate touching. He has become an advocate for polyamory, having multiple, simultaneous loving relationships. He also serves as a sex surrogate for middle-aged women. “Sex is something we give to other people,” he says. Craig wants to be a very giving person.
Knowing she and Craig are from Illinois, and now reminded by her mention of Paris, I have to ask her about Jack Ryan, the former Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. If Barack Obama becomes the next president of the United States, he can thank those sex clubs in Paris. Ryan was running against Obama, and had a good chance of winning, too, but his candidacy crumbled after court papers filed in his divorce from actress Jeri Ryan indicated that he and Jeri—she apparently reluctantly—visited the clubs. Personally, I don’t think visiting a sex club in Paris should disqualify anyone from public office. On the other hand, I feel this episode revealed a moral flaw in Ryan, not of sexual depravity but of greed. (Did I mention he was married to Jeri Ryan?) Neither Craig nor Debra believes they ever ran into Ryan, but they say I’d be surprised by the number of well-to-do prominent people who go to the clubs. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe once. Not anymore.
Swinger clubs like the ones Debra and Craig have been telling me about have been around for a long time. The most famous in the United States, probably the world, was Plato’s Retreat, a New York City club that opened in 1977 during the last spasm of sexual profligacy in disco-era Manhattan. It closed in the wake of AIDs.
Swinger clubs are making a comeback now. Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dallas—most major cities have several swing clubs and many smaller cities have at least one. There are swinger travel agencies arranging swinger vacations to desti
nations like Cancún and Jamaica, swinger hotels, swinger message boards on the Internet, swinger personals.
The parties at Fetish Con, held in public nightclubs, did not offer any penetrative or oral sex or display of genitals. In fact, at many fetish events, sex is frowned upon regardless of venue, sex being secondary to the scene and a possible violation of a code of etiquette within the fetish community that discourages sex in “play spaces.” The swinger clubs are different. Sex is the point. At Miami Velvet, in South Florida, couples can even perform for an audience in the club’s “Luvnasium.”
With their emphasis on sex, swinger clubs are considered somewhat old-fashioned by many in the fetish and BDSM world. Some refer to swingers as “lifestylers,” a name that evokes overweight, middle-aged people wearing gold chains and thong bikinis and cruising swimming pools in Las Vegas. But a new breed of swinger—younger and prettier—has arrived. Trained on raunchy MySpace party photos, Bang Bus, and hooking up, many are singles who just want hot, fast NSA (no strings attached) sex.
The Wet Spot is something different. It was founded in 1999 by six people who wanted to promote sexuality awareness and freedom. At the time, Allena was a well-known community activist and café owner who sometimes held BDSM “play parties” in the café’s basement. The founders hired Allena to take charge. She has been the director ever since. While one can certainly “hook up” at the Wet Spot, there is a self-conscious exploration of sexuality as a way of life that the founders and Allena have tried to foster. That was what attracted Debra and Craig and why they wanted to stop by on their travels.
As soon as we return to the Wet Spot, Craig drops his pants. He goes wandering around in his gray man briefs and his socks, checking out some of the students from the earlier class who are practicing their fire play. When I look again, he is lying down on a table getting a massage from another man. Nearby, a woman is lying naked on a similar table with a flame erupting from the middle of her back. Her male partner is working like an intense Frankenstein concocting new variations, assembling his ingredients on a side stand, plotting his next creation.
America Unzipped Page 28
