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Family Ties Keynote Address

I’ve been in the scene for quite a while.  One of my standing jokes is my first set of nipple clips was made from live trilobites, but in truth, did my first scene in 1964.  It’s hard for people now to remember what it was like back then.  There was no Internet; even its daddy, Arpnet, was only a gleam in the eyes of a few geeks.  There were no nonfiction books on how to do this stuff.  The first gay how-to, The Leatherman’s Handbook over half a decade away; the first lesbian one, The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, a quarter century, and the first one basically for heterosexuals, Jay Wiseman’s SM101 would not appear until after 1990.  The serious psychological works had taken their cue from Kraft Ebbing’s Psychopathica Sexualis and roundly predicted that anyone who did this sort of stuff was bound, in a few years, to be stuffing dead bodies into trunks and writing missives with human blood.  This, I probably don’t need to be telling you, that wasn’t good for my peace of mind. 

It didn’t help that this was before the days of open stacks in academic libraries.  The procedure in those days was for a student to submit a slip with the call numbers of books he wanted to read.  Not only was there more than a bit of paranoia in telling the powers that be you wanted to read about violent perversion,  but those books were on a “closed list” and you had to have permission from a psych professor even to look at them.  Fortunately, this was also before the days of burglar alarms in college libraries.  It’s amazing how much more credible pure bullshit sounds when you are reading it by the light of a penlight clutched in your teeth.

There were no support groups.  There weren’t really any groups at all.   Oh, there were whispers about a New York/Long Island club of rich men and beautiful women, which we now know was run by Charles Guyette and is probably the model for all the “secret European societies”  about which bullshiters love to talk about on the net.  But a group like this was hardly accessible to “real people.”  For that, we had to wait for Eulenspiegel to appear in 1970, but, even then, unless you lived in or near Manhattan, you were out of luck.  I didn’t live in Manhattan or even within 200 miles of the city.  Even if I had heard about it, Eulenspiegel might as well be on the Moon.

The lack of groups and direct contact led to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance.  It is the feeling that ones needs and feelings are unique, unshared.  That one is isolated and alone.  This in turn creates a feeling akin to guilt, as if one is a freak, different, unworthy of society.   A simple model is a dictatorship with an active secret police.  Even if every member of the society including the members of the secret police want to overthrow the dictator, if they can be prevented from expressing those thoughts, they are left feeling that they are the only ones holding them.  This makes action effectively impossible.  Look at how quickly the Soviet Empire vanished once people began to express their disproval.  If anything, the mechanism is more powerful in sexual matters.

Still, I was luckier than most.  My first partners were a lesbian couple who needed a top.  The switch half of the couple wanted a chance to bottom while the bottom was understandably jealous of other women.  As a male, I wasn’t seen as a threat.  Believe me, being the “insignificant other” in such a relationship is a sure cure for Top’s Disease.  Because of my relationship with them, they occasionally took me to a leather bar in Providence, Rhode Island.  At that time, lesbian women were welcome at gay bars because their presence provided the regulars with a “beard” should the police arrive.  “Hell, officer, we ain’t queer.  Look ‘et the broads.”

This was my first exposure to what has become known as The Old Guard.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I wasn’t part of their scene.  I wasn’t even particularly welcome.  The situation was like a not particularly beloved relative coming to visit with her pet poodle.  “As long as he stays off the sofa and doesn’t piddle on the floor, he can stay” sort of thing.  But I did get to see the interaction and some of the play, a good bit of which we brought into our own relationship.  Hell, I hadn’t even seen a flogger before then.  But knowing there were others doing consensually what I wanted to do helped a lot.

Later, I heard about and made a few trips to Hellfire in New York.  These were both exhilarating and frustrating.  It was wonderful to see hetero people playing and know I wasn’t alone in a global sense, but it was also frustrating to know that but to return to relative isolation, where my play partners were ostensibly vanilla women whom I seduced into kink.  There was also a lot of guilt, wondering if I hadn’t awakened appetites that they wouldn’t be able to satisfy once the relationship had run its course.

Much later in the mid-80s, I joined Threshold after encountering the group at The Lifestyles Convention in Las Vegas.  Then, I got a job in New York and was able to attend Eulenspiegel events, soon I was lecturing there.  Much of the beginnings of The Loving Dominant comes from my lecture notes.

Then, the best thing in my life happened.  I got an email through Prodigy saying only, “I think we share some things in common.”  That was how I met Libby, my wife, my partner, my best friend, the center of my life.

And this provides a segue into the online world.  My first contact with online BDSM was in 1978, at, what was then, a relatively limited network run by Compuserve.  Part of their offerings was what they called The CB Simulator.  In effect, it was the first group of chat rooms, real-time interaction.  Channel 13 had been taken over by the BDSM crowd.  It was tentative; everyone was still learning; for many, this was their only exposure to BDSM, but it was another crack in the shell of pluralistic ignorance.

Later there was the discovery of Usenet and the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage.  However, the sense of liberation wasn’t total.  There were still powerful forces trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle.  For example, Prodigy, where Libby and I met, explicitly forbad any discussion of BDSM on their bulletin boards (remember, that back then real-time communication was rare and most communication was made up of messages left and read on bulletin board systems).  We, the Prodigy forces for kink, got around this by posting in the literature section and making it seem that our messages were about Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty series.  The powers that be might have been squicked by any hint that people actually did this, but they were content with our discussing books by a noted author.

It was largely in reaction to this that when Libby and I finally got together one of the first things we did was to obtain a computer bulletin board and dedicate it to open and unlimited communications between people interested in BDSM.

Now, looking back, it would seem like we are riding the crest of a wave leading to acceptance for BDSM.  More mention of it in the media, often without the pro forma snickering that used to characterize any “whips and chains” comment, more clubs, more access via the Internet, more relaxed social rules in general. That would be wonderful, but I’m not so sanguine.  It’s human nature to look at a curve on a chart and mentally extrapolate it along the same line.  However, if this were true in real life, miniskirts would have turned into belts, dotcommers would now be billionaires and The Four Seasons would be serving cocaine and marijuana along with Chevas and Chateau Roschild ’97.

Society tends to be cyclical or at least a spiral rather than linear.  We can already feel the forces of repression gathering in the not too far distance.  The Christian Women of America, finding gays a tough target these days, have redirected their aim at us and are gleefully bouncing around the states trying to lock us out of convention halls and hotels.  We have an attorney-general who feels that sex is something for missionary position, in the bed room, with the lights out.  Police in some states are under legal duress to ignore any protestations of consensuality when investigating “bedroom abuse.”

Let us not forget that neither side of the political spectrum loves us.  The liberals hate us because we beat people and the conservatives hate us because the people we beat get off on it.

I’ve heard often that “what we need is a Stonewall,” but let’s take a look at why the riot resulting from the police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969 succeeded.  It wasn’t that the cops were getting the crap beat out of them.  It was because they were getting the crap beat out of them by handbag-swinging crossdressers.  It was the incongruity of the image that excited the popular imagination and gave it the kind of news coverage that was able to electrify gays who were still in the closet.  Recut the scene, deleting the pastels and poodle skirts and replacing them with leather vests and floggers, and you’ll have Bush sending in the FA18s with cluster bombs and the public giving a bored shrug.  We can learn from the past but we can’t duplicate it.

One of the popular images of the political debate is polar opposites yelling at each other.  This makes good theater, good television.  Blood on the carpet and all that, but it doesn’t win battles.  We not only don’t need to confront our enemies, we shouldn’t.  The radical feminist who sees us as an archetype of masculine hegemony, the CWA member opposed to any kind of sex that differs from hers, all of the people who rail against what we do are are not the one we want to be talking with.  First, it can’t go any good.  If Jesus came down in a golden chariot and told them we were all right, they’d probably turn Buddhist rather than change their opinion, and even more importantly, if wrestle with pigs, you get dirty, not to mention that pig has much too much fun.  Fighting with them creates a kind of intellectual parity in the minds of bystanders; that, frankly, doesn’t do us any good. 

We don’t need to engage those on the far side of the curve from us.  It’s a no-win situation.  Our targets should be those just over the hill.  Those who find us mildly distasteful or a little frightening.  They are a lot more likely to listen, and once they listen, to come over to our side.

What can you do?  Quite a lot actually.  Want to be closeted?  I can appreciate that feeling.  I used to be a college professor.  Academia has loosened up a lot in the past few decades.  A lot of “personal idiosyncrasies” are tolerated, but fer god’s sake, I beat women with a whip.  On the scale of political incorrectness, I’m right up with the guy sporting a toothbrush mustache and a fondness for beer halls.  The tenure and promotion committee wouldn’t even have had to meet.  A few phone calls and I’d been looking for another position.  I know what it means to check the closet door a few times a day to make sure it’s still locked.  But ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there’s been a way to quietly show your support.  Aside from Black Rose which is the Bill Gates of the kink movement, I don’t know of any BDSM organization that isn’t chronically short of funds.  If your lips can’t do the talking for you, let your check book do the talking.  For example, NCSF and LLC are doing magnificent work in the legal, political and outreach areas.  Give them a hand and you’ll be helping yourself in the long run.

Not quite ready to hoist a banner at a sexual freedom march?  That doesn’t mean you have to remain silent when someone seems to be looking for information or making a bigoted remark.  Now, you don’t have to wave your arms and proclaim “but I LIKE to do that.”  Let’s take the common remark, “Why would anyone like to do that?”  Bear in mind “that” is probably a loaded term for the speaker so a direct response is probably not the best approach.  My usually procedure is to put on a puzzled look and say, “Tastes often puzzle me.  After all, my friend Jim likes anchovies on his pizza.”  Then, lift your eyes and look the guy who made the remark. “Can you explain why anyone would like anchovies on a pizza?”  This is particularly effective if you know the speaker is one of those vile perverts who likes to mix fish with cheese, but it works in any case.  Also, notice that we’ve moved the discussion away from sex, an area that in the best of times in an emotional minefield for a lot of people.

The same approach can be used with someone who expresses a more direct dislike.  If you brace them directly, you’ll just create a confrontation.  What’s called for is a little mental judo.  Agree in principle with “that” bothering them, but then add, “Yup, a lot of things bother me, but that’s freedom.  If I get to shut up everyone I don’t agree with, I suppose someone is going to come along and shut me up.”  Give a sad shake of the head and add, “Well I guess if a free society were easy, everyone would be doing it.”  You don’t have to out yourself, but you can shake up their thinking.

But did I say you weren’t ready to hoist a banner at a sexual freedom march?  Think about it.  The gay rights marches have been one of the most powerful tools the gays have for getting the attention of politicians.  Let’s face it; most politicians aren’t developed organisms.  Heck, to get into the phylum chordate a creature has to have a backbone, a feature most politicians clearly lack, but politicians can count.  As long as “we” seem to be isolated groups of a dozen to a few hundred, “we” don’t show up on their radar and they can follow the money, an organ in the politician that corresponds to the conscience in more evolved creatures.  However, when they see rank after rank of people walking down the main street in support of an idea, they see rank after rank of people walking into a polling place to vote for… or against… them.  That does get their attention.

There’s also something more you can do.  Be a bit tolerant.  I know that Your Kink is Not My Kink, But Your Kink is OK is a mantra, not revealed truth, but it’s a pretty good place to start.  Tolerance isn’t being a cheering section for the other guy’s kink.  Hell, it’s not even liking it in some sort of kinky new-age group hug.  What it mainly means is you extend the same courtesy to him as you expect him to extend to you. 

Take, for example, the raging, and often mean-spirited, debate I’m seeing over SSC and RACK.  People, these are slogans.  They aren’t religious tracts.  After all, “Fifty four forty or fight” wasn’t a roadmap or a battle plan.  “This isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile,” didn’t guarantee your old man drove a Ford, and “You Meet The Nicest People on a Honda” didn’t preclude that foul-mouthed tobacco-chewing psychopaths might just be riding a Gold Wing.  Slogans express a feeling, a desire.  Their power comes from their brevity and their vagueness.  Imagine a flower-wearing lovechild greeting you with “Peace Man… except of course unless the pigs bust into my pad and hassle my old lady or the government passes laws I disagree with then I’m justified in bashing their heads in with this protest sign.”  Sorta loses the impact, don’t it?

I also occasionally hear reminiscences back to some sort of Golden Age where entry into the scene was “purer” and the people “more real.”  The ironic thing is that many of the people casting back to this Kinky Camelot were still in knee britches when it was supposed to have been taking place.  It really saddens me that something in human nature impels people to try to nail shut the closet door once they have passed through it.

Do you want to be surrounded by people like you?  That’s fine, even praiseworthy to an extent.  Want to start a club where the sign over the door (like the one in the old Mineshaft) says, “By walking through this door, you give your consent”?  Or maybe a group where play is limited to spanking and silk ropes?  Or one where everyone is under thirty and terminally cute?  Wonderful.  I’m not asking that people be uncomfortable with their surroundings.  You have the right to choose with whom you chose to associate.  However, accept that not everyone in the scene shares your limitations.  Don’t denigrate the efforts of others who may be more accepting.   You have the right to lock the door to your clubhouse, not the door to the kink world.

If I had my way, I’d have a red light flash whenever anyone said, “Real.”  If there is a case for a category of “kinky fight’n words,” that one leads it.  All too often, it’s used as a psychological club with the implication “I’m real; you aren’t.”  To me, “real” or “not real” is all too often a thing of the soul, and these old eyes aren’t good enough to peer that deep into someone’s soul.  Unless yours are, I suggest that “real” is a word to use with care and not a small measure of trepidation.

One of the main battle grounds of the real/unreal conflict is the online world.  Now, I don’t know anyone who holds that an online flogging has any correlation with one where whip actually meets flesh and you can taste the tears you kiss away.  However, domination and submission has strong and possibly overwhelming components that don’t depend on whips, rope and cuffs.  They are, as I say, things of the soul. And things of the soul are deeply personal.  Who, for example,would argue that a nun, a Bride of Christ, a woman who has accepted a master that, outside of the Second Coming, she will never meet on this Earth, isn’t completely honest in her dedication.  After all, nun in her cloister can, perhaps, be in greater ecstasy that a priestess of Pan during the Spring Rites.

If someone tells me he or she feels submission to someone who is, in effect, only lines of type on a screen, who am I to say “Your feelings are not real”?  It’s much like the current debate over gay marriage.  To me, the bottom line is, I am married to Libby.  Whom someone else chooses to marry has not one wit of effect on my marriage.  In fact, I’m more than slightly offended to be told that other peoples’ actions make my marriage a sham.  My marriage and my play are real to me, and that is the sole criteria by which I measure it.

Different doesn’t mean wrong. In the old tribal societies, “stranger meant enemy;” I hope we have risen above that.

Safety is a valid concern, but that has always been the case.  People today like to point to the multitudes entering the scene without what they often refer to as “adequate preparation,” which, sadly, often means “bowing down to me.”  True there are people out there playing who haven’t taken advantage of the hard earned community knowledge, but at least that community knowledge is now widely available.  That wasn’t the case when I started to play.  Back then, no one in the heterosexual community and many in the gay community simply had any other resource than their own experience.  It’s a big change between “everyone ignorant” and “some of them are ignorant.”

Also, while it’s very ego satisfying to stand back like some Norse god, point a finger and declare “Thou art Unsafe,” it’s a lot better for the scene in general to try to teach these newcomers, many of whom are eager for the information.

There’s also an outcry against “fakers” with the implication that they are a phenomenon of the web and the net.  Hell, things are a whole lot better than the old days when the only widespread way of finding others were personal advertisements in the contact magazines.  Back then, you had to send in a letter with a couple of bucks asking the magazine to forward if to advertiser identified only by a code number.  A big clue was when the magazine told you not to stamp the letter but to simply put the stamp in with the letter.  Why?  Hell, most of those “advertisements” were written by the publisher and the stamp and the money went into his pockets and your letter, into the wastebasket.

Like the poor, the faker you will always have with you, but let me tell you, things are a lot better now.

I think we are headed into a bad time for anyone who is different, and the worst thing we can do is start battling among ourselves.  You don’t have to love the next guy, but a bit of toleration makes things move a lot smoother.  When people start fighting in a life raft, the only one who benefits is the shark.

As we head into this bad time, I do see a few comforting things.  One of the most important is that it will be much harder for the forces of oppression to cut off the flow of information.  For example, when I was younger, one could actually be sent to jail for sending any information about sex through the mail.  I’m not talking about Playboy centerfolds.  You could go to jail for simply sending someone information about, for example, how to use a condom or how to recognize the symptoms of syphilis.  The postal inspectors would open letters to check that they didn’t have any “naughty parts,” and if they did, in the best tradition of McCarthy, they would then legally blackmail the sender into given them information about other “perverts.”  This despite a law that specifically guaranteed privacy in first class mail.

Well, I’m afraid we are headed back into an era when the government will again be opening mail, but there has been a major change in the law.  Let’s not forget that the first time the Supreme Court even looked at the First Amendment was during World War I.  Basically, it was ignored for about a hundred years, and the first time it seriously looked at the concept of obscenity was in only 1933.  Well, they ain’t ignoring it anymore, and despite ups and downs of just what obscenity means, there is one constant thread running through the Court’s decisions: if it ain’t fiction, it’s probably protected.  In the words of Justice Burger, one of Nixon’s revenges on the US, works are protected if they have “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” 

Fiction may bite the dust, but factual information probably will continue to be protected, and that means the information, like the Agent Fox Mulder’s Truth, will be out there.

Another powerful force that gives me hope for the future is the Internet.  Oh, it’s clearly in the crosshairs of those who would protect us for our own good.  Libraries are now required to put in software “to protect the children.”  Children wear diapers and I downright resent any government bureaucrat who wants to tuck my ass into a pair of Snuggies.  However, the beauty of the Internet is that it’s a house with a million doors, and it’s gonna be one hell of a job for them to nail all of those doors shut.  Even China, the poster child for oppression and information hell, is discovering that this particular hydra has a lot more heads than they can cut off.

Pandora opened her box; we’ve had to pry the cover off of ours from the inside, but we’re out and while I see tough times ahead, we ain’t gonna go back in the damned box.