Different Loving

by William Brame

  We are still living with the Victorian notion that sex itself is bad. Western society has not always believed that, but it believed it with a kind of a vengeance after Krafft-Ebing—a man who as far as anybody can tell had intercourse with his wife enough times to produce a couple of children and may not have done anything else sexually thereafter—wrote Psychopathia Sexualis. He held as the worst possible sexual practices homosexuality, transgenderism (he was particularly addressing transvestism), sadomasochism, and masturbation.

  —WILLIAM A. HENKIN

  Three things are remarkable about Psychopathia Sexualis. The first is its breadth of inquiry; then and now, psychological theory often rests on an extremely limited statistical base. Second is his compassion toward those who practiced acts that personally disgusted him; he advocated leniency, tolerance, and legal reform, arguing that one should not be punished for a condition for which there was little hope of a cure, as in the case of homosexuals. But most remarkable of all was the enormous distribution of his book: Krafft-Ebing, a medico-forensics expert who was specifically interested in the legal ramifications of sexual deviance, never intended Psychopathia Sexualis to be popular.

  He did not want the public to read his book, so he gave it a scientific title, employed technical terms, and inscribed the most exciting parts in Latin. Despite these handicaps, the author proved to be a magnificent reporter: the public swooped down on his book.

  —VICTOR ROBINSON9

  It was sensational, shocking, and irresistible. As a medical book it escaped the taint of deliberate salaciousness; its stringent moral tone reinforced social ideals. Genteel readers entered a dizzying vortex of vampires, ghouls, lust murderers, shoe fetishists, groveling masochists, heartless sadists, pederasts, and bestialists—many of whom apparently drank tea in the cozy drawing rooms of bourgeois Europe.

  Actually, Krafft-Ebing’s behavioral “discoveries” had been known for centuries, if not millennia. Yet some readers found in Psychopathia Sexualis the first inklings that their sexual desires were not unique.

  HAVELOCK ELLIS AND THE OBSERVER EFFECT

  For the first time there was an exhaustive, accessible work that dealt not only with sex but with the types of sex that people seldom discussed. But even as Psychopathia Sexualis was going to press in Stuttgart, in England Havelock Ellis had begun the research that would culminate in his massive—and virtually unmatched—Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

  Contemporaries in time and discipline, these two scholars had dissimilar motivations. Ellis had a vested interest in demystifying sexuality: He had a lifelong titillation with urination that he credited to his mother having urinated openly in front of him when he was 12. His vocation as sexuality educator resulted from a religious experience he had as a young man. While reading a work by Dr. James Hinton that attempted to reconcile Christianity with science, Ellis was struck by a sense of utter harmony and euphoria. He decided then to become a doctor and to devote himself to the study of sexual behavior so that future generations might be spared the shame that ignorance and repression had caused him.

  Ellis ultimately produced the seven volumes of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897 to 1928), but his greatest goal was never achieved. His works had limited success in combatting condemnation of unusual sexual behaviors. Freudianism was already growing apace, and its emphasis on psychoanalysis and intuitive theory was at odds with Ellis’s cross-cultural studies and scholarship. Still, Ellis’s sympathetic point of view helped popularize his work among members of the sexual minorities he wrote about, some of whom seemed to receive his conclusions as gospel. After reading in Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) that turn-of-the-century American gay male prostitutes wore red ties, for example, countless gays began wearing them as a recognition device.

  Bullough notes that the Chicago Vice Commission in 1909 found that the numerous male homosexuals there (estimated at 10,000 or more) also made use of the red tie convention to identify each other. Bullough comments: “This leads to a question of whether homosexuals had adopted red as a color in Chicago or whether they wore red because Havelock Ellis told them it was the thing to do.”

  —EDGAR GREGERSEN10

  The possibility that gay men, after reading Ellis, wore red ties illustrates the observer effect. Simply stated, the observer effect involves learning of a behavior (whether by direct observation, reading, or word of mouth), finding the behavior personally appealing, and then emulating that behavior. This is not an unthinking imitation of the “monkey-see, monkey-do” variety. The observation elicits feelings of identification in the observer. By emulating the behavior, one gains an affiliation with one’s fellows which leads to increased self-esteem and social power. The gay men who learned that red ties could discreetly communicate their orientation to other gay men adopted the code as a standard, much like the contemporary gay man who wears a colored hankie in a rear pocket to “flag” his sexual interests.

  This process of observation-identification-emulation-affiliation must be distinguished from fallacious assertions (such as those made by the Meese Commission in its study of pornography in the 1980s) that exposure to unusual sexuality (paraphilia) contaminates individuals who are otherwise uninterested.

  Paraphilias are not socially contagious. They are not caught by association with paraphiles or reading about them, or by looking at movies or videos of them engaged in paraphilic activity. The myth of social contagion, especially from exposure to visual depiction of paraphilias, underlies officialdom’s current panicky fascination with pornography and with driving it underground. The truth is that paraphilic pornography does not defile normophilic lovemaps. It simply does not appeal to anyone except those whose lovemap already mirrors it.

  —JOHN MONEY11

  A heterosexual cannot be transformed by reading Ellis—or anyone else—into a homosexual, any more than this book will transform a sexually conventional reader into a sadomasochist. The person whose sadomasochistic desires were previously limited to fantasy or occasional furtive encounters is the one whose behavior may be affected by discovering that a community of shared interest and sympathetic understanding exists.

  THE 20TH CENTURY

  The life sciences still battle for the ground that was scorched and denuded before the 19th Century’s end. Science has failed to adequately explain the origins of sexual proclivities. Instead, today’s popular media, bolstered by rafts of self-appointed experts, seize on idiosyncratic theories, such as sexual addiction, as if they represent progress in thought and knowledge. But the “diagnosis” (that too much sex is always bad) is warmed-over Victorianism, and the “treatment” is unchanged: strive to overcome, sublimate, repress.

  Indeed, the scientific study of sexuality languishes. Scientific methodology demands, among other things, that when an experiment is repeated under all the same conditions, the results must be identical. A truly scientific study of sexuality is perhaps an impossible task, since we do not have the ability to replicate genetic structure or behavioral conditions in different human beings. Further, scientific study requires long and painstaking research and, most important, funding.

  Sexual research has invariably incited storms of hostility and outrage. In Britain Havelock Ellis’s publisher faced criminal prosecution for issuing Sexual Inversion. The Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality (1919–1933), founded by eminent German scholar Magnus Hirschfeld, was sacked and its priceless documents and library burned by the Nazis, who shipped some of its staff members to concentration camps.

  In the United States Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) was a pioneering work that gained Alfred Kinsey the title “The Columbus of Sex” from Time magazine. Kinsey examined sexual behavior as practiced, not as idealized. Among many other findings, he reported that 20 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women who participated in his original surveys expressed some degree of arousal in response to sadomasochistic stories. By 1954 Kinsey was under attack from the American Medical Association and Congress for the depr
avity his works allegedly engendered. The House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw financial support from Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. The U.S. Customs Service seized materials addressed to the Institute. Kinsey died of a heart attack in 1956, his research incomplete, and colleagues allege that the “scrutiny, criticism, and harassment took an emotional and physical toll.”12

  A decade later William E. Masters and Virginia Johnson published Human Sexual Response, based on 12 years of direct laboratory observation of sexual activity. Laymen and clergy attacked their work for, among other things, the use of sexual surrogates in studying orgasm and for their conclusion that almost all sexual dysfunction originates in religious orthodoxy. Conservative psychoanalysts ignored or dismissed some of Masters and Johnson’s more controversial findings.

  Between 1988 and 1991 three federally funded studies of potentially invaluable worth (particularly at a time when transmission of the HIV virus that causes AIDS is epidemic) were proposed to examine patterns of sexual behavior. The two that were approved were ultimately canceled under pressure from Senator Jesse Helms and Congressman William Dannemeyer. The third was dismissed as political suicide despite the high regard with which it was received in peer review.13

  Although over 100 years have passed since Krafft-Ebing first identified sadomasochism and classified it as a pathology, his theories remain the foundation for current perceptions and clinical diagnoses. Official changes in the classification of unusual sexuality—when they occur—seem to be driven by changing social attitudes rather than new data.

  If you look at the first edition (1952) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, fellatio, cunnilingus, and masturbation are all mental illnesses. By 1980, with the third edition of the DSM, you find as mental illnesses reduced desire, incapacity, and so forth. And that’s changing again. Psychology, in this sense, is very much a sociological creature. We follow the scripts of the society. When the society says it’s good to have sex then it’s psychologically sick not to, and when the society says it’s bad to have sex then it’s psychologically sick to [have sex].

  —WILLIAM A. HENKIN

  In discussing the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to reclassify homosexuality in 1973, Dr. John Money points out that politics and pocketbooks inform scientific bias.

  A major political struggle of gay activists to have homosexuality upgraded from an illness to a social status required having it declassified from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the APA.… Inevitably, the old guard fought back. They were loath to relinquish their conviction that homosexuality is always a disease for the cure of which they provided a treatment (and earned an income).

  —JOHN MONEY14

  Although attitudes are changing about what constitutes acceptable sexuality, the view that paraphilia is an illness requiring treatment prevails.

  Most of the psychological literature is bent on demonstrating that alternate (which I prefer to “deviant”) sexual practices or lifestyles are in some ways sick. This is a consequence of the medicalization of psychology. I’m not very happy that psychology is seen as a medical process. It seems to be far more a philosophical inquiry, if you will. Nobody knows why people become anything.

  —WILLIAM A. HENKIN

  In the last few decades knowledge about D&S behaviors and customs in the D&S subculture has largely been disseminated not by scientists, but by sexual practitioners themselves. Increasingly sophisticated modes of communication (beginning with the explosion in the publishing industry, and extending to television talk shows and, especially significant, to computer bulletin boards) have provided individuals with a wealth of information about sexuality. And the observer effect has played a significant role in the growth of minority sexuality communities. Open communication about D&S has attracted thousands of fetishists and sadomasochists to D&S support networks. There is no more instructive example of the observer effect than the transformation of the Old Guard of sadomasochistic homosexuals into contemporary D&S culture.

  THE LEATHER EVOLUTION

  I think S/M is changing now because the opportunity for communication exists in a fashion that it has not had ever before. Kinky sexuality is talked about more on television and radio talk shows. The purpose of the people producing all of this media [may be] to sensationalize in many cases, but the effect is that people are not living in dark, separate corners, as I was when I was young, believing that no one does any of this stuff. They are [informed] by general media that [such] fantasies are acted upon.

  —JOSEPH BEAN

  The gay leather scene traces its ancestry to two sources: the barracks of World War II and the motorcycle outlaws of the 1950s and 1960s. As the origin mythology describes it, leathermen derived their complex authoritarianism from the first source while from the second they acquired an abiding fascination with black leather and bike clubs.

  The massive American military mobilization of World War II uprooted millions of men who might otherwise have found scant opportunity even to travel from their hometowns and placed them within a huge, exclusively male society under pressure of a cataclysmic drama. Men whose homosexuality might have remained repressed or hidden were given an extraordinary opportunity to explore and gratify their desires. For gay men of a sadomasochistic bent the military offered a further thrill: power and discipline within an authoritarian framework. Gay leather sex then and now is a celebration of Greco-Roman ideals of masculinity—a hypermale society that embraces classical male values and rituals such as honor, service, initiation, mentoring, and paying one’s dues.

  Upon their return to the States about 1946, many of the gay vets wanted to retain the most satisfying elements of their military experience and, at the same time, hang out socially and sexually with other masculine gay men. They found that only in the swashbuckling motorcycle culture did such opportunities exist and so the gay bike clubs were born.

  —GUY BALDWIN15

  By the early 1960s the existence of this subculture had reached the attention of the avant-garde. The film Scorpio Rising (1963)—described by author Hunter S. Thompson as “a bizarre little comment on twentieth-century America, using motorcycles, swastikas and aggressive homosexuality as a new culture trilogy”16—depicts men slowly and sensuously dressing in leather jackets and Levis, and contains a few sadomasochistic vignettes.

  Leathermen did not generally welcome public attention. Entering their society was intentionally made difficult. Each newcomer had to prove his worth in a controlled social environment where experienced people guided him through a lengthy training period. Failure to abide by the complex unwritten rules governing dress and demeanor meant at least a lessening of social status and at worst ostracization. This social milieu has since come to be known as the Old Guard, and networking was among its key social regulators.

  One of the mechanisms that keeps the S/M community relatively safe is networking: People know people within the community who know new people within the community, and so on. I’m talking specifically about the male subculture, which is what I know best.

  —JOSEPH BEAN

  Although Old Guard conventions continue to influence gay and straight leather and D&S communities, its rigorous etiquette has been considerably diluted. This is largely attributable to a sizable influx of men (and women) who seek sexual acceptance among peers. The very things that made the Old Guard strong—a highly evolved social structure and a sense of community—attracted new members and, ultimately, contributed to its demise.

  [When] Tom of Finland became widely known—his art primarily dealt with gay male leather imagery—suddenly there were a couple of years when leathermen were the living icons of gay sexuality. The result is that the network breaks down. There is an influx of endless numbers of curious people; there are more people showing up at play parties and the bars than could possibly be assimilated. In my view, for the S/M community to remain somewhat underground and somewhat unaccep
ted, so that people have to approach warily and have to prove themselves as trustworthy individuals, is in fact a very high value for the community.

  —JOSEPH BEAN

  The leather community met a previously unfulfilled social need. And as novices flooded in, activists became keenly aware of the vital importance of educating those who would not have the opportunity for individual mentorship.

  THE MODERN SCENE

  In the second edition of The Leatherman’s Handbook, author Larry Townsend writes:

  A little over ten years ago I signed a contract to write The Leatherman’s Handbook.… It was a virgin field, wide open, and, except for my disagreements with a few shrinks here and there, the ideas I was suggesting were fresh and new. This time, however, I am faced with a mountain of written material expressing the opinions of a great many people.… Making the present task far more difficult … is the enormous increase of people participating in a very wide area of activities.17

  The blank slate upon which Larry Townsend wrote in the early 1970s had rapidly filled by the 1980s. Until the 1960s the main sources for information on D&S were clinical studies; by the mid-1980s a wide array of nonfiction and fiction about D&S (much of it produced by gays and lesbians) became available. For a time it seemed that the 1960s’ relaxation of sexual mores had opened the door to free discussion—and exploration—of unconventional sex.