by Dale Peck
Because let’s face it, BDSM is silly in any context other than the sexual. Contrast the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe with those of Lovett/Codagnone and it becomes clear that what’s hot in a dimly lit bar or bedroom is pretty ridiculous in broad daylight, even if it refuses to surrender entirely its aura of taboo. This verboten quality is a large part of the reason why, in the late 1980s, as gay culture was rebounding, at least psychologically, from the first decade of the AIDS epidemic and reclaiming its sexual identity, some gay men nostalgically infused BDSM and its attendant fetishes with the hedonism of that all too brief pre-AIDS moment during which a generation of gay pioneers pushed the sexual revolution to its logical next step. Working more by instinct than intellect (which is to say, following their dicks and asses rather than their hearts or minds), gay men in the 1970s uncoupled coitus from its biological assumptions as well as the cultural baggage straight people had been piling onto it over the course of thousands of years. But what was most revolutionary about this behavior was neither the number of participants in a given encounter, nor the exotic accouterments to same, but, rather, the underlying (often unarticulated and unacknowledged) assumption that this kind of sex was fundamentally an individual activity rather than a communal one. It was a process of self-discovery premised upon self-abnegation, a subterranean interrogation of identity that the anachronistically applied term “anonymous sex” both hints at and obscures, “anonymous” being one of those post-liberation conveniences, like “queer” or “play” or “vanilla,” that attempts to interpret the past and extend it into the present, but can only do so by obscuring what came before. “Anonymous” leads us to think of the other person as the unknown, when in fact we are as nameless as our partners—not just to them, but to ourselves. Now as then, anonymous sex is a way to shed your civilized identity for a more protean being: to hook up with a stranger, but also, and more profoundly, to be a stranger to yourself.
But if the physical behavior survived the onset of plague, the psychology behind it didn’t. It couldn’t. Prophylaxis requires that your brain as well as your body shows up for sex; and for a certain kind of gay man—for the kind of gay man I was born too late to be—it was yet another of the epidemic’s tragedies, second only to the loss of life itself. And for that same kind of gay man, BDSM was a way of reconnecting with an earlier era’s raptures of oblivion, culturally, through the hallowed milieux of leather bars, but also via paraphilias, which, because they flout the conventional associations of this or that object or behavior or environment, assault not just the physical senses but good taste, propriety, the very idea of culture, and make it possible, if only for a few endorphin-charged moments, to pervert the homogenization and commodification of modern life, whose greedy grasp extends increasingly into the realm of personality itself. Late twentieth-century capitalism had a prurient fascination with all things sexual but offered little by way of approval or condemnation as long as money could be made. And for better or worse, money erases cultural and moral distinctions. We may not have been equal in the eye of the law in 1993, but we were all the same in the eye of the market. Even so, there were still some gay men who wanted to think of themselves as different from other people, gay as well as straight—not necessarily “abject,” in Michael Warner’s phrase, let alone “anticommunal,” in Leo Bersani’s (although not necessarily not abject either, or communal for that matter), but, more simply, as beings whose identities were bound up in sex—but only while they were having it. Gore Vidal maintained until the end of his life that “there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts,” and to the degree that that’s true, then the men in the bars where Colin Ireland found his victims recreated themselves in some fundamental way when they took off their workaday drag and replaced it with leather or rubber, exchanged their given names for Sir or boy, trumped cognition with acts of physical stimuli that for the seconds or minutes or hours they could be borne recast the entire body as a single Foucauldian sexual organ. The freedom granted by these experiences is fragile at best, if not simply illusory (sex that requires specialized and often expensive accessories would seem to be the very definition of a commodified activity), but the contradiction didn’t detract from its appeal. It did, however, make its participants—its adherents, I want to say, its believers—wary in the way they shared their experiences, because separating them from the context in which they occurred reduced them beyond recognition—or, rather, magnified them into meaningless abstraction.
This, then, was the source of my reticence in writing about the London murders, and I encountered it whenever I tried to talk to someone about the crimes. It certainly wasn’t shame, as the massive size of the leather contingent in any gay pride parade demonstrates, not to mention the context in which most of my conversations took place. It wasn’t even silence per se. It was, rather, a refusal to integrate certain specifically sexual activities into their nonsexual lives (indeed, the very word “integrate,” with its assimilationist connotations, gives away the game, and “incorporate,” the other word I considered using, is even worse). These activities could be hinted at or even declared (c.f., pride parades), but the sex that the signs and flags (and chaps and codpieces) signified remained fundamentally unseen and unseeable; unexplained; inexplicable. I remember, for example, a man named Grant I met in the First Out, a gay cafe just off Tottenham Court Road, who, within an hour of meeting me (and still in the cafe), told me how a former boyfriend used to tie him spreadeagle to the bed in the ground-floor bedroom of their house, duct tape one end of a long length of plastic tubing into his mouth, then walk with the other end upstairs to the living room, where he would watch television—EastEnders, Coronation Street, Neighbours—drink beer, and piss through a funnel into the tube all evening long. Not immediately, but over the course of several hours, the piss would make its way to the helpless Grant on the floor below, who, because of the tape sealing his mouth, had no choice but to swallow it. Grant went so far as to tell me that I could buy the tubing, not at a DIY store, let alone a fetish shop, but at a store that sold supplies for aquariums, where it would be less expensive, but he would not tell me that he was a fetishist or into BDSM, and when I pressed him denied that such specific sexual activities constituted an identity as opposed to, say, a predilection, a hobby, something he did every once in a while—once or twice a month, say, or once or twice a day—but to which he didn’t devote a great deal of thought otherwise.
Or as my friend Gordon wrote me in December of that year:
To finish off, I’ll leave you with something special for Christmas, and try to give a few details of a recent sexual encounter in which my behaviour surprized me a bit. Parts of it are blurry, and parts will likely sound cliché, but here it goes. On Saturday night, eve of a full moon, lunar eclipse and “dies mali,” I found myself in the only bar I can stand on such a night, on the third of a three-day coke binge. (I should add that I hadn’t been out at all for six weeks, due to a mix of moving anxiety, the flu, and disinterest.) It was an extraordinarily friendly night—I think because of the number of Seattlites in town escaping American thanksgiving—and I was pretty friendly myself, with a couple of ‘seventies-style’ mutual-electric-exchanges.
Early on, I locked eyes with a man I swore I’d never seen before, with a magnificent bare chest, smooth shaven head, scraggly goatee and piercing eyes. Hours later, I realized that he usually sported a Nordic blond crewcut and that I had seen him and his lover many times before but had assumed—hastily, it turns out—that he was less free in his relationship than in his choice of leather and rubber ensembles. I warned him that I was on coke and therefore a bit short-circuited hard-on-wise, but when we went through the list of things we could do, he found good enough reason to shrug off his lover, take me to the pool in the basement of his apartment building, piss all over me and fuck me face-down on the cold tiles in the changing rooms, among other positions and locations. There was more than this, but it�
�s the part that’s blurry (sort of) and it’s the kind of thing I’m bad at explaining. Anyways, as he reached orgasm, he pulled out and asked if he could come inside me. Bad enough we were fucking without a you-know-what—but my initial objection was admittedly groggy—I was obviously torn over the matter, and after a few strokes of phallic coersion, I gave in to the Bad Deed. The whole experience was more intense and extreme than I can communicate—in fact, I think it was when I stupidly, sluttishly groaned, “Oh god, this is the best” that he was inspired to take the liberty.
So as my mood brightened over the following days (“Sparky’s back,” quipped a friend), I obsessed over what I had done—before admitting to myself that I was thrilled. I didn’t enjoy the dilemma, but I did enjoy the coersion and the strange inner sense of abandon. I also enjoyed my massage therapist’s reaction to the large bruise along my spine that I don’t remember getting (“Looks like you rubbed up against something there …”). I can’t put down why I feel such amazement at my own actions and reactions. Only, perhaps, to say there’s this feeling of having made a leap in my understanding of myself, not the thing you’d expect from Saturday night at the Shaggy Horse. This state of mind moved me, just yesterday, to finally defy my departed lover’s opinions about the aesthetics of my chest and get a pierce in one of those resilient nipples of mine. About time.
What unites Graham and Gordon’s stories—and, now that I think about it, Byron’s too—is the hyperspecific manner in which they’re told, and the way in which that specificity is employed, not in the service of information, but the erotic. Graham and Gordon and Byron weren’t simply trying to tell me how hot their respective encounters had been, they were trying to turn me on, because it was only when what they’d done existed in an erotic context that it could be perceived by an observer in the same way its participants had—or, not perceived, but felt. Experienced, in the loins as well as the head. That there were other implications to their actions, other meanings that might be gleaned from them, was undeniable, but also unsayable, viz. Gordon’s It’s the kind of thing I’m bad at explaining … The whole experience was more intense and extreme than I can communicate … I can’t put down why I feel such amazement … Over the course of the last three years of his life Gordon wrote me dozens of letters amounting to some 50,000 words, almost all of which had something to do with sex: of course he could have communicated the source of his amazement: he just refused to. (Six months earlier, in June, I had recorded this impression of my second date with Robbie: “I simply can’t describe how turned on I was, & I don’t want to try. I really, really don’t want to use words—at least not now—to get at the feelings of that experience.”) Likewise, Graham and I had picked each other out in the vanilla environment of the First Out because of our hair (cropped), our Levi’s (too tight, cuffed high up the ankle over our boots), and our jackets (an acetate aviator jacket in his case, a Lewis Leathers biker jacket in mine): not only did our sexual habits constitute an identity, but that identity came with its own uniforms, both informal (what we wore in the First Out) and dress: the more extreme gear we put on to go to leather bars, or just to have sex. And Byron …
Byron.
After Alan died, Byron was forced to return to his homophobic family in Australia because he could no longer afford his meds. He sold off many of his possessions before he left, some of them because he couldn’t get them to Australia, some because he knew he was going home to die and he didn’t want them to end up in his family’s hands, or the trash. Some of the stuff he sold to strangers but some was offered only to certain of his friends, and the last time I saw Byron was when he invited me to his apartment and pulled out a suitcase (I think it had been under the bed, but the bed was gone now) and showed me the collection of bondage gear he had made for himself and Alan, and as I sifted through it he told me how, after Alan’s funeral, Alan’s straight brother had come back to Alan and Byron’s apartment and he and Byron had dropped acid and had sex. It was Byron who shaved my head for the first time. He did Jean-Claude’s on the same occasion, but only Byron and I had erections. I would have slept with him then, but I wasn’t ready to sleep with someone I knew was HIV-positive, and I would have slept with him the last time I saw him, might even have used the four shackles I bought from him, but there was no longer a bed to tie him to. There was no longer a bed, and the bones were visible in his pitifully thin wrists and ankles, and there was a piece of paper taped to the wall beside his toilet listing the frequency and consistency of his bowel movements because he had cryptosporidiosis and was literally shitting his life away, but even so, he wanted to tell me that he had seduced Alan’s brother because it was the only way he could communicate the reality of his life with Alan to that man, who was practically a stranger—who referred to Alan by his first name, John, and who paused whenever Byron said the name Alan, as if asking himself who that was. And, of course, it was the closest Byron would ever come to sleeping with Alan again, just as giving me his gear was the only way the pleasure they had shared would live on in this world.
WELL. YOU CAN run with the Dionysian thesis if you want, but if you prefer a simpler explanation for why people in London wouldn’t talk to me, or, at any rate, wouldn’t talk about certain things, there’s also the fact that BDSM occupies a gray zone of British law, which is to say that BDSM itself is not illegal, but many sadomasochistic activities are. (As the Christians say, hate not the sinner but the sin.) As with the (now-unconstitutional) sodomy statutes in the United States, the law categorizing certain sadomasochistic behaviors as forms of assault ostensibly applies to both heterosexuals and homosexuals, but in practice gay people are prosecuted with greater severity. By far the most notorious example of biased prosecution is known as the Spanner case, from the name given by Manchester police to a sting operation carried out between 1987, when officers found a videotape that depicted several gay men engaging in activities that included “beatings, genital abrasions and lacerations,” and 1989, when sixteen men, including several who had been the recipients rather than the perpetrators of the “beatings, genital abrasions and lacerations,” were charged with a variety of crimes, among them “assault, aiding and abetting assault, and keeping a disorderly house.” The case was initially heard in the Old Bailey in December 1990, when the indicted parties’ only defense—that everyone involved had consented to the activities—was ruled ineligible, at which point the men pleaded guilty and were given sentences of up to four and a half years in prison. The convictions were upheld in the High Court in January 1992 (although the sentences were reduced), and upheld again by the House of Lords on March 11, 1993—which is to say, the day after Peter Walker’s body was found, and, not surprisingly, the timing of these events hampered London police in their investigation into Peter Walker’s murder and the four murders that were soon to follow, as gay men who might have had relevant information refused to contact authorities for fear of being imprisoned themselves.
“The people who speak to us are often traumatised,” Jeremy Clarke, the director of Gay London Policing, told the Pink Paper of the few gay witnesses who came forward. “They are frightened of the police and fearful of press exposure.” The only assurance offered by Det. Chief Superintendent Ken John, who led the investigation into the killings, was a rather vague “I am not going to go beyond the bounds of this operation,” which was not, as many people pointed out, the same as saying that men who came forward as witnesses in the serial-killing case wouldn’t later be prosecuted for BDSM sex, and, on July 16, 1993, the unidentified gay police officer appointed to the investigation team wrote in an anonymous letter published in the Pink Paper that Det. Chief Superintendent John could not “provide a guarantee of immunity, which is why it is suggested that you seek legal advice” before coming forward. Apparently many men did not seek legal advice, or if they did the advice was that they keep their silence: Det. Chief Superintendent John admitted that more leads had been received from “the general public” than from gay men and, for the authorit
ies at least, the issue became moot when Colin Ireland was arrested at the end of July.
