Conferences and events. Events and conferences, from local to international in scale, are so frequent that nobody can go to all of them.
Dossie recently attended a workshop in Nebraska for newcomers to S/M, where she was Mistress of Ceremonies to a talent show, performed poetry, and led two workshops. One workshop was on S/M dynamics in relationships, an in-depth discussion of the different ways people manage to figure out whose turn it is to make the coffee in the morning when the person they live with is sometimes referred to as Master - or more seriously, just how far do you want the roles you like to play in the bedroom to affect the rest of your life?
Dossie’s other workshop was on bondage and ropes. This was a more practical workshop, where several experienced people brought a whole lot of rope and helped everyone figure out how to tie each other up with it. This range of experience is typical of BDSM conferences.
Other events are title contests, where individuals compete for titles like Mr. San Antonio Leather or Ms. Oklahoma Drag King. Local contests may be held in bars or clubs, and feature entertainment and lots of costumes and silliness - most are held as fundraisers for a local charity. This structure provides an nice milieu for kinky people to gather, get to know each other, be creative and outrageous on a stage, and generate a positive presence in the larger community by making a sizable donation to a charitable organization.
Local titleholders may go on to compete in larger national or international events. The granddaddy of leather events is International Mr. Leather, which annually fills up a large number of hotels in its host city, and generates parties that go on for ten days. The winners of these contests are expected to justify their fame by producing and hosting lots more events and fundraisers.
Kinky conferences usually include entertainment, play parties and how-to workshops, and many opportunities to make friends and meet experienced players. Major events usually have a vendor area, where participants can buy books and magazines, fashion and toys, and meet the craftspeople who serve their community.
What about young people? For legal and ethical reasons, virtually all these wonderful supportive kinky environments are open only to adults. Where, then, does that leave the young person whose fantasies about kinky behavior are strong, but who is too young to enact these fantasies? Kids are encountering images of alternative sexuality at a much earlier age these days. Unlike your authors, they don’t have to struggle with nameless desires for years or decades - they know the names of those desires, and they’re speaking freely about them. (Good!)
Remember - talking about something, or fantasizing about it, is not the same as doing it. Catherine remembers fantasizing about spanking and bondage from an age as early as four, but did not enact those fantasies until her late twenties. We hope that the teenager with kinky desires will find a group of like-minded, or at least sympathetic, people with whom he can talk freely about his evolving sexuality. Many cities offer support groups for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered teens, and we would hope that such groups would also offer support for teen members of other sexual minorities. Support groups for BDSM and other alternative sexualities now exist on a handful of college campuses; more, we presume, will evolve in the future. There are also a couple of good websites, notably Scarleteen (www.scarleteen.com), which provide support and information for young people’s sexuality.
We have developed our own culture. If you attended some of these conferences and events, you would discover that in the ghettos of the extreme sexual minorities there has developed a fascinating culture, with its own literature, publications, stores, businesses, craftspeople and artists.
Craftspeople are very important to the kinky community, as the costumes and toys that we use to live out our fantasies are usually not available at regular department stores. Craftspeople and artisans in leather, rubber and chain create clothing, costumes, corsets and fetishwear, all of it designed for use in a sexual context, and for the wearer to express how each sees him- or herself as a sexual person. Toys - restraints, bondage cuffs, blindfolds, dildos and whips in an enormous variety of materials, colors, textures and styles - facilitate infinite possibilities for sexual exploration.
The making of sex toys is a high art in this community; sleazy stuff is not welcome, as most people value their sex lives, and do not want their costumes and toys to be poorly made junk such as is found in many porn stores.
From our love of well-crafted leathers and toys, stores have opened to sell the works of craftspeople - leather stores have become so common that there is a well-known boutique in the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. (A strange sight to see if you have been traveling, like one of our authors, without your leathers and toys for fear of being hassled crossing borders on a European trip.)
In the visual arts, well-known artists like Robert Mapplethorpe have taken S/M and kinky imagery into the mainstream. Other artists are well-known within the kinky community: we recently attended a show of S/M art at San Francisco’s Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. S/M themes show up in the work of mainstream artists like Leonor Fini and Masami Teraoka, and out-of-the-closet artists like Tom of Finland and Fish explore explicit imagery of fantasy and roleplaying, offering in their art a profound understanding of sexual communication within the sexual minority ghetto.
Fashion designers Gianni Versace and Jean-Paul Gaultier openly display S/M clothing, while fashion photographer Helmut Newton has created an entire kinky style of presenting clothes.
Kinky people have a particular affinity for the performing arts, given our love of psychodrama in our private lives, and we have seen theater, dance and spoken word performance in cities as different as New York and Omaha, in theaters both within and expanding out of the sexual underground.
French philosopher Michel Foucault took the theory of sexuality, informed by S/M, to the heights of logical abstraction, and was one of the major voices of twentieth century philosophy.
In literature, Anne Rice (under her pseudonyms A. N. Roquelaure and Anne Rampling) writes intense S/M fantasy, and Pauline Reage’s Story of 0 has been a classic since it was first presented to the French Academy in 1958. Within the present kink community, there is an enormous amount of writing being published, both erotic and philosophical /political/psychological, about and from the point of view of sexual variation. Several publishing houses have evolved to serve the needs of a community hungry for fact and fiction about its own lifestyles. Certain distributors specialize in delivering these books to bookstores all over the country, either gay/lesbian bookstores or erotic boutiques, so that information is available wherever you may be looking for it. (Information about good books to read and how to find them will be found in the Resource Guide at the back of this book.) What a contrast to your authors’ childhoods, when we couldn’t find any books about sex at all!
Our point here is that kinky people live in an underground community that is rich and productive, generating art and discourse of its own and exerting a major influence on art and philosophy outside of the boundaries of the sexual minority’s ghetto: our voices carry very far “beyond the pale.” The three largest public events in California, where we live, are the Rose Bowl, the San Francisco Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/ Transgendered Freedom Day Pride Parade, and the Folsom Street Fair. This last, which attracts a couple of hundred thousand attendees every year, takes place in San Francisco’s South of Market “Miracle Mile,” home of leather bars, sex clubs, art galleries and performance spaces serving the sexual underground. (The mainstream newspapers here in San Francisco usually give the Fair a couple of column inches of space.)
Indeed, so complete a community and culture exists within our pale that many of us have very little contact with the mainstream world. Those of us who live in the sexual underground have entire social and extended family networks ready to take care of all of our needs; businesses, places of employment, neighborhoods where nobody stares when we walk by no matter what we are wearing. One publisher in our community maintains a list of Kink Aware Profe
ssionals, listing therapists, doctors and dentists who are “S/M friendly” in many cities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the Far East.
We even have our own museum: Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum now houses valuable historical documents and displays from our community’s past and present.
Why we feel safer in a ghetto. Because nobody will offer us a hard time. Many kinky people feel safer within the boundaries of our subculture, and more free to expand and refine our understanding and expression of our sexuality and our selves. There is very little space for our exploration in the mainstream culture.
This can be hard to understand, so let’s look at an example. Dossie writes and performs poetry with intense erotic and philosophical themes, and she has no desire to perform in the larger culture, even though she might make more money. The difference is about being understood. Audiences in the underground understand what she is saying, and are able to listen and respond with enthusiasm. A mainstream audience would be (and, on occasion, has been) so shocked by her content that they wouldn’t really hear her, and certainly would not be able to respond with enthusiasm. So inside the ghetto, she can develop her art and get feedback from those who read and hear her. Outside, she is regarded as an embarrassing freak.
The more we live in our community, the less we know about what is mainstream. We become a strange kind of foreigner, ostracized from the larger culture in which we live, encapsulated. Dossie has never lived in the mainstream as an adult, which is one reason why she seems old-fashioned when she tries: the “straight” culture she remembers living in was in the fifties. Some of us become “disculturated,” unfamiliar with the “regular” way, which means that when we visit you, our friends and family who are not of the sexual underground, we wind up feeling like a fish out of water, not knowing how to act or understanding the underlying meaning of interactions around us. How forbidden is it to be gay these days? Are lesbians more widely accepted than they used to be? Is it okay to joke about things like spanking and bondage? We don’t know.
If you visit in our culture, come perhaps to one of our art openings or theater performances, or the Folsom Street Fair, you too will feel like a fish out of water. Surrounded by people wearing odd bits of leather and chains, sporting tattoos and piercings and scarifications, or perhaps exquisitely tailored military uniforms, you might feel shocked, frightened, awkward and unsure of yourself.
A few years ago, Catherine’s mother was kind and brave enough to join Catherine for a panel discussion at a San Francisco S/M club on the topic of “S/M and Families.” As she followed Catherine around San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, past the leather stores and bars, past the men in leathers and the women in crew cuts, her eyes got bigger and bigger. The program itself was held in a gay men’s sex club that the support group had rented for the evening, an industrial space featuring individual booths for sexual activity, bondage equipment, rafters strung with discarded boots, and large safer-sex posters featuring muscular and erect young men stroking their latex-clad genitals. Mom - who handled the program like the pro she is, and was invited by several less fortunate kinkyfolk to come be their mother too - had a chance to learn firsthand what it feels like to be in an environment so very different from her own, and has had a whole new appreciation for the gap between sexual cultures since then.
Put yourself in that position, and remember: that’s how we feel when we visit the mainstream culture that you take for granted: we feel frightened, awkward and unsure.
8
Coming To Terms
How do you, how does anyone, come to terms with your friend’s sexual experience when it is way beyond the boundaries of anything you ever expected to find near you - nothing you ever expected you would have any need whatsoever to deal with, to learn about, to accept? Most of us have been taught that any sex, much less kinkiness, is embarrassing and disgusting. But now we are faced with someone - a friend, a lover, a member of the family - that we know and love, and we don’t want to hurt him, or lose his friendship.
This section will help you in deciding what your own feelings are about the kink of your friend or relative, and in clarifying your own boundaries.
Permission. Start by giving yourself permission to not like, not want, not feel erotic about anything that you may be hearing from your kinky friend that is shocking and difficult for you. It’s not your job to like every single fantasy or role-play or sexual behavior that you hear about. All that is asked of you is that you find a neutral position.
Now might be a good time to turn back to Chapter Two, if you need to. Take a few minutes to breathe, relax, and remember the wonderful things about your kinky friend or relative.
The other side of this same coin is important to note here. Since our culture has stereotyped kinky people as self-destructive sickos, it can be a startling revelation to discover that a person that you love and respect and know to be a healthy and worthwhile human being is into kinky sex. Dossie recalls what a shock it was to meet Cynthia Slater, co-founder of the Society of Janus, twenty-five years ago:
“I had always been aware of fantasies about bondage and kidnapping, but had thought them to be about an unhealthy, not-yet-reconstructed part of my pre-feminist self. Cynthia was a woman with whom I had a great deal in common: she was intelligent, outspoken and outrageous. So here was this woman whom I liked and respected (and found extremely attractive) who was actually doing all those forbidden things that were in my fantasies! I had a revelation. Maybe I, too, could try out some of those forbidden sexualities from my dreams and still be a strong and healthy person. And so I did, and so I am.”
You may find that you need to give yourself permission to acknowledge kinky themes in your own fantasies or your desires. Once again, give yourself permission to feel how you feel, and be who you are. You may never act on such fantasies, or you may try them out at some other time - there is no rush. Coming to terms with your friend’s kink does not mean you have to join him, and if you find yourself with some desire to do so, you can give yourself all the time you like to think about that, gather information, and make up your own mind for yourself. And if you decide, as many do quite happily, to keep your kink in fantasy only, then perhaps this book, or what you hear from your kinky friend, may enrich your fantasy life, and we think this is a good thing too.
Continue to give yourself permission to have your feelings - give your gut responses some respectful attention, and be kind to yourself. You can safely own your feelings and learn from them as long as you don’t blame yourself or anyone else for those feelings being there inside you. They are simply your feelings, part of you and your unique character and history.
Setting limits. Another important thing to know about coming to terms with information about your kinky person’s alternative sexual behaviors is that you get to set your own limits.
For example, you might find that you’re perfectly OK with hearing that your daughter likes bondage - but that hearing the details of exactly how she likes to get tied up and what happens next is simply too much, that it feels too intimate or too scary to hear that information. We think it’s extremely important that you communicate your discomfort to her, and set clear limits about what information you want and don’t want to be given.
Many kinkyfolk talk among themselves in a very forthright and uninhibited manner, and it’s easy for us to forget that the rest of the world may not feel comfortable with such frank talk. Please, if your kinky person is telling you more than you want to know, or using language that feels uncomfortable to you, say so. Be as clear as you can about exactly what it is that’s bothering you and how she can avoid it in the future. If you can, make it clear that it isn’t her kinky behavior that’s upsetting you, it’s that she’s giving you more information than you’re ready to hear right now. We think she’d much rather have you state your limits clearly than have you simply stop communicating at all because you’re feeling overwhelmed.
You may also dis
cover that what worries you is not so much that you’re upset by how your kinky person is talking, but what other people might think - especially if those other people are important in your life, your neighbors or co-workers or parents. This may be a special concern if your kinky person is very “out” and public in his desires (“Wasn’t that your son Tim I saw at the Folsom Street Fair on the news last night?”)
You may never choose to hear the details, and that’s okay too. Your friend or family member needs to know that you still care for and respect him as a human being, not that you ardently desire an instant education in the joys of perversion. Even if your kinky person is your lover, spouse, mate or partner, which we will discuss in detail soon... even in this difficult case... you still get to choose how much you feel you can take in at any given time. It probably took your kinky friend some period of time to get comfortable enough to speak easily about what she does. You can reassure yourself by asking your friend about his learning process: “Didn’t you have a hard time with this the first time you heard it?” Chances are he did - sexual sophisticates are made, not born.
Pay attention to your own reactions. What shocks you the most? What your friend does? That he is not ashamed? That she talks about it in language that you’ve never heard before except as an insult? That your friend is out of the closet and lots of people know about his lifestyle, and what will the neighbors think if your kinky person shows up at your house for dinner in leather and studs? Knowing specifically what’s bothering you today makes it easier to set limits: “I’d like to invite you to dinner, but I’m embarrassed and I feel distant from you if you come in costume, and I worry about what the neighbors will say to me.”
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