In my last post I mentioned that the ending of a romantic D/s relationship had me questioning if power exchange was something I should keep trying to do, which truthfully stems from a few strikingly similar heartbreaks. Questioning myself as the singular thread connecting these situations seems self-aware and ultimately a good thing to do. However, it’s been five months and I’m still not sure that I have any big take-aways. It had been almost two years since I engaged in a rigid power exchange relationship, a very intentional pause* after a very bad breakup that had me chewing on many of those life-altering lessons. I felt confident in my ability to internalize what I learned and not repeat the patterns that harmed me.

This past year I did something I’m really proud of. I honored the biggest lesson I learned from that big breakup, which was that I stepped away at the right time. In the past I would spend years having the same fight over and over again hoping that something would change. I felt like breaking up was abandoning my partner (yikes, any Daddies relate to this?). What I learned is that in not breaking up I was actually abandoning myself. In the grand scheme of things, breaking up is really not the worst thing in the world, and only once you learn that can you be more attuned to your core needs. This year, by breaking up, I was able to salvage a special relationship instead of letting it live on life support until its untimely death. However, as is customary in the untimely death route, I was expecting a huge ah-ha moment of clarity for how to change and do things differently in the future because it’s so easy to point out what not to do again when there were so many red flags ignored. This time I’m still searching for that big lesson like a needle cap on the floor of a dimly lit dungeon.

Absolutely ravenous for real reflection, I began where I always do. Reading books or listening to podcasts always help me get my introspective juices flowing, so to work I went!

When I started getting really into Leather history and learning all I could about power exchange and BDSM I was shocked by the utter lack. Meaning, the books are solidly terrible; mostly self published and barely edited or poorly written. I can deal with all that if the content is good! Reader, the content is mostly not great, or at least is never what I’m looking for. Dykes apparently don’t write about power exchange relationships… go figure! Thus, I’ve read mostly books by gay men or straight people on a subject that winds up being unnecessarily gendered. Dykes not writing about 24/7 dynamics is a mystery I’ve been pondering for years at this point. Ever so often I think surely there must be books that I haven’t found yet, and then I’ll start a new search only to turn up empty.

This time around was… slightly different! My desperation led me to find and listen to many episodes of the Erotic Awakening podcast, hosted for years by husband and wife D/s couple Dawn and Dan until very recently, they broke up this past summer. I started out cherry-picking much older episodes and then a few weeks into listening they had put out a brand new episode where I learned that the couple had sadly split up. Imagine that! In trying to crawl out of a sad girl hole about my relationship ending and questioning a huge facet of my identity, I discover a podcast run by a couple that had been at it for over twenty years only to discover that they also just had a break up. Does nothing last forever? Well, no, certainly not. Weighing the devastation of my year-long dynamic against one that lasted twenty times as long momentarily put my pain into perspective, but only for a moment. I really can’t imagine how hard that must be.

Anyway, the podcast contains a lot of good content, but you do have to look for it! Some episodes I enjoyed are linked below. I took a leap and decided to order one of their books on D/s to hopefully gain some perspective and wisdom from such a long-term TPE relationship and I ended up reading Hearts & Collars published in 2022. This book was a bit of an info dump on what this specific couple has done and what works for them. I found the content mostly useful and my ultimate take away is that it challenged my idea of “contracts” pretty heavily.

One of my reflections from my power exchange heartbreaks, with moi as the common denominator, is that maybe I’m not being explicit enough in setting expectations and providing direction. When I realized I had started to repeat myself multiple times, I jumped to strategizing how I could be communicating better. What hadn’t I tried? The answer was writing it down! I had never created a house manual nor had I delved into written agreements in the form of a contract. The cool thing about the contract example in Hearts & Collars is that it’s not about what objects go in what holes, it’s about the most important shit—boundaries, wants, and needs.

My knee-jerk reaction to contracts comes from a place of never wanting to do something just because other people do it. Admittedly, this is one of the first things I heard about when I learned of D/s relationships — you must sign a contract outlining the rules. I had second-hand embarrassment at the scene in Fifty Shades where Anastasia sits in the conference room at Christian’s office and emphatically crosses fisting off the contract before signing (sorry but I love these movies, they are really fun to watch with a group of perverts). If something is so cliché to have made it to that film, I surely don’t want to partake! Yea, I might have a proverbial red-room but at least I’ve never worn Dom Jeans… fuck!

Anyway, Hearts & Collars positioned a contract in a way I’d never heard or seen before and I really liked it. How does the sub need to be treated? How does the dom need to be treated? What are each person’s duties to each other? There are many more sections in the example contract but these appealed to me the most. They advise picking one section each month and reviewing it to continue to speak these things out loud (i.e. here is my pledge to you) and it gives the opportunity to revisit and revise.

This got me thinking about creating a House Manual, which I had only heard of and never actually read before. A House Manual is an instructional guide for anything and everything one needs to know to be in service to a house or, for my purposes, me. A manual seemed like a logical extension of a contract in that it serves as a constant source of reference for codes of expectations and behaviors. Because I like to research before doing almost everything, I wanted to read at least one before writing my own! I created an instagram story asking if anyone had one I could read. Would you believe that no one answered my call, and I was back to square one! It wasn’t until a few weeks later I was perusing one of my favorite blogs on power exchange and found a post that recommended a real printed example of a house manual that you can purchase! Eureka!

When the Order for Discipline and Service Handbook arrived in the mail, I tore it open and read it immediately. It was fascinating! The house that it was created for has live-in subs so a lot of information about dealing with finances and working outside the house are necessary. For example, the sub must not have too much personal debt upon entering the house. It reviews expectations for behavior in vanilla spaces, including which collars to wear for which occasions. It outlines the different uniforms that must be worn. While I don’t know much about the authors of this manual, I do think it is a really great read if you are like me and LOVE knowing how other people do relationships and that includes their full run of house.

Taking a pause to slow down and seek out resources to learn from and being open to absorbing inspiration (even from straight people!) has been a very rewarding part of my Sad Girl Fall. Sitting down and crafting my own version of a house manual feels like a playful exercise in preparation. This is not only an efficient way to communicate expectations when new subs enter my life in the future, I also see it as a type of manifestation now. I never thought I’d get excited at the idea of writing a contract draft, but now I can’t wait to put pen to paper on how I need to be treated as a D-type. Sharing this with anyone feels super vulnerable but ultimately, a hard lesson learned. I am constantly becoming the Daddy I want to be.

I listed all these resources below in case you want to listen or purchase the books.

Hearts & Collars

Order for Discipline and Service Handbook

EA682 - Advanced Sadism with JustRob and Having Fun

Just Rob talks about advanced sadism. I listened to an interview with him from the Service Conference and it was really good. Not gay and not about D/s, but fed my sadist heart!

EA343 - Laura Antoniou

Interview with legend and author of The Marketplace and the Leatherwomen anthology Laura Antoniou. Fun fact, I finally ordered and read The Marketplace for the first time ever after listening to this.

EA562 - No Punishment Dynamic

Daddy Duan and slave girl j are a queer couple that do D/s while long-haul trucking. They have been at it for a verrry long time! Pretty cool! I also listened to an interview with slave girl j on the Service Conference website that was so good.

*I’d be remiss to not mention that the intentional break I mentioned was also partially due to the extremely shallow dating pool of masochistic service subs but we’ll save that one for another time.

Community is a subjective and muddied word that has a different meaning to nearly everyone. For example, when people say “LGBTQ community” I roll my eyes because I certainly don’t share values with most of my fellow LGBTQs. The “kink community” gets an even more violent eye roll from me. Is this “community” in the room with us right now?

So much rupture has unfolded in pockets of the Leather and kink community over the past few months that it brought me out of writing retirement to shout into your ears/inboxes on what I have been spending so much of my waking hours thinking about. These are the things I’ve been talking about almost constantly with anyone who will listen! The various conflicts unfolding all around us may have completely different context, but I really think there is a common thread or two that runs through it all. I’m going to attempt to break it down in hopes that anyone still reading this newsletter (shoutout to a several year hiatus!) can really feel called to step up to the plate to do better.

It’s widely known about me that I love gossip. The word gossip sounds so flippant but it’s really a catch-all for like, WHAT IS THE EXTREMELY LOCAL NEWS? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO PEOPLE AROUND US? WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING OR PARTICIPATING IN? And that, my dear friends, if you pay close enough attention, will help you build your values. Do you see someone doing something you think is fucked up? You can learn to not behave like that person. Do you see your friend treating their partner badly? Now you know how not to behave in a relationship and cough cough hopefully also help your friend be accountable. Observing others is helping us imagine how we’d act in certain situations and to solidify our own values. (If you missed @fantasticat’s rant on instagram about this very subject, you should go check that out on her pinned stories.)

Values! This is the meat of what I’m getting at here. What are values? Your values are your most core principles of behavior, standards, and what is important to you in this one short little life. Have you ever thought about what your values are? Have you ever sat down and written out what your values are? I have done it, and I have also assigned this task to others as a way to connect. You cannot know what your boundaries are, the framework for your entire life, if you haven’t laid out your values first. Do it with your friends, do it with your partners, it’s really important work that should guide every decision you make!

My biggest value is relationships, and my boundaries around relationships seem quite simple — I don’t fuck with people who aren’t on God’s green earth trying to do better every day. I don’t fuck with people who don’t receive and give feedback graciously and then consciously make moves to improve and do better. This is a hard limit to be in my close circle and it’s something that I discuss with my friends and partners regularly. How can I support my loved ones in being a better person, in making sound decisions, and moving with integrity?

from my little workshop on boundaries in 2020 :)

As an adult child of alcoholics, the gift that keeps on giving is hypervigilance. I am constantly collecting information about whether or not people are trustworthy, predictable, and thus safe. This may sound fucked up, but I feel like it’s protected me from a lot of harm in my life and has allowed a level of discernment in who I decide to build relationships with. Here’s a really mundane example. Let’s say that I observe you talking shit about your friends, but you don’t ever give your friends that feedback directly. This provides me with information that you aren’t invested in relationships, might have bad boundaries, and may be conflict avoidant. I likely won’t want to be friends with you! I will probably tell you: “Wow, it sounds like you need to talk to your friend about this!” However, if you go talk to your friend about how you’re feeling, that’s one point on the trust board for having difficult conversations. That gives me information that if you ever have a problem with me, you’ll come talk directly to me about it (in addition to everyone else).

How do we get this information about people? Sometimes it comes from others just sharing the gossip, and often times it comes from being nosy and having direct conversations. Ask people the hard-hitting questions when you want to know something, especially people that you call your friends. What do you have to lose? If someone doesn’t want to answer your question that’s their prerogative, but it also gives you information about whether or not they are trustworthy (what are they hiding?). Do you feel like you need to corroborate someone’s story? Go talk to other people. Information is vital to making decisions about who aligns with your values and who does not. Information lets us know who amongst us has a fucking backbone.

The question I posed above: What do you have to lose? is really nuanced. Let’s pretend I’m not talking about the instances where opening your mouth will pose a safety issue. Instead, let’s focus on the large majority of cases where it is perfectly safe to call someone in or share a story, but the factors in kink circles and educational spaces breed a culture of clout chasing and cowardice that cause folks to shy away from this. So ask yourself, what do you have to lose?

Do you avoid difficult conversations because you fear losing access to kink spaces?

Do you avoid difficult conversations because you fear losing money?

Do you avoid difficult conversations because you enjoy proximity to someone who has more clout or connections than you?

Do you avoid difficult conversations because you don’t want to be disliked?

Do you avoid difficult conversations because you are a people pleaser?

Folks who have been around any kink scene for at least a few years have likely seen lots of the above happening. My friend commented how it’s so wild that people want to make each other bleed but can’t have a direct conversation to save their lives. If you ask me, you should not even be engaging in BDSM if you are conflict avoidant! Why can you readily take a class on how to tie someone up but not on how to have hard conversations? Where are the classes on building your values and boundaries? (I should teach this class again!) I know, it’s not sexy so it will likely not be well attended, but the soft skills are arguably even more important than the hard skills when the stakes are this high.

baby rope top daemonum in 2016, still from my first Aorta shoot.

Years ago when I was first getting into rope and self-tying a lot, a very popular rope top from the West Coast who I was mutuals with on IG asked me to tie while he was in NYC. I thought this was strange since I wasn’t a bottom, a very obvious dyke (he is a cis man), and there were lots of other people that he knew in NYC. After I informed him I’d never been tied before, he tied me in a box tie without any explanation of risk or education on nerve checks. I was only in the air for maybe ten minutes and I could not fully use my left hand for a week after that. I thought this was a totally normal result of a high-risk activity. I had no idea what I was doing because I’d never bottomed before, and I don’t remember if I ever even shared my injury with him. (Note to non-rope people: Some responsible tops have no problem tying first-timers in TKs if there is an established relationship, bottom education and lots of check ins. I have done it myself, although extremely infrequently. That is not what happened here!)

We built a friendship as sadists that I was admittedly quite hesitant about (hypervigilance for the win) but wanted desperately to learn rope, a service he was offering for free. I ended up visiting him in California for a weekend. I thought that his proximity to several women via his photos was enough of a voucher for him. A close friend who played with him at a party once did not say anything negative about him when I shared that I was going to visit him.

During the visit, he talked a ton of shit about his exes (the women I assumed would vouch for him because I had seen them in his rope photos). He said they had all ganged up on him and made him out to be a bad guy. The vibe was not great, he couldn’t answer questions directly and deflected a lot. I had a feeling he was not being honest. BUT! I learned a lot about how to tie rope!

Not long after this trip, a popular rope bottom released a tell-all post on FetLife about his history of horrific abuse, specifically in his relationship with the ex that he talked a lot of shit about. I don’t know the poster personally, but I can only assume that she decided that in order to keep more people safe, everyone needed to know the truth, even if it wasn’t necessarily her story to tell.

He had apparently been SA’ing people in the local scene as well as during the traveling he was doing as a rope educator. He had already been ousted from major community spaces in The Bay Area for his actions. The lightbulb went on - suddenly it made sense to me why he took an interest in mentoring a dyke across the country. Proximity to me might help his reputation. Slimy!!!

My text messages delete after a year (I know!) so I can’t tell you what I said to him, but I know that he tried to explain that everyone was out to get him, and I never spoke to him again.

I told my friend who had played with him before what was going on, so angry, disappointed, and honestly feeling lucky that I was relatively unscathed (just wrist drop… right?!). She then shared with me what really happened during the scene she had with him at a play party. He was on a ton of drugs and after getting her in the air he dipped — completely left the party. Other people had to step in and get her down!! I was appalled and honestly hurt that she did not share this with me earlier.

When I asked her why she didn’t tell me, she said that maybe he had changed, and she didn’t want her experience to color my judgement. That’s exactly what vetting is! You get information about people ~ good or bad ~ so you can make your own informed decisions. Now, some people may not have cared if he did that to one of their friends and still would have gone to get the free intensive lessons. I am certainly not one of those people! However, I didn’t even try to vet him, I did not give him feedback about the wrist drop, and I flew to CA for free lessons after getting bad vibes. All of that was super messy and quite honestly a failure to protect myself.

There are so many reasons why all of this happens, people don’t talk because of shame or fear, none of it is cut and dry. This particular person was physically violent and I understand in those instances why people who have been harmed don’t speak out. And let me be clear — the person causing the harm is solely responsible for their actions and to STOP harming people, but we have to do what we can to protect each other when the person causing harm doesn’t want to be accountable. We can share our stories (and stories we have heard) with anyone who will listen, warn others, and make sure what happened to us doesn’t happen to anyone else. We can ask better questions! We can listen, and respond! At the very least, we can not assume anyone is safe based on who they took a photo with!

Read David’s guide to vetting sadists here, and my previous post about gossip here.

i.

This is the scene—my future bedroom is the choir balcony in a completely open 2,000 sq ft one-room church house built in 1897. Roughly six feet from my back door begins a cemetery even older than the church with gravestones dating back to the early 1800s. No rooms, wide open space, complete silence, the bones of the dead stewing beneath my feet. 

I must have just fallen asleep, snuggled up to the dogs for warmth, when I heard footsteps clear as day downstairs. I looked at the clock and it was just after midnight. Of course I was alone. My first thought was that my realtor, Becky, who’s one of those moms who definitely looks like a dyke but is totally not, had a valid point when she told me to change the locks (I did not). Someone was inside. I pondered for a minute how it could be my contractor, the star of my cheesy porn-plot fantasies. My air mattress could hold us, but only because I didn’t yet have a cage to put him in.

Three or four footsteps landed, then a door slammed and clearly latched. Every door in the building was bloated beyond the jamb and took the full force of a body to close it completely. Whatever door I had just heard slam was not a door that currently exists in the building. Was I hallucinating? I pulled the blankets over my head, a solid strategy I employed as a kid to make the scary things go away, and eventually fell back asleep.

ii.

I always say that I don’t get embarrassed but then again I’ve never felt the need to admit to absolutely anyone that my most listened song of 2022 was Taylor Swift’s All Too Well (10 min version). Let me explain. This song was the star of my carefully crafted breakup playlist I made this past summer after, well, Thee Breakup. I played it any time I went anywhere, sometimes starting over immediately after it finished. Because the song is so long, it cut down on me listening to much of anything else. I’m far from a swiftie, in fact, I’m incapable of naming any other song she sings. Driving down Bushwick Avenue alone, rage-screaming “never-needy, ever-lovely jewel whose shine reflects on youuuuuUUUUU” 300 times in the span of a few months really did something good for me, and for that I am grateful.  

iii.

I started watching this show called The Story of Home where a couple restores an old farmhouse upstate. They do everything themselves including building furniture and storm windows. The man appears to do 90% of the actual work while the woman does things like mix homemade paint. As someone who’s watched hundreds of home renovation shows, I can expertly say that no one does this shit alone. It’s always a We. How delightful to have two sets of hands, two brains, someone to trade jobs with when your body is begging you to do something else. Two incomes, even! How wonderful to be twice as productive, move twice as fast. To be honest, this is a lot of what I think about when I am alone. When I’m tirelessly scraping glue off antique quarter sawn Doug Fir in a remote mountain town four hours from Brooklyn I’m thinking, “this was absolutely a mistake,” and “how much faster would this go if I married a useful, heterosexual man who knows how to use power tools?” But in my case We is just my gay ass and the six hundred muscles in my little body that I have enraged in the process.

iv.

I have always been a workhorse. I’m embarrassed of my love for productivity. What I mean to say is that my church is dangerous for me. I’ve spent an unnatural amount of time on my hands and knees—just me and my angle grinder, baby! I have a routine where I start on all fours, shift to one knee, and then the other. Once I’ve run through all my positions, my body begs for a break. It’s not in my nature to oblige but I’m trying to take better care of myself. “What would Davey do?” I whisper as I attempt some half-assed yoga poses. 

On several occasions I have considered how much I could get done if I simply did not sleep. I look at my insurmountable to-do list. Surely my body would be fine. I am very strong and I have working-class blood. I picture myself collapsing from exhaustion like the celebrities of the early aughts. Except instead of being dehydrated from lots of drugs, I’m dehydrated from eating only chips and iced coffee for several days straight. I’d be whisked away by my publicist, Biz, to recover at some spa in Arizona, securely tucked away from the paparazzi. Except that’s not how it would happen—I’d be alone, of course, with no cell reception and no one to find me but my dogs. 

v.

After the Dyke Show event, on an unusually warm February night, I decide to take my time strolling through the West Village on my way to the train. There’s something sensual about solitude and the way it allows you to hone your attention, it feels almost vampiric. Padding over cobblestones with puffy eyes, I notice everything. I write the following list in my phone:

-Real gas lanterns-Spider web transom-Carriage houses-Dozens of people crowded around to watch a movie set-Everyone is outside eating in February-Rich people with no curtains in their fancy homes with plaster ceiling medallions (most likely original) and god-awful modern light fixtures-The street suddenly turns very gay with a men’s spa and trashy sex shops-It is better to be alone than to not be seen by someone you love

vi.

My big plan was to spend an entire week working at the church while everyone else was doing the things they do for Christmas and New Year’s. I was going to be productive, finish the floors, get a real feel for country living. In between sanding sanding sanding, I listened to approximately 56 different playlists and talked to myself and the dogs at an alarming rate. Have you ever gone to Lowe’s hoping the cashier would strike up a conversation with you? Horrifying! By the end of the week I felt like I was losing my mind. As someone who loves being alone, I learned that I had never felt lonely before. Being alone had always been more of a choice and I could very easily choose company. Feeling lonely was heart wrenching, a feeling I decided I don’t care for at all.

vii.

I have been casually reading my own tarot cards for almost a decade. However, this past summer I decided it was time to get my very first professional tarot reading. Feeling raw and looking for anything to ground me, I met with S. She gracefully consulted the cards on my behalf. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of Thee Breakup the cards had a lot to say. One of the highlights of the reading was that I would spend the next sixteen months mostly alone, tending to my own nourishment. I nodded my head at S on our zoom call, knowingly. You will be softening, loosening your boundaries that no longer serve you. You made the right decision. You’ll never get what you need from them. The mystical cardstock reminded me that I’m completely responsible for my own peace. Peace often must come in the form of solitude, a trade-off with chaos.

A horror filmmaker, she said, as she sipped her mezcal, chunky silver rings on each finger clinking against the glass. She was so sure of herself and spoke slow and intentional. She had that look in her eyes that I recognized from years of being a woman—she wanted to fuck/kill me and she wanted me to know it. I knew deep down that half of everything she said to me for the next two years was not true but, because she she was my first lover who obliged my request to be tied to the radiator and fucked into the seventh circle of hell, I pushed it to the back of my mind. She had basically no furniture in her room except for a vintage medical chair and a thin mattress on the floor (“minimalism”). Today they eat men alive on the internet for this sort of psychopathy. It was the perfect set up for relishing in our depraved appetites.

June 2015

I remembered her today because of the book I’m reading—page by page the words cutting me like razor blades. Desire and grief, grief and desire. Suddenly I’m sucked back into her vortex. My first and last top, although we didn’t really use that language back then. I begged her to hurt me and I begged her to smack my clit and I put her hand over my mouth and nose to slow my heart rate until I came/died. I was always begging her and mostly it felt humiliating to need something so badly from another person for the first time in my life, so completely out of my control, but she eventually gave in to me.

She would take her giant rings off one by one, never fast enough, while I salivated like a dog in heat. On one rare occasion she pushed me into the back door, face pressed against the cold metal, and when all my holes were satiated I cried like an absolute baby. I thanked her for the strenuous labor of shooting electricity from every single fiber of muscle from her toes to her tongue straight through me like a goddamn dyke Furfur.

But she tore through me like a maelstrom. I felt it coming from the second she first looked at me in that bar with those fuck/kill eyes. It was worth it—the intoxication of finally feeling seen.

Something about the power she had over me and how dangerous it was to need someone that much just so I can feel my toes tingle. I fantasized about it, about being that for someone else, to have a plaything that begged for it, a sweet girl that said, “Please Daddy, I’ll simply die without it!” Except I wouldn’t be wrong, withholding like she was.

One of my many mistakes is that I insisted on being a chaos demon of vulnerability while she lied and lied and lied. I could change her with my softness, my wetness. I didn’t know any other way. I still feel her in my bones all these years later, reminders surfacing in unexpected places. Except now I know that it’s a demon called grief and I know how substantially it changes you. I know so much more now, but never enough never enough. She was part of my transformation while I didn’t even know her real age. She gave me nothing of herself but the electricity.

Intimacy is a lot of things but you know what it mostly boils down to people making themselves knowable to each other. It may sound easy to you, but the pain can be unbearable. Here’s what happens—people take turns cracking open and you each throw your bleeding pink guts at the other person’s feet like an offering at their altar. You’re disemboweled, and it feels absolutely horrible, but the bright side is that you get to peek at your lover’s meatstuff all fucked up and delicious. You learn some things. If you’re lucky, they help to sew you back up. Some even say the more you do it the easier it gets. 

In time I built a shiny life with someone new who needed painpleasure just as badly as I once did. I got so much power from being the giver, holding the path to salvation in my hands. It was serious business. They took it and took it and I gave it with such pleasure, they never even had to beg for it. We danced together over the fire falling deeper through each circle of hell. Every loving stroke from my deliberate hands to their body had a current passing through it and I saw it in their eyes that they felt like I was lightening. I learned to be a top but it seems that I did not learn my lesson.

Our parents would roll over in their graves if they heard us praying together, speaking to our demons in tongues. While they never said much, at least they told the truth. This is different, this is different, this is different. We created a vessel—my lover poured themselves into it and stretched to the edges. Fall apart baby, fall apart, I’ll catch you, I’m here. I would have gathered all the magic in the world to feel supported like that, but it wasn’t about me. They lost sight of me and I become a projection for what they wanted me to be. Giving, loving, lightening doesn’t have needs. You can’t build a family with desire alone.

I clawed at their skin, gnawed at their inner thighs, my desire to consume them was a desire to know them. I drank their blood straight from the vein, burned my initial into their flesh, it was all the same. I did everything to try to get closer closer closer but none of it made a difference. I was starving to get a taste of what was really inside. How close can you get without language? What space can you fill between words? I don’t know but I fucking tried and I was always left hungry. You can’t build a family with desire alone.

Things were different now and I couldn’t be as vulnerable as I once was, but in time there was a tender place and I was able to crack open. I threw my guts at their feet while I, again, had to beg for what I needed. I stood there bleeding while they did not even peek at my raw insides unfurled on the floor, and I got no assistance sewing up my belly. It was terrible and it did not get any easier. 

For months I could feel a new demon growing inside me, I carried it around with a heavyness. Everywhere I went there were people just walking around alive who didn’t know that I was without a heart. The barista handed me my coffee. Why does this keep happening to me? I ran into my neighbor down the street. I’m always just a projection of everyone’s greatest fantasies or worst trauma. I was teaching a class. Why is it so hard to find someone to sew you up? I went to dinner with friends. You’d think drinking blood was was more intimate than having a conversation. I was just trying to piece it all together, keep it together, but I knew very well what failing looked like.

Then I woke up in a cloud of ash, my guts sprawled out on the floor. I was in a fever dream and nothing made sense. I was in a fever dream and everything made sense. A small demon crawled out from inside my festering wound. The demon pointed a long finger nail directly at me and said, “The things you desire the most are just distractions for what’s hiding below the surface.” The demon turned its back to me and slowly walked away, the ash cloud following closely behind. I scooped up my insides, carefully jiggled them back into place and painstakingly sutured myself up. I stared at myself in the mirror fingering the wound and wondered if I should take something for the infection.

If you’ve been following along, you may already know that Davey is my friend. We met during Folsom years ago when they still lived in Oakland. I have fond memories of that weekend—swarming Gayle Rubin like she was Justin Bieber and we were twelve year old girls after an arena concert in 2012. Except it was a small event at The Stud about The Catacombs. Dr. Rubin, who has written extensively about The Catacombs, was both the keynote and DJ. She was wearing a red paisley necktie and was gracious about us praising her like some kind of a dyke rock star. She even took a photo with us youngsters, fisting hands in the air.

Like me, Davey also appreciates SM scholarship of both the academic and corporeal kind. It will be obvious to leather queers that X was written by a brilliant writer who also happens to be a heavy player. The first time I read X, I couldn’t put it down. In my recent den of plague isolation, I was able to slow down and savor my second reading. Highlighting paragraph after paragraph, I found it even more captivating this time around. It’s an incredibly romantic, nihilistic mystery novel full of sadomasochism and extremely specific queer humor—still laughing over the protagonist calling themself a Dobermxn. A novel written for leatherdykes, by a leatherdyke. I’m trying to think: When was the last time this happened? 

SM fiction, non-fiction, and even academic studies are almost always centered around masochists. We all love the pain sluts but let’s face it, they are over-represented. I’ve written about this before. X drops a large weight on the sadist side of the scales. This being my lane, it’s a big deal and the focus of this review. The fictional protagonist Lee is probably someone you’ve met before if you’ve been in the scene long enough. They’re a perfect caricature of the Brooklyn-white-masc-sadist-asshole that gets a lot of play. Lee is kind of a terrible person who uses their charm and top appeal to get what they want, but yet they still have lines they won’t cross. They reminded me a lot of Dexter in the way that sure he kills people, but he abides by the code. 

I can picture Davey clicking away at their laptop thinking to themself, What are all the hot things a sadist who is bad for me might say to me? Thus, Lee is a sadistic romantic who constantly says things like “I bet she has a nice scream.” Completely relatable! For Lee’s one year anniversary with their girlfriend, they give her a vision board of how they would plan her funeral, something they decided on shortly after they met. After they give her the gift, they cut their initials into her. There’s an entire paragraph of them talking about how beautiful her blood is. The romance! Why hadn’t I thought of this?!?!

The novel follows Lee as they hunt through the Brooklyn queer scene for X, a “femdom nightmare” that they let top them. The problem is that X, along with all other undesirables, is being asked to “export” or leave the country. Even though Lee is a strict top, we can assume that their hunger to reconnect with X is based on her skill and ability to make nihilistic Lee actually feel something. Throughout this main plot we are also transported to Lee’s childhood with a neglectful, alcoholic mother, and given a tour of past sadistic exploits and present day relationships. 

The text is sprinkled with tales of ex-girlfriends that are both extremely sexy and give the reader insight into what kind of a person Lee really is. Davey writes Lee with this code so it provides readers like me, also into SM, a level of ambiguity that gives pause and almost manipulates, “Wait a second, is this top actually that bad?” While the novel never explicitly mentions consent as we have come to expect from truly responsible SM media*, the subtext is everywhere. The scenes are written in a way that I understand (most of) what Lee does to be a consenting part of their SM relationships. “You know your word,” Lee says to their girlfriend, reminding her to use her safeword. The bottoms Lee hurts also give away that they are totally on board with being hurt. One lover, admiring the backs of her legs covered in bruises says, “I look better this way.”

So, what exactly is their sadist’s code? It’s never explicitly defined but we are given glimpses through Lee’s extremely messy hookup history. Lee’s introduction to SM is with their first girlfriend, before they know their desires have a name or even a sociality. Like many of us, they used to hurt each other without knowing what they were doing. Lee narrowly escapes manslaughter during a rope scene where their girlfriend stops breathing. Later, they meet a domme named May who teaches them everything they know, including the very important skill of keeping bottoms alive. “We hurt, not harm,” May councils. 

Lee’s code includes the most basic: do not fuck with people who are too intoxicated to consent. They teach a humorous life lesson to a brat in how to ask for what they want. They never do anything they don’t want to do. They take vetting seriously, “I never cut up someone I can’t trust.” And lastly, it’s very important to them that the fear is genuine. “Personally, I prefer it when they struggle. I like to see faces and hear sounds. If a girl faked an orgasm with me, that would be one thing; if she faked a scream, it might break my heart.”

X was a delight to read, both times. I’ve never read a book where I felt so seen and understood as a sadist dyke. Davey weaves gothic romance into the sadistic and perverted, almost reminiscent of classic vampire horror. The characters engaging in SM aren’t conflicted by its violence because it gives them life; they know what they want and go after it. This is when I get emotional thinking about creating the types of media that need to exist, the things that make queer perverts feel less alone, showing that this lifestyle is possible. 

I had this fantasy of twenty or thirty years from now, Davey is invited to a leatherdyke event at a dive bar during Folsom to talk about the influence of their novel, X. I hope that after they give their talk, a gang of screaming leather clad fangirls rushes up to them asking to take photos and, most importantly, thanking them for the legacy of this work. 

There’s so much more I could say about X, but it just came out and I don’t want to give any big spoilers. Do me a favor—when you read it please let me know if you’d let Lee top you (no judgment).

*Noting my own sarcasm just in case! Not all SM media needs to teach or be the most positive representation of consent, we don’t expect that of vanilla sex! I do appreciate how these elements can be expertly woven in so that it’s not slamming you over the head or appearing to virtue signal. Needless to say, X does this very well.

Creativity feeds my sex drive, it inspires my gender expression, it sparks my ideas for writing and making things, helps me be a world-class pervert, and it begs me to read furiously. This is all somehow quite cerebral. Reader, I had no idea!

Let’s start with gender. My femme ass used to say things like “I’m femme on purpose, I dress up for myself! No one else!” Well hey guess what happens when you don’t leave the house for weeks at a time because there’s a global pandemic? Suddenly there is no femme to be seen. It’s… social?! Thus began the longest stretch I’d gone without wearing a dress (or hard pants) or makeup or lingerie in my entire adult life. In sparks of “feeling myself,” I’d put on a dress and do a full face only to feel like a total clown. Who is she? Is she still femme? Why does this feel so foreign? The few months last summer where the world felt safe to socialize meant that every time I went out in public I felt like an awkward teenager who didn’t know how to dress myself. I brushed it all aside, assuring myself of my femme status and reminding myself that wide leg adidas pants and crocs are just my personal evolution.

I used to read like, one book per week? I absolutely loved devouring books and the more I liked a book the more invigorated and inspired I felt in other parts of my life. Most of my reading happened on my subway commute to my day job, which was a 45 minute ride each way. The more I read, the more I wrote. I would meet up with friends saying “OMG let me tell you about this book I’m reading!” It was a sweet cycle of creativity that completely disappeared as soon as I stopped riding the subway to work, or at all. I was too invested in doom scrolling twitter while simultaneously watching HGTV to read books and every time I tried I would simply fall asleep. So eventually I stopped trying because it made me feel really sad. I did that thing where I was kind to myself and I said Hey it’s ok you don’t actually have to read a book a week to feel smart or interesting. Do what feels good right now (you annoying overachiever), it will be ok! 

I have only read a handful of books (five?) in the last two years. It really fucking bums me out but ~radical acceptance~ or whatever!

When I was in my mid-twenties I read Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and suddenly everything was erotic. What I took away from that essay was basically that mindfulness, intention and self-worth were powerful pillars of the erotic. When I say that my view of the world immediately changed, I’m not kidding. I think this is how I came to be endlessly inspired by New York City– its people, its rats, its trash! The vibrations from the energy of the city really breathed life into my sexual self. Some of my best scene ideas came to me while sitting in a park people-watching, or staring at a random beautiful person on the train. I can’t explain it other than she is my muse (NYC). 

Being effectively cut off from a social life for the past two years (I mean like not the kind where there’s gay people on my screen, like corporeal homosexual demons smashing their bodies together to loud music) has drastically changed the way my brain works. I truly had no idea how much of my grind was a result of my surroundings and attachment to others – friends, acquaintances, the hotties fucking at the play party, and even the people who I have never met that I shared energy with in public spaces.

I realized recently that while this definitely is due to the extreme sadness of the world falling apart and massive amounts of death, it is also a different grief that I’ve been trying to ignore. 

A few weeks ago, I attended a leather femme tea time over zoom. I was wearing my pajamas (silk and leopard at least!) and had hair still wet from the shower (at least I showered!). My friend and host Hannah asked all the attendees to set an erotic/kink related intention for 2022. As someone who dreads future planning (hello, trauma!) I spent the few minutes thinking about my lost desire/erotic imagination and got super sad. When it was my turn to share I wiped a single tear from my eye and told everyone that I just want to WANT TO do stuff again! When will my desire return from the war?

Knowing what I know about grief, which is a lot, I’m shocked that I didn’t realize until now that I can’t move on and create a new normal or recalibrate my life if I’m not mourning the things that I lost. I have also realized that (in revisiting a Judith Butler fav) that grief is an erotic process. This is what I mean by reading is inspiring!! I will save the poetics about grief for another time, but it is erotic in that it forces you to feel things. Grief unrecognized in melancholy (I think Freud said that?) and you have to literally let that bitch in, and let her top the shit out of you, to be able to move on. 

Accepting that change is “fine” is one thing, but actually mourning what has been lost is quite another. 

In the spirit of looking upward and onward since this winter is already looking bleak – here’s where I am at the start of a new year. I have settled on a new version of my gender that is like, sexy construction worker who wears red lipstick? I don’t know, I’m still workshopping it. Winter’s hottest boot is platform crocs with thick socks. I wear a puffer coat now. I bought Carhartt overalls in which I actually do Carhartt shit. I am renovating a church that will hopefully have heat in the next few weeks! I am watching slightly less HGTV these days, which may or may not have anything to do with having already watched every show possible, and have been splitting my idle time between reading and stripping paint. I did 2 (TWO!) scenes last week where I was covered in blood. My plants are thriving. The best thing about winter is that I can snuggle my little heater dogs with reckless abandon. And lastly, I have been moisturizing like nobody’s business, which, as we all know, is extremely erotic. 

If you’ve learned anything from this, let it be that you should be kind to yourself, drink water, and process your grief! We all have mourning to do these days, some more than others. What has changed? Who have you lost? Grief, after all, is the deepest form of love.

Culturally I think that at least those of us into BDSM understand the whats and the whys of masochism, while I simultaneously emphasize/scream that we don’t really need to pathologize our desires. BUT, nonetheless we ponder. Yes, pain can feel good. Our bodies release serotonin, a natural analgesic, which provides a biological explanation for why it feels good. It is an emotional experience. And, it’s sexy.

I recently read Leigh Cowart’s Hurts So Good, The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose. You guessed it, it’s all about masochism. For them, growing up a ballerina, pain was coupled with reward. You dance hard > your toes become “hamburger meat” inside pointe shoes > you become a better dancer. Suffering for a reward is usually what makes the suffering “worth it,” because it doesn’t make any logical sense at all to suffer in vain. In fact, did you know that giving your pain a purpose actually helps improve pain tolerance? Context matters! It’s true and it’s fascinating. (Read the book!)

My fellow ex-Catholics are probably familiar with the concept of pain with a purpose. It’s known in religious terms as redemptive suffering. As a child I was told that I could offer my headache to God as a gift. I always thought God was kind of dumb if he wanted my pain as a present, but nonetheless I prayed. I now realize that this very popular concept called “offering it up” wasn’t explained to me properly at all — quite comical when I think about my fuck-up parents. 

The ultimate suffering for meaning was when Christ died on the cross for *our* sins. If you are suffering, let it not be in vain. In trying to find the exact origin of “offering it up,” I fell into a deep hole of horny blogs talking about suffering. Focus, focus!  The Catholic blogosphere is chock full of stories of loved ones dying of cancer or enduring great illnesses and “offering it up,” praying every day for God to transform their suffering into meaning. Not as I was told, that God would accept your suffering as a present and take it away from you, but instead he accepts your suffering as a present but leaves you to martyr yourself for redemption. Talk about bad boundaries!

Suffering like Jesus all comes back to Colossians 1:24 where Paul says, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” This sexy divergence is all to say that in many cases suffering is spiritual. When pain is given a higher purpose it means something. In the Catholic sense, disgusting and delusional ideas about the meaning of human suffering have a redemptive purpose, a moral masochism.

Focus, focus! I wanted to bring this back around to examining why masochism and being on the receiving end of pain is much more accepted and understood(?) than sadism. I’ve thought about this for a very long time, as a sadist who lives in the world — as I have received weird Twitter replies about how I’m a sicko for enjoying hurting people, as I have read books focused on SM that seem to skip completely over emotional perspectives of sadists, and as those against SM frame masochists as the victims of evil psychopaths. Why does it seem like after all these years being on the sadist end of sadomasochism is still taboo?

Masochism as a concept seems to imply consent. As such, it is almost peripheral to violence. Even if someone is being beaten to a bloody pulp, they are asking for it with a smile on their face. How bad can that be? We can even talk about the healing and transformative aspects of pain on purpose, etc etc. Even if someone doesn’t want to be hurt, they may be able to understand, and can perhaps see this practice as one of empowerment by intellectualizing it.  As the book Hurts So Good suggests, masochism is everywhere! Thus, it may be easier for the average person who loves something as mundane as hot sauce to vaguely understand the sexual masochist. Masochists are practicing embodiment. Masochists are ritualizing pain. Masochists are perverting an apparatus of control. 

“Masochism takes control of the technologies that produce subjectivity as cultural stereotypes. It develops elaborate strategies for framing the collapse of socially sanctioned identities, and it performs this collapse as a pleasurable abandonment of identity. These strategies aim specifically to pervert the disciplinary technologies our culture uses in its everyday operation. Sadomasochism produces subjectivity through the performance of a sexual technology. It relies upon the pleasurable disappearance – and controlled reappearance – of the subject.”-John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism

I find that sexual (I must keep saying consensual!) sadism, on the other hand, doesn’t ever get the social privilege of being on the periphery of violence. Consensually inflicting pain onto someone else means you are the violence, buddy! Unlike my painslut pervert friends who had masochistic tendencies from a young age, Sid from Toy Story usually doesn’t grow up to be a hot ethical dom top. Quite unimaginative and unfair, I do protest. Perhaps it’s the early psychoanalytic theories (Freud, which I will admit to only having read second hand) that posit sadism as a masculine drive and masochism as a feminine drive that have fucked us all up. I won’t say that aggression isn’t characteristically masculine, but also it doesn’t have to be. How do we get to a place of understanding (consensual) sexual aggression as neutral and, dare I say good, in the right context. 

When I Google sadism, I get a mix of results about murderers and sexual sickos, purely negative vibes. Aggressive behavior, sadistic aggression, inflicting pain for pleasure, The Dark Triad,  etc. I learned, just now, the idea of the everyday sadist. Sadists are not just serial killers, they walk among us and they get pleasure from watching others in pain! My innocent girlfriend who laughs for hours at videos of children face-planting, by definition, is an everyday sadist! Psychologically unstable! I’m honestly not sure what I expected given this niche topic of research, but I am still left disappointed.

Maybe I can’t explain with science what happens in my brain when I’m giving someone the pain they have asked for. It would be cool to understand more about why I find such pleasure in making hot babes writhe in pain, why I love sinking my teeth into juicy thighs until they bruise (ok we’re getting horny again!). To physiologically define the joy in the feedback loop of hand, to cane, to ass, to scream, to moan, to ears, to brain, to pussy, and back to hand feels like an impossible feat. I can only share my perspective on how fucking wild it is that people trust me to do things like put a knife to their throat so they can feel turned on by the possibility of death. Me, the death bringer! The smell of fear mixed with desire is intoxicating. In a way I get to play God, not the biblical vengeful version but a new type of deity who feeds off the loving offerings of screams and tears. 

Do sadists have a God complex? Is this all about ego? How do I explain to people outside of my insular community that consensual sadism is not an antisocial behavior, in fact it is intersubjective. Bodies in sync feeding into each other’s desires—I know that they know what my face looks like while I’m watching the first drop of blood exit their body, and no one else in the world but us exists. They know that I know that they know that this is an act of love.

There are so many ways we dumb down our own experiences so that others will understand. There are also ways we speak from experiences we haven’t had ourselves (allies, right?!). Sometimes it’s too complicated to spend the time and effort to make people really see us, and sometimes missing the mark is ok as long as it’s close enough. I don’t need to list the embarrassing ways that the mainstream queer community creates narratives that make us more palatable to the heterosexual overlords they so deeply want approval from. The ideas that support “we’re just like you” are harmful to everyone on the margins who can never be just like them, or who simply refuse. 

Who you want to fuck and how you want to be perceived are two different things, but we can’t pretend as queer people that the two aren’t in constant conversation with one another. For those of us who prioritize sex and the erotic, these are almost impossible to compartmentalize. There’s a validation loop that happens when you fuck the people who make you feel safe, grounded, home. When someone sees you with and without clothes exactly how you want to be seen, fucks you exactly how you want to be fucked (or lets you fuck them, etc), it illuminates the potential for embodiment. For me, it was a turning point for self-worth. Now that I know what this feels like, why would I ever accept anything less? 

There’s a lot of jokes to be had (all true) about two femmes fucking. It’s just a lot of complimenting each other back and forth—stealing a few seconds to appreciate your lover because you know exactly what goes into getting those stockings on, the effort in matching your panties to your bra, or applying a perfect face of makeup. I have written (several times) about the first time I had sex with another femme, and it was an experience that continues to deserve my attention. I felt seen like I never had before and I was able to locate my erotic self in the way I internalized my partner’s desire for me. Having someone so interested and sure of what they wanted that they saw in me was an incredible feeling. Sex and gender, separate, for who?

It took me many months to finally finish my holy grail of books, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader edited by Joan Nestle. As I’ve slowly devoured each page, I’ve been really inspired to think deeper about the book’s main theme of queer gender as erotic identification. Not that I haven’t thought about this a million times before, but reading 500 pages of personal accounts from dykes about how their gender cannot be separated from their sexuality long before the queer rights activists I met in college told me the exact opposite is just a trip. And let me tell you, everything seems to come back around to my ever-present thesis that perverts are magic.

To give context on why this 1992 anthology is important, femme-butch pairings were sacrilegious in lesbian feminism. Fucking with power (SM) was sacrilegious to lesbian feminism. To fight the patriarchy, one mustn't wear men’s clothes, or dress too feminine so as to attract men. Butches and femmes were recreating heterosexuality. Androgyny and equal power amongst all women was the way to become woman-aligned. Anything else was entering enemy territory!

Reader, I have a confession to make. As a baby femme who hadn’t yet learned or cared about her history, I also believed that butch-femme couples were recreating heterosexuality. I had no idea that my line of thinking was recycled repression from decades past. Had I been pointed in the right direction, I would have quickly discovered that many of the people who came up with this idea also hated femmes (me!) along with trans women and sex workers and sadomasochists and basically anyone who was cool and attractive!!! Another reason to be embarrassed by younger me, but growth is wonderful. 

This was a projection stemming from a mixture of jealousy and resentment. I thought becoming gay meant the instant realization of my childhood fantasies of high-femme porn stars with sexy lingerie and delicious smelling long hair. My experience of becoming gay actually was the complete opposite of that. Well, the smokin’ hot high-femmes were everywhere, they just all had masculine partners. There was one femme-femme couple that lived in another city and I thought of their love as sacred and unattainable. With the understanding that no one owed me attention, sex, or their boobs in my face, it was really heartbreaking to feel erotically invisible by those I desired the most. I needed a femme to devour me like I needed air, and I was gasping for breath. Basically what happened was that they weren’t erotically available to me (in general) so I wrote them off as straight. 

I don’t remember when I changed my mind about this, probably when I finally got laid and stopped being a hater — highly recommended! Another reason that reading about lesbian history as a young person, and specifically the history of butch-femme relationships, would have really knocked some sense into me. One of the most well known writings on butch-femme love that exists is in this anthology. What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism, A Conversation Toward Ending Them is a 1981 discussion between Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga (originally published in Heresies 12: Sex Issue). Hollibaugh and Moraga have a candid conversation about sexual desire and what it means to want your partner to eroticize you, the power in responding to the need of your partner with your body, and the role that dyke genders play in this exchange.

AH: My fantasy life is deeply involved in a butch/femme exchange. I never come together with a woman, sexually, outside of those roles. Femme is active, not passive. It’s saying to my partner, “Love me enough to let me go where I need to go and take me there. Don’t make me think it through. Give me a way to be so in my body that I don’t have to think; that you can fantasize for the both of us. You map it out. You are in control.” 

It’s hard to talk about things like giving up power without it sounding passive. I am willing to give myself over to a woman equal to her amount of wanting. I expose myself for her to appreciate. I open myself up for her to see what’s possible for her to love in me that’s female. I want her to respond to it. I may not be doing something active with my body, but more eroticizing her need that I feel in her hands as she touches me. 

In the same way, as a butch, you want and conceive of a woman in a certain way. You dress a certain way to attract her and you put your sexual need within these certain boundaries to communicate that desire… And yet, there’s a part of me that feels maybe all this is not even a question of roles. Maybe it’s a much richer territory than that. 

CM: Yes, I feel the way I want a woman can be a very profound experience. Remember I told you how when I looked up at my lover’s face when I was making love to her (I was actually just kissing her breast at the moment), but when I looked up at her face, I could feel and see how deeply every part of her was present? That every pore in her body was entrusting me to handle her, to take care of her sexual desire. This look on her face is like nothing else. It fills me up. She entrusts me to determine where she’ll go sexually. And I honestly feel a power inside me strong enough to heal the deepest wound.

Hollibaugh is a high-femme who is known for her desire for stone butch lovers (Hello out there if you have my copy of My Dangerous Desires, please return it!). Every time I read or listen to her talk about her desire for butches, it helps me understand my own desires better. She describes giving herself over to her lovers to do as they wish, locating her own pleasure in how deeply her partner desires her, like an ouroboros of hunger. I want you to want me, I need you to need me.

In reading story after story of the iconic pairing between butch and femme, I can only resonate with the butch in this position. As a top, my desire is for femmes who love bottoming, who are consumed by how much they want to be absolutely destroyed. I want to look down and see frilly pink socks and long batting eyelashes staring back up at me. I want to hear “more, please” come from lips painted the perfect shade of red. Who doesn’t want to be with someone who will fuck you with their eyes, their lust made known long before they actually touch you? Truthfully, I have no better way to describe these desires than objectification. Objectification is known as the enemy of feminism, sexual bores have long decried it as an act of the patriarchy, stripping women of their humanity, a problem of morality. 

Philosopher Immanuel Kant, who some (just me, actually) refer to as the first honorary sex-negative lesbian feminist, wrote a lot about the morality of objectification and sexual impulses as the downfall of humanity. His words inspired the likes of Dworkin and MacKinnon.

“The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires. Human nature is thus subordinated. Hence it comes that all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring and direct their activities and lusts entirely towards sex. Human nature is thereby sacrificed to sex. If then a man wishes to satisfy his desire, and a woman hers, they stimulate each other’s desire; their inclinations meet, but their object is not human nature but sex, and each of them dishonors the human nature of the other. They make of humanity an instrument for the satisfaction of their lusts and inclinations, and dishonor it by placing it on a level with animal nature. Sexuality, therefore, exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts.” (hot!)

When people think about objectification as a fetish, the image most common is the hole, a sub may be wearing a hood with just an exposed mouth and being told they are only good for one thing. Not to try to make objectification any more respectable, I love holes! But objectification is an expansive erotic practice that Kant, who clearly never had sex, is not keen on understanding. What's most fascinating is that in all he gets wrong, he does seem to propose that gender and sexuality are intrinsically linked, nevermind that he was talking about heterosexuals. Men desire women not because they are human, but because they are women! Everyone is out here just trying to make their sex more alluring to become the objects of lust. Let them live!

My sadistic lusting is responded to willfully by the objects of that lust. Leather, dyke, and SM culture stresses the importance of signifying your desires. It is not enough for us to be visible as dykes, we must erotically present ourselves to attract our partners. The aesthetics of top/bottom make for notably funny memes but they are actually quite helpful in signifying who we are and hint at what we may be looking for. From flagging and leather harnesses (yes they have a sexual purpose), to high heels or tartan skirts, we beckon our erotic matches. Objects of my desire hold my desire because they can erotically present themselves as both femme and bottom, the type who wear skirts a little too short and bend over on purpose to watch my reaction. The objects of my desire happily place themselves into that position by signaling to me that they want to relinquish control. 

Joan Nestle writes in The Femme Question,

“Living a butch-femme life was not an intellectual exercise; it was not a set of theories. Deep in my gut I know what being a femme has meant to me, but it is very hard to articulate this identity in a way that does justice to its fullest nature and yet answers the questions of a curious reader. In the most basic terms, butch-femme means a way of looking, loving, and living that can be expressed by individuals, couples, or a community. In the past, the butch has been labeled too simplistically the masculine partner and the femme her feminine counterpart. This labeling forgets two women who have developed their styles for specific erotic, emotional, and social reasons. Butch-femme relationships, as I experienced them were complex erotic and social statements, not phony heterosexual replicas. They were filled with a deeply lesbian language of stance, dress, gesture, love, courage, and autonomy.”

She speaks to the experience of being in relation to others and in community, not an intellectual exercise, not a set of theories, things we only truly know when we live them. Experience is only made possible when we touch grass and ass, and get off the internet. Something that haunts me to this day is that on the NYC Queer Cruising Facebook Group (another loss to Sesta/Fosta albeit probably for the best), someone once suggested that the mods ban gender preference (not genital preference, which was already banned) from cruising ads claiming that having any preference for gender wasn’t actually queer. And, well, I hope that person is reading this. :) 

“We are all hungry for the power of desire and we are all terribly afraid.” Dorothy Allison

My copy of Leatherfolk edited by Mark Thompson is stained with tears, I hid my wet eyes from fellow passengers on the A train as I devoured it on my way to work. So many pieces in that collection really touched on the emotional facets of leather and illuminated all the ways that queer love pushed to the margins can bring us all closer together. Leather is sexy, yes, but it is also tender and it is nothing without community. I remember when my ex-girlfriend gifted me a copy of Coming to Power, the coveted and very out of print Samois leatherdyke anthology. I was ecstatic as I knew this book held so much significance to my erotic lineage. I furiously took notes and read and reread my favorite passages. Another ex gifted me a tattered copy of Leather Women edited by Laura Antoniou, its well-loved pages imbued with the energy of others like me who came before. I kept it in the little cubby next to my bed for years, a talisman to bring forth pleasure and pain. Power Circuits edited by Raven Kaldera includes an essay by Andrea Zanin that was really pivotal for me in understanding that my own ideas of polyamory can work with D/s. Even my Fist zines, five little anthologies of lust and communion, unite experiences of leatherdykes across the globe. 

BDSM anthologies are not new. They are some of the most important published work on sexuality, inviting lonely and isolated readers into the erotic worlds of those who dare to live their desires, making plain that another way is possible. All of these books are, for the most part, timeless in connection. They are self-published or published by small presses specializing in themes of sexuality or alternative relationships. This material is surely seen as frivolous by most major publishing companies unless, of course, you’re Dennis Cooper or equally famous enough to convince the publishing gods of smut’s artistic and monetary merit.

Enter Kink: Stories, an anthology just released by Simon & Schuster and edited by Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon. I first learned of this anthology from a Leather Associate and was naturally confused why S&S would publish what I thought was going to be a book of kink erotica. Wow, I wondered, is this still the aftershock of Fifty Shades? 

On February 9th, its release day, Jade cooked baby beef (a dish with vegan beef named affectionately after Kala) and the pod got comfy on the couch and attended a virtual panel with the two editors and two of the contributors. One of the editors spoke negatively about the commodification of kink without making the connection, at least not out loud, that this book is a major contributor to that phenomenon. The other admitted to not being able to even talk about sex because it’s that level of mortifying. One of the writers said that he didn’t even know what kink was until he was asked to contribute to this anthology, while the other said that kink was all about centering her own desires. The discussion and readings left me dry, confused, and not hopeful at all that the book would actually live up to the hype. Not even three weeks later, Kink has already been named a national bestseller. 

The introduction to Kink is really lovely, full of ideas I’ve written and spoken about many times before. It primes the reader for stories that are breaking stereotypes and maybe even setting positive examples of kink as a practice to a very wide audience, something I can get behind! The mainstreaming of kink usually comes filtered by respectability, and this did not sound like that.

Kink is often pathologized in popular culture, the attendant desires flattened, simplified, and turned into a joke, a cause for only shame. In movies, television shows, and popular books, kinky people are often also serial killers, emotionally stunted plutocrats, and other stock villains or exaggerated figures of fun. Instead of pathologizing kink, the stories in this anthology treat it as a complex, psychologically rich act of communication. Kink in these stories is a way of processing trauma, and also of processing joy, of expressing tenderness and cruelty and affection and play. The emotional dynamics of kink are as varied as those of any other human experience, and the stories here explore the whole gamut of human feeling, from exuberance to anguish. Rejecting reductive ideas of normalcy and aberrance, these stories allow for investigations richer than etiology, treating kink as one of the tools we use to make sense of our lives.

Unfortunately, most of these lovely ideas were directly contradicted throughout the themes that wove most of the stories together, kink not being one of them. Not only are several of the stories in this anthology not about kink, they’re not even about sex. Confusing, I know. Most of the stories that do include kink and/or sex left me angered by what I felt was a lack of congruence between the introduction and the words on the pages. If I wasn’t already a very well versed practitioner of BDSM, a professional even, I would walk away from this collection thinking the following: kink is assault, kink is not negotiated, kink is shameful, kink is not done with people you love, both parties involved in a kinky encounter don’t need to be into it, consent is not necessary, vanilla sex is kinky if you’re queer, and kink is a way of avoiding intimacy. 

“‘There’s something a little wrong with me…I don’t want to be this way,’ she said, turning toward him her pale, determined face. ‘I’d rather not be this fucked up.’” R.O. Kwon’s story “Safeword” features a husband who, after years of marriage, gets his wife to admit she is not sexually satisfied because she has unfulfilled masochistic desires of which she is very ashamed. He takes his wife to a dominatrix to learn how to beat her (bravo!). He wants his wife to be happy, but he does not want to hit her at all. He hates every second of it. “He didn’t want to hit Jihyun anymore— he wanted to get out of there. He wanted to untie her and take her home, soothe her and have sex with her, his wife, whom he loved. But he kept going.” The wife thinks something is wrong with her and is extremely ashamed, while the husband is straight up not having a good time. Sounds hot, right? 

Shame, something the editors mention as always connected to kinky desires in mainstream media, pops up over and over again. If kink in popular culture is a cause for only shame, why include so many stories where characters are mired in it? It would be a complete lie to say that kinksters don’t deal with shame, but in specifically calling out that this collection aims to not position kink as shameful, it’s totally missing the mark. Alexander Chee’s story “Best Friendster Date Ever” has characters who have pretty standard gay sex with some light bondage and say things like “None of my friends know me like this,” and “When I had sex with people I didn’t know, I became someone I only met when I had sex with strangers. I found that the people I met like this often loved it but hated me for doing it, for knowing it about them afterward… There was the rich shame and the defiant pleasure.” Here we see more shame, but this also touches on another theme—kink is most often done with people you don’t know, almost as a way of avoiding intimacy.

Cruising is a cultural norm with both roots deeply planted in BDSM and queer culture. While cruising is great, casual encounters are always at the forefront of mainstream portrayals of kink adding to its cold and pathological social aura. The movie Cruising immediately comes to mind, Angels in America is another. People emotionally invested in kink as a lifestyle usually don’t go from casual SM hookup to casual SM hookup. Kinky people build community and relationships, even family. In Kink, and perhaps also in real life, casual encounters are easier when desires are shameful. When kink is used to ward off true intimacy it is rendered other and distant, which stunts the beauty of its exploration. There is nothing wrong with wanting a stranger to destroy you, to make you nothing, to fill the void. But when this is presented as the dominant option, it’s doing a disservice to the work the editors claim to care about in the intro. The mean and hard Dominant is a mostly incorrect cultural trope, and it’s the reason that people are shocked to find I’m actually a sweet and warm person. 

Using kink to avoid intimacy shows up across many of the stories in Kink. Some of them highlight that kink is not something you could ever do with a real partner, thus cruising. Others, like Larissa Pham’s “Trust,” position kink as a distraction, a way to feel intensity without being truly vulnerable. “Trust” is a somber story about a woman in a newish relationship with a man who’s only appeal is that he’s willing to hurt her. She plays to his willingness and stokes his sadistic flames, she feels that becoming the object of his aggression is easier than the thing she really wants—real intimacy. “She knows that a small, soft animal lives inside her, and that that animal wants to be loved completely, flat on its back, kissed and cuddled… But at any touch of softness, a wall goes up in her that she cannot navigate around. Fuck me harder, she says. Easy to be like this, hard. And he listens.” 

Roxanne Gay’s “Reach,” actually gay, shameless, SM erotica (and probably my favorite story), features a married couple who practice sadomasochism. It seems to be embedded in their relationship happily from both parties, which is a refreshing perspective I’ve mentioned is lacking in the book. While they have been together for a long time, the protagonist says several times that her wife is hiding things, she has secrets, stories of scars she won’t reveal. “I want to know the stories of all her scars, but I’m not sure I’m willing to pay the price for that knowledge. Sasha continues to stare at my reflection. She is an expert at holding a gaze. She won’t break—not for anything. She’s that way about many things.” SM is portrayed as a game of chess between top and bottom, wife and wife, as a tool to eventually lead to real intimacy. “I will help her up, carry her to bed, hoping I have inched closer to that place she might never let me reach.”

This story touches on another theme, which is lack of consent, communication, and safety. The protagonist casually cuts her wife with a straight razor, hands still sandy from the beach, across her back (err, spine?) without a word between them. Believe me, I understand there is trust in long term SM relationships where you no longer need to ask before you do everything. However, as someone who cuts my partners often enough, there would never be a time where I pick up a dirty(?) straight razor, cut across someone’s spine, not sanitize the skin, or with dirty hands. Whatever enjoyment I was getting out of this story, because it was getting hot, was completely depleted when the cutting scene happened. Call me a buzzkill, but careless bloodplay does not turn me on!

There are countless instances throughout the book where communication and consent should have been given. In fact, most of the stories that involve more than a sentence of sex have no negotiation nor explicit consent. There’s a scene in “Trust” where the woman’s boyfriend cums inside her without a condom and without consent and she thinks to herself “at least I have an IUD.” The fact is that even vanilla sex needs consent and negotiation, which is not the message you get when you read kink scenes where people are diving right in without talking about anything first. I know what you’re thinking, “But I don’t want to read about negotiation in erotica, it will kill my boner!” I think that first of all, negotiation can be really hot if you write it correctly. Even just affirmative consent would be lovely, acknowledging that you already ironed out all the details...anything. Second of all, this book is absolutely not erotica. If Garth Greenwell can take the time to explain to us novices, mid-scene, why emasculation is a turn on (“it’s the worst thing, to seem like a woman”) then we can have some goddamn scene communication!

Melissa Febos opens the book with a story called “The Cure.” If I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was a story about a lesbian written by a homophobic straight woman (the author is actually queer). The protagonist laments she is tired of the lesbian way, which is apparently going on dates with women you’re not even attracted to. She decides to fuck a man because lesbians are too complicated and, let me tell you, what the world needs is a story called “The Cure” about a lesbian fucking a cishet man. While having sex with this man, she immediately decides that she doesn’t want to have sex with this man, but keeps going anyway. Through each encounter they have, she becomes more comfortable with centering what she wants, all without any discussion at all. She turns their last hook-up vaguely kinky by instructing him to jerk off and then telling him to stop so he becomes frustrated. Again, none of these several sexual encounters had any communication or negotiation at all, which maybe was the whole point? I could have also been too horrified and completely missed the point.

Consent is paramount to kink, even the vanillas know that! Apparently when the book came out, some people were upset at the editors on Twitter because kink is often used as an excuse for people, like Marilyn Manson, to abuse their partners. R.O. Kwon published this piece last week taking a stand against the conflation of kink and abuse in an attempt to clear up any misunderstanding. I read that article and Greenwell’s supportive tweet just a few days before I read the anthology.

If kink isn’t abuse (and it is not!), and it’s actually homo/transphobic to say so, then why is the story he included in the anthology a homosexual SM encounter turned violent rape scene? Let’s try to follow this logic. You’re an editor of a soon-to-be bestselling mainstream kink anthology where you introduce the book with a strong view opposing the stereotypes of kinky people in pop culture as serial killers and villains. Does it seem like a good idea to then include a legit Dom-turned-rapist story in your anthology? Yes, we’ve all seen Cruising. Kink is not abuse, and sexual assault doesn’t belong in the same category, or book, as BDSM. 

Carmen Maria Machado’s story was a confusing one. It’s a great story standing alone, but I struggled to understand why it was in this anthology when the only vaguely kinky action also turns to physical assault. A woman’s boyfriend is hitting her in the distance and we aren’t really told whether or not it’s consensual. Later, we see this same woman crying for help to escape the same boyfriend beating her. Her trying to flee the second time is the only difference in how consent is communicated between these two scenes. Again, I don’t know how I’m supposed to believe the message that kink is not abuse when many stories don’t include consent and two of these stories also include physical/sexual assault. 

The reality of mainstreaming kink in this way is that books like this (and Fifty Shades) are going to be a lot of people’s introduction to BDSM and those involved in commodifying kink need to be accountable to that. Mainstreaming kink can’t be done recklessly with bad examples of poor and dangerous consent practices, lack of communication, and reinforcing archaic stereotypes.

The creators of Netflix’s show Bonded received tons of backlash from the sex working community for the irresponsible portrayal of life as a dominatrix. Season 1 was so bad that I had to turn it off after one episode, a show that I should have loved. Luckily, Netflix did the right thing and hired actual sex workers to consult in creating Season 2. Inviting members of the already marginalized sub-culture you’re exploiting to guide the narrative, and pay them, is the very least they could do. Did the editors of Kink have a BDSM sensitivity reader? Did the editors of Kink edit anything at all?

Book reviews are always interesting to read in that they are never really honest. People are afraid of critique. My kinky writer friends wouldn’t take on an honest book review of Kink with a ten foot pole for fear of upsetting one of the many Very Famous contributors. What if they need one of them to blurb a future book? It’s been so interesting watching people with platforms who don’t normally talk about BDSM join in on this conversation (contributors included). This is to say that many of the reviews I read actually praise the book and confirm that it is, in fact, kinky. The New York Times review says that it “is not quite erotica. Ostensibly, it’s more about the transformative nature of kink as a practice, and the different modalities — kink as anticipation, as communication, as processing…” I’m left wondering if we read the same book. The Cut’s podcast review poses the question, “Well, isn’t everyone just a little bit kinky?” Not everyone posts their entire kinky lives on the internet like me, but it’s not hard to tell by observation of language who is speaking from experience, and who is just speaking.

There are many conclusions that I could draw. It’s annoying when a subculture is misrepresented in mainstream media, commodified kink is never going to be good. It sucks that leather people aren’t included in discussions about their lifestyle. It’s unfair that a group of famous writers could so easily publish a mediocre book “about kink” that isn’t really kinky while my less famous writer friends who are into Leather could not get the same opportunity to do it right, joining the ranks of Leatherfolk and Coming to Power. And lastly, it really sucks that the way this book has been hyped up for weeks led me to believe it was going to be something else entirely. 

Amidst a sea of grim disappointment, the book is closed with a story that left me feeling like someone might actually get it? So I leave you with this passage I really liked from Chris Kraus’ story titled “Emotional Technologies.” “This is pure romance, as in roman, a story that’s contained within itself. Like theater or pure math, S/m is a self-generating system large enough to reference everything that it excludes. Romance, desire, context, expectation loop back and forth between us through our roles. Multiple paradoxes yielding triple penetration. The game is totally complete within itself. Unlike ordinary sex, it is an act, and not a metaphor, of love.”

From the outside, and sometimes on the inside, people think that role based relationships of dominance and submission flow in one direction. This means that all the power, instruction, and leading come from the dominant partner then are absorbed and obeyed by the submissive partner. Much like a hose flowing in one direction the dominant sprays their commands onto the sub until they are soaking wet, maybe while wearing a white t-shirt or equally seductive ensemble. How many times do we hear “My domme made me do ____!” Submissives take the orders and must do what they’re told or they get in trouble. I get why people think this, but it takes a pretty even flow of give and take between two people to make a working, lasting, power exchange relationship.

I’ve found that when people in any kind of relationship consent to do things they don’t actually want to do, they may keep their word for a while, but they ultimately end up slipping and breaking their promise because they’re crossing their own boundaries (many people call this compromising). People who agree to monogamous relationships when they really want to be fucking lots of people always end up cheating. People who agree not to talk to that ex anymore when they actually really love and care about them will always end up sneaking DMs, phone calls, or even secret meet ups. Submissives who agree to follow protocol, tasks, or do an activity that they don’t really want to do will end up disappointing their dominants by dropping the ball, and maybe even feeling resentful.

To that end, D/s simply cannot be one-sided. Submissives shouldn’t agree to relationship terms that they don’t actually want because they will find them very difficult to keep. This goes the same for dominants as well. One-sided relationships where submissives do whatever they are told all the time (what a lot of people think happens) comes off as an extremely disconnected dynamic, even selfish. D/s is called power exchange for a very real reason—there is a flow of energy between two people that is really beautiful and romantic, but let’s not forget super hot. The one-way transfer of power is also dangerous in that it easily positions consenting submissives as victims. Not that we need to care what other people think but it’s hard for lots of people to wrap their head around the fact that consent, even when it’s consenting to never say no, is an ongoing choice. You choose it every time you say Yes and continue the dynamic, but it has to be negotiated. It’s common for people to see relationships and make assumptions that submissives lack autonomy under the iron fist of a dominant, those poor things! 

So what I’d like to get at here is to explore all the ways that power exchange is failing if it’s one-sided. A dominant that’s doling out orders and having someone complete their every wish isn’t actually receiving energetic feedback from the sub. All the attention and energy is focused on the dominant’s desires, and in reaction the submissive meets those desires. If someone is so devoted to you that they would do literally whatever you say, that’s actually a failure of power exchange and sounds more like a cult leader than a dominant. (Again, join whatever cult you want, but don’t call it D/s.) 

So, what is this exchange of power supposed to look like? First, let’s talk more about what exactly this power is. There is power in both dominance and submission. Power in submission comes from both the ability to trust in someone enough to let go and from the commitment to a discipline of boundaries. It’s so powerful to say “I need to take care of myself first.” It’s powerful to say “That doesn’t interest me and I don’t want to do it.” It’s powerful to say “Can we renegotiate this so that I feel more comfortable?” Power in dominance comes from control with care and a discipline in attention to feedback. It’s powerful when dominants pay attention to the energy feedback they are receiving and then alter or continue the cycle. It’s powerful to say “You’re not allowed to clean my bathroom until your personal chores are done first.” It’s powerful to say “Thank you for stating your boundaries.” Both of these roles become almost spiritual (sorry for going there but I had to) when they have both this inward and outward ongoing commitment that’s being transferred with every step. 

When a submissive always says yes, or consents to never say no, the flow of energy goes in one direction and is only outward. This robs the submissive of the crucial ongoing work of boundaries and deepening consent. This makes it so the dominant can take without actually focusing any attention on the submissive, the attention always stays on the dominant. You can consent to something by saying yes, but what deepens consent is the ability to say yes, and. Negotiation is consent. Yes I can do this for you, and I need more time because I have a date tonight. Yes I would love to play, and I really can’t handle a beating right now.  

I’m not really a fan of protocol. It doesn’t make me feel any more dominant to make someone kneel when they enter my house, or never look me in the eye (or, whatever!). If the purpose of protocol is to reassert the roles in the relationship, it doesn’t really do that for me and feels like show pony optics. I don’t need to be reminded with protocol that I’m in charge because we’ve already agreed that I’m in charge. In reading Real Service, the concept of “If the dominant doesn’t want it, it’s not service” really stuck out to me. Protocol is something I get asked about often because it’s a super common facet of D/s relationships, integral even. I wonder how many people do these things because they think they’re supposed to, or because they see other people doing them? Does the queen need people to bow to remind her that she’s the queen? Definitely not. Any protocol I keep serves a, shall we say, higher purpose. My girlfriend isn’t allowed to wear pants in my apartment because I like to look at her ass at all times, a divine purpose indeed.

In thinking about this concept of one-way D/s, I realized another thing about protocol is that it can be an effortless way to reenforce dominance when there isn’t actually an exchange of power. Protocol can be a routine way to feel like something deeper is happening in the dynamic when it’s just a call and response, or a test of routine and memory. While I suppose that can still be considered an energy exchange, it can seem superficial in that it lacks a je ne sais quoi! A dominant can be super impressive and domly with a list of 50 protocols they ask their subs to memorize, but to this I ask: To what end with the pony show? What does this do for you? What does this do for the sub?

I work with people to help them start power exchange relationships... What’s that pesky word? Ethically! In my own relationships, I always fear that my partners are just going along with what I want because I’m usually the one who’s extremely clear about what I want. I’ve asked many times “If you were single, is this something you’d desire?” Or, “Are you just doing this because you want to please me?” Especially if someone has codependent tendencies, they may not even be able to answer that question without their rose-colored enmeshment goggles. Anyway, this all plays into building ethical D/s relationships because they need to be co-created. In order to facilitate this co-creation, I ask dominants to try pulling instead of pushing. Before you set the relationship rules, make your submissive write you a description of their ideal relationship. Have them write you erotica and tell you what was so hot about it so you have an idea of their desires (or make them tell you directly). Make them keep a masturbation journal so you know what they think about when they come. This is all data that will help you learn what they lean towards so you can find common ground where your desires overlap. This is not so you can cater to their every whim, because that’s just as bad and also not collaborative. Give them positive reinforcement for saying no, for saying yes, and. Make sure your relationship is always up for negotiation rather than signing a contract (oop!).

Power exchange relationships are really ripe for the type of healing and repair that happens in healthy intimate relationships because they are so deeply negotiated and discussed. When they are not heavily negotiated there is likewise major damage potential. Without a symbiotic flow of energy, it’s easy to disregard boundaries and completely give yourself over to the fantasy of being “owned.” It’s really hot to be a brainless object that follows orders, truuuust me I know. However, that fantasy lived out 24/7 and with a person who only cares about getting their own needs met can leave lasting damage. Being literally dommed into having boundaries (You get a sticker when you share your feelings with me), prioritizing yourself (You have to stay home and rest tonight or we can’t have play time this weekend), and creating more discipline in your life (You must send me a photo of your bed made every morning) is maybe even hotter. 

A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were in the planning stages of a live rope event we hosted together virtually. We knew we couldn’t do anything too risqué because zoom monitors for adult content (luckily a lot of SM isn’t “traditional sex” so it scrapes by the respectability algorithms). As the point of a fundraiser is to get as much money as possible by appealing to a wide audience, “What’s our scene going to be?” was a hard question to answer. Both Sara Elise and I do not like to filter ourselves for anyone, but when our private scenes usually consist of her pretending to be 1.) A Sex Doll, 2.) A Child, 3.) A Murder Victim, with me pretending to be 1.) An Evil Doctor, 2.) A Creepy Old Man, 3.) A Serial Killer (also a man) you can see why we may have run into some brainstorming trouble with our mainstream marketability.

“I can be a teen and you can kidnap me…”“Nope. That will offend a lot of people.”“Wait, why?” “Age play. CNC… We would need to trigger warning the fuck out of it.”“Okay how about I can be a school girl and you can be my mean teacher who punishes me?”“Nope. That will offend a lot of people.”“Ugh, why?” “Age play. Torturing children...”“Wow ok, so we can’t have fun if we want to sell tickets? Great. What can we do?”

I had deja vu from last year when this same conversation happened. We were brainstorming for a Halloween performance at Venus Cuffs’ House of Screams event. I was coming up with a plethora of similar accidentally “offensive” ideas for our scene, but this time she was the one explaining why they wouldn’t work. “I want to dress like the scary nun from the Conjuring 2. You can be a child on the playground playing with a ball and I torture and possess you…” She steered us in the less offensive direction of a (sexy) backwoods butcher who tortures a lost backpacker of unknown age (but still in a Catholic school uniform) who stumbles into the butcher’s creepy barn.

For the virtual event last week, we ended up settling on a Principal/student scene between two real-life consenting adults over the age of thirty. The student got sent to the principal’s office for violating the dress code with her six-inch long tartan skirt and good, old fashioned torture ensued. “We swear, we swear,” we told our audience, “the student just turned eighteen so everything in the fantasy world we created that’s not even real was completely legal!” It felt like a compromise between what we actually wanted to do and what we felt would have appealed to a majority of the freaks who follow us on social media. BUT...

The following was a comment on the instagram post announcing our virtual event (on Sara Elise’s instagram):

I have no idea who this person is, but kinky or not it is so common for people to jump to these wild conclusions that surface a deep misunderstanding of fantasy as being a stand-in for our real life desires. If this had been a serial killer scene with no mention of a student/teacher dynamic, would the “glorification of murder” be more acceptable for this person? As I’ve written about before, sometimes sexual fantasies and role playing can lead us directly to our truth, but most of the time they absolutely do not. There are so many examples of this. Do people that watch tentacle porn want to be fucked by an octopus? Most of them would say not. So many people shut off their own fantasies and desires due to shame that they can’t comprehend being interested in playing sexy pretend. Actually, let’s back up—I simply want people to stop thinking “Do they actually want to do these things in real life?” and replace it with “It’s just consenting adults playing make believe and no one is being harmed.”

Because the title Daddy is somehow culturally divorced from any connection to age play, it’s wild that I can say “I’m Daddy,” and even have complete strangers calling me Daddy (which I don’t consent to by the way), with absolutely no projection of Bad Things onto me. Age play by name, however, is something I don’t talk about “publicly” very often, not because I’m ashamed of myself, but because in my experience it’s one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of role playing and power dynamics in BDSM. As evidenced above, people completely lose their shit. I don’t trust the average person not to project these Bad Things onto me, even if I am playing the role of educator. And even when I am educating in private one-on-one lessons, I still have people disgusted by the thought of participating in this type of role play because they make their own giant leap to associate an adult consensual fantasy with actual children. This is not even remotely close to that. It’s not a stand in for that. Just no.

Speaking for myself and my experience, I landed here upon accepting that I get off on role playing extreme power imbalance, societal taboos, and corruption of the innocent (again, all fantasy between consenting adults). As the Top/Domme in these situations, I’m the extreme sicko in charge of the corruption, which for me is part of the fun. However, if people think the concept of age play is disgusting, they absolutely place that disgust onto the D in these situations. I become morally corrupt as the active partner in these fantasies while the submissive/receptive bottom usually gets away with pity—”You poor thing, what happened to you as a child?”

I recently listened to a psychology podcast talking about BDSM where they mention various role playing scenarios that people engage with because they are working through trauma. There are people who believe that engaging in the more “taboo kinks” is okay if it’s done by those trying to reclaim power that was stolen from them. This means that consensual non-consent, age play, or incest play are done by people who have survived those specific traumas, are engaging in exposure therapy, and therefore have psychological merit. This is labeled as “Safe, Sane, Consensual.” This reeks of respectability. Expressions of sexuality that are considered fringe or edge don’t need to be tied to traumatic events. It’s almost like this brand of “healing” BDSM is okay, but otherwise the filthy “insane” perverts are giving everyone else a bad name.

People tell themselves a lot of things in order to be okay with what they’re doing, I just wish they would be a little more self-aware while doing it. There’s so much bleaching happening that sometimes I wonder if people even understand that at its foundation BDSM is actually about power and pain, not respectability or healing. If you’re not fucking with power you may as well be having vanilla sex, and that’s ok, just please call it what it is. 

Daddy/boy and Mommy/girl (sadly, it’s much harder to find writing about M/g), and their variations are Leather archetypal roles. These are often longer-term power exchange relationships usually entered into by a Dominant-type who takes on some form of caring, guiding, training, and/or mentoring for a submissive-type partner who seeks the same. Pouring over my books on Leather culture and relationships written mostly by men and before 1995, Daddy/boy relationships are never described as age play. I’m not sure if the word didn’t exist yet, actual age regression wasn’t common, or this label just wasn’t necessary because that aspect was already understood. Daddies are described as caring and loving wards of their boys, often portrayed in contrast as childlike, eager to learn, be good, and please their Daddies. 

Blade T. Bannon wrote a handbook for Daddies and boys called “My Mentor My Guide” that provides wonderful real-life examples of this Mentor/mentee relationship. The perspective in this book (in contrast to Bean, mentioned below) includes an inherent age gap where Daddies are always older, sometimes twenty or thirty years older, than boys. The last chapter, written by Andrew Cline, discusses the psychology of what it means to reparent through the Daddy/boy relationship. As I mentioned, I tend to stay away from psychology when I talk about BDSM, but I enjoy understanding corollary benefits to my perversion. It is common to form Leather familial bonds of chosen parents, siblings, etc where we get the love, care, guidance, and acceptance that these culturally significant relationships may never have afforded us. We shouldn’t look for a Daddy with the intention of healing from having a shitty biological father, but we also can’t deny the possibility.

“Most men who engage in Daddy/son role play want the fantasy, not actual incest. The thought of sex with one’s actual biological father is often distasteful in the extreme. In my opinion, for most Daddy/son role play, the “Daddy” may be a surrogate of some sort, but there is also an element of transformation and re-creation that eliminates the anger, hostility, and conflict often present in actual father/son relationships. Daddy/boy role play usually involves lots of verbalizing feelings. Just using the taboo words “Daddy” and “boy” can be powerfully erotic.” 

Leathersex by Joseph W. Bean outlines Daddy/boy in a section on Leather Relationships. He explains that the Daddy/boy relationship is a power dynamic that has evolved from strict M/s that was more popular in previous years (Old Guard). Daddy/boy dynamics, in contrast, allow for loving romantic relationships. “So the shifting of social acceptance in the gay community and the world has contributed to the redefinition of acts, attitudes, and clothing in such a way as to support- but by no means create-the rise in popularity of the Daddy-boy relationship.” In this section he interviews his own boy Scott about what boyhood means to him. 

Q: What do you mean when you say you are a boy?Scott: Being a boy means I have the freedom to play, a safe place to do it, and a Daddy, which means lots of love and a nurturing relationship with a lot of growth. It means getting to wear silly clothes, and someone else takes the blame for them. It's permission to be silly sometimes.

Q: Does a boy have to be young?Scott: No. A boy can be any age, which is good for older boys who like young men.

Q: Does a boy have to be childlike?Scott: No. A boy should have the ability to be childlike when appropriate, but he also has to be able to function as a normal, human, male adult.

Q: What does a man need in order to be a boy?Scott: Honesty. A sense of fun. A need for a strong "father figure" in his life even if he has a good relationship with his father, and a desire to learn from and be like "said strong person." Oh, and a good hot butt.

Q: What kind of satisfaction can you get from being a boy, since a boy seems to always be serving someone else's needs?Scott: You can get the joy of a job well done and the love of a good Daddy. And, really, it works out pretty well if you have the right Daddy. Like, if you don't want to do the fucking, don't want to stick your dick in someone else, you can have a Daddy, and he'II do that for you.

Let’s circle back around to the fact that age play, and similarly incest play (overlapping in this case), invoke moral panic knee-jerk reactions from the same people who enthusiastically call sexual partners Daddy, or good girl. Where did this connection to meaning break in the diffusion of Daddy from Leather culture to more popular kink culture? It is possible that I’m tracing these origins to the wrong place. I get that it’s very easy to draw hard limits at things that disgust you while brushing up against those things in a very real way. The point is that people either don’t think about what they’re doing at all to the point of denial, they think about it through a lens of pathologization and shame, or somehow an impressive combination of both. 

Someone asked in the Principal/student rope event last week why age play is so stigmatized. My reaction was “Oh, come on. You know the answer to that!” To that person, if you’re reading this, I hope this explains better than my frustrated dismissal of your question. Mostly, I don’t know, maybe we could all just stop sucking the fun out of being perverts?

Every year of my life since I moved out of my parents house sixteen years ago, someone has asked me about home as if that place is still it. This is obviously worse around the holidays, like now, when unsuspecting coworkers and baristas don’t mean to push your family button, and you can’t really not answer in a polite way because you realize they are just being nice. Imagine being a person for whom family or place of origin carry no weight so that the words “Are you going home?” directed at near strangers just roll right off your tongue. 

I’m definitely not someone who initiates, but sometimes the conversation strikes up and I dodge the question of family in a very deliberate way. Surely only someone with family would ask another person “Are you visiting family for the holidays?” But! If I was backed into an awkward conversational corner I would choose something much more impersonal and less presumptuous like “You doing anything this weekend?” When I do get the home for the holidays question, for anyone who needs some pointers, I do love to play dense. “Oh yea, my home is my apartment in Brooklyn so that’s where I’ll be!” 

Anyway, it’s all especially weird this year because of COVID. People are still asking these questions when no one should be traveling to any family gatherings. Many people aren’t “going home for the holidays” to be with their family of origin for the first time ever, not because they finally set boundaries or cut someone off, but because a deadly virus is keeping them away. The pain of family separation is now relevant to almost everyone instead of just those who are estranged or incarcerated or separated by borders. In the words of the great Italian philosopher @Jaboukie, everyone is now appropriating queer culture. 

The last time I “went home” for Christmas was maybe five years ago (honestly could have been ten, what is memory?). My older brother had flown in from Omaha to stay with my dad in our childhood home where he still lived. He had been there for two days by the time I saw him on Christmas and my dad had yet to appear. My dad spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s house and was too busy to spend time with his own kid who bought a plane ticket and even took time off from his cultish multi-level marketing job to be there.

On Christmas morning I drove over two hours from Brooklyn to a suburb of Philadelphia and picked my brother up, then we did the rounds with our grandmother another hour away. We were going to drive yet another hour in another direction to my dad’s family’s Christmas party for dinner. We were halfway there when my dad called my brother to say that he was leaving the party and for us to turn around and go home. He was going back to his girlfriend’s house and would be home in two (2!!!) days to drive my brother to the airport. That was the last time I attempted to see my father. 

Fuming, I cursed him and drove us to a diner nearby as rejected children do on Christmas night to eat giant plates of french fries and drink black coffee. I could tell you alllll about my brother, but I’ll just say that he’s someone whose favorite coping mechanism is denial. For years I told him about the shitty antics my dad pulled with me and my younger brother. For years my brother defended him and told me I was overreacting. Now, after having experienced the deadbeat dad bullshit first-hand, he was... still defending him! In between bites of his fries, this absolute fool made up all kinds of excuses for our father. He has a new family now (a girlfriend with children she cares about) and we should be happy for him. He raised us and did the best he could (my favorite is when people tell you that you owe your parents because they gave you life and fed you). We reminded him of his old life, his terrible marriage with our mother (whom I look exactly like). If you’re not aware, people in the multi-level marketing scheming world have a specific language that basically strikes down any negative-speak. My brother calls it neg-bombing. I call it gaslighting. This was the last time I saw my brother.

There are very few times in my life now where I get to hear the Philly accent. When the world is normal, I usually drive to Philly a few times a year to eat the vegan versions of comfort food I grew up with— cheesesteaks, hoagies, tomato pie. My childhood best friend still has the accent even though he’s also been gone for years (Hi, Dennis). My younger brother’s voice, not tempered by a new city or fancy education, holds my most difficult ties to home. His speech hasn’t changed much since we were kids and so his voice is a time warp. Sometimes when he talks I’m transported to places I’d rather not visit. We are driving back from the Poconos when he lets a frog loose in the station wagon and wiggles all over trying to catch it. I am sitting on our front porch watching him learn to skateboard. I take him to the mall to pick out a present for his birthday. The thing about happy memories is that they’re devastating in hindsight, you had no idea what was to come. 

Even though I know it’s not true, it feels hyperbolic to say that something isn’t safe even if there’s no real threat of physical danger. I know in my body that the lowest low, bare minimum requirement for safety is no threat of physical danger. I think a lot about how home is not a safe place for so many people, and it wasn’t always a safe place for me. I spent a great deal of my last five years at “home” with my parents by not actually being there. I was obsessed with school. I was at my friend's houses all the time. I ran away. As an adult on my own, there were so many years I spent fortunately housed, but without a real feeling of home. Bouncing around from shitty apartment to shitty apartment is a thing most young people do in New York City. It is a luxury to stay in the same place for more than a year. It is unfortunately also a luxury to find roommates who agree on the definition of filthy. 

The house I grew up in was decorated green. It was a small house that was once the rectory of the church next door. My mom had this chaotic decorating idea that if you painted each wall a different color, it made the room look bigger. That meant that every wall in the living room (which essentially was the first floor) was painted shades of green from medium to dark. The couch was green, the recliner was green, the rug was green, the flowered wall paper border was green, the curtains were green, green art, and the front door was painted green too. She loved kitschy knick-knacks and yard sales, which she never left empty handed. She collected tiny chairs and would display anything from dolls to stuffed animals on them. She loved green glass vases. She loved doilies. She was a textbook maximalist. While I definitely inherited her love of old things and yard sales, I have renounced everything else. 

When I moved in over seven years ago, I painted the walls of my poorly lit, eighteen inches underground apartment a gothic dark grey. Now a plant dad who cherishes sunshine (footcandles if we’re getting nerdy), I decided it was time for the dark to go in favor of something that wouldn’t eat up the light. Many hours of painting and extremely sore muscles later and I have a cute light pink living room (ok it’s really white but there is a serious pink tint and calling it pink makes me feel adventurous). Sometime during this process, my girlfriend Kala pointed out to me that everything in my apartment is black, white, or grey. First of all, I literally have colorful plants everywhere! Besides that, she was correct. The only acceptable place for color is my socks and underwear, and even that feels slightly uncomfortable. For some silly reason I never made a connection between my opposition to color and my mother’s love for it (duh, everything is about your mother). So obviously I’d decorate my home absolutely nothing like the one I couldn’t wait to escape. 

For me, home is both a place and a feeling, but one that is quite the opposite of nostalgia. Home is softness and comfort, a space where I don’t shrink myself, where I can feel my shoulders relax, where I count on wet licks from adoring dogs to greet me without fail. Home is intimacy. It’s a place I can invite other freaks to be freaky. It’s the feeling I get when I rest my head on my girlfriend’s thighs (it’s taking a big juicy bite). Home is watching vampire movies in a pile of snoring dogs. Home is being in awe of the skyline every single time you turn that one bend on the BQE. Home is knowing that someone also feels home in you.

The collective idea of home, at least during this time of year, is tethered to the place and people who raised us. (Blood) family is always the most important, and (blood) family means home. We’re never meant to interrogate this or question whether or not we have healthy relationships to home. It doesn’t matter if these people actually know who we are. (I have a lot to say about the latest lesbian Christmas movie.) Luckily, being queer has given me a new definition of, well, almost everything. When I was young, I learned through watching others what happens when home is generative, flowers need water to grow. As an adult, I try every day to make up for lost time. I don’t own the apartment where I live so I will eventually have to leave, but I know it’s a place I’d never run away from. I make sure that things don’t just grow here, they flourish.

Most of the world spells Sex P in V, parts rubbing together for the purpose of, biologically speaking, creating the miracle of life. If we’re talking dirty, like Genesis 1:28, God mandated that we “be fruitful, and multiply.” This is why I said I lost my unholy virginity to the boy on the patio swing when I was 18 and not to the boy in the basement bathroom when I was 12. It’s great to have definitions for things to be able to categorize them. Words mean things, as they should. However, in the cursed year of our lord 2020, there are a whole lot of us (homosexuals) who do not know each other biblically and thus the cultural mandate does not apply. So how do we define sex? (hello, welcome to another post about queer imagination)

When gossiping about dates it’s pretty normal for me to ask “Did you fuck?” without literally meaning “Did at least one person penetrate the other in one or more holes?” It’s all about context. It’s so boring for me to ask that, just as it’s boring for the person I’m asking to assume that’s what I meant. My definition of sex basically doesn’t exist. This is really obnoxious for me personally because I desperately want words to mean things. Sex is always action, but not always the same action. Sex is anything that feels erotic and exciting. Over the past five years or so my relationship to sex has changed a lot. I’ve become a lot more hungry for power and pain. The ways I’ve eroticized power and pain have caused me to reimagine my relationship to S-E-X and I realized I don’t even need to involve genitals when I fuck. Are you lost yet? Good.

During a recent virtual leather femme brunch, we were discussing how a lot of young queers don’t know about stone sexuality (You haven’t even heard of Stone Butch Blues, and it shows!!!). In the most literal definition of “words mean things,” younger queers have created 75 new terms and corresponding flags for the varying shades of asexual. I support all people to fly whatever flag feels right for them, but the need to have a name for every degree of sexual and romantic attraction also signifies to me, a grumpy elder, that maybe younger people leading this charge don’t yet understand that sexuality and attraction are fluid, always in flux, and not everyone wants to fuck each other all the time? Or that many of us have lots of limits and boundaries around how we have sex and with whom, and that is totally normal!  

I very much do not identify as asexual… but at the same time I don’t really “have sex.” WHAT IS SEX?!?!?! In the biblical vanilla sense, I guess my sexuality is pretty close to demisexual, except that I don’t want to fuck, I just want to erotically hurt people, which can sometimes include fucking them. Essentially, I’m a leatherdyke sadist who has leathersex and I only want to fuck people who understand what that means.

I remember feeling all kinds of butterflies when I first read Xan West’s (still unfinished *sobs*) blog series on stone sexuality. Xan, aka Corey Alexander, was “an autistic queer fat white Jewish genderqueer writer and community activist with multiple disabilities” whose recent and untimely death has left a resounding sadness in many different communities. I think Xan shared one of these blog posts on Twitter, which sent me down a long and emotional rabbit hole. I read and reread the series of blog posts because I had never heard stone conceptualized in this way.

The first woman I ever had capital S sex with waited until after she fucked me to tell me that I couldn’t return the favor. She said she was stone, and I was devastated! My shining moment of blissful lesbian sexual reciprocity that I had dreamed of for many years had arrived— I had a hot nineteen year old model from okcupid who lied about her age in my bed AND I couldn’t touch her. I obviously respected this, even if that was very much not what I was expecting nor what I wanted at the time. This was my first encounter with stone sexuality and I’m glad I had the cultural knowledge of queerness to know what this meant. My desires at the time definitely didn’t align with not being able to touch my partner. Little did I know what the next ten years would have in store for me. (Not to sound horny but the next woman I dated was a twenty three year old who had never been kissed and also would’t let me fuck her. I consider this time in my early twenties a karmic period of sexual misalignment.) 

Stone sexuality is not something widely written about at all, but Xan epically fixed that and wrote about it really beautifully. They propose stone identity as so much more than just being “untouchable,” that it’s additionally marked by the ability to locate one’s own pleasure in creating pleasure for partners. I love juicy, feral, hungry types of desire, like how I felt the other week eating food from my favorite restaurant for the first time since April. Anything less than this—meh. This is the type of desire Xan describes that really resonates for me. For them, a one-way gaze (within the consensual framework of mutual desire) fueled by response and energy exchange is a marker of being stone. Keeping up with the food metaphor, it reminds me of a predator out hunting for their next meal. The prey instinctively knows the hungry gaze of the predator and how to react accordingly. However, what if the prey/snack’s deepest desire is to be devoured? This works out really well for everyone. 

“I can fuck every inch of someone’s skin, and create a whole and complete sexual experience from that. That experience feels rooted in my stone sexual identity; because of how my sexuality works, not only can I fuck someone’s skin with my knife or my boot, but I can come from fucking them that way, and if I’m in tune and they are in the headspace for it, can make them come as well. Hot incredible sex can happen that doesn’t involve anyone’s bits…to me, that’s stone sex for sure.”

In Leathersex, Joseph W. Bean’s 1994 epic and timeless book on all things leather, he says that “Sex is not necessarily a genitals-only experience.” He says of piss play, “Urination, adequately eroticized in advance, can be like coming. No, not like coming. It can be coming, the feeling of an orgasm going on and on, controllable and extendable in a way that no other orgasm can be.”  Baby dyke me who just wanted to fuck would never have understood these concepts, let alone imagined this for myself. 

Growing into my identity as a sadist who uses power and pain to facilitate sexual arousal, my interest in anything remotely close to what might be characterized as vanilla sex all but disappeared. The way I understand my sexuality is not defined by what I don’t do, but by my deep hunger. Desire is a creative process of embodiment that’s begging us to focus on what’s pleasing and juicy and erotic to us in the moment. Desire is the craving for pleasure, and pleasure is ultimately subjective. Especially with alternative sexualities, sex has always been a game of subjectivity. As queer people doing the devil’s work, we’re already challenged to locate our definitions of sex outside the idea of penetration. Then, as leather queer people, why stop there? Why not try skin fucking like Xan West, or a piss orgasm like Joseph W. Bean? A tongue on this boot is S-E-X! 

Enjoy this skin fucking scene I wrote in honor of Xan and the influence their writing has had on my becoming:  

Snapping my pink nitrile gloves on to my hands is a rush, they’re just transparent enough that I can still see the color of my long fingernails. The smell of rubbing alcohol fills my nose as I aggressively clean the unsuspecting flesh of my prey. I look at the skin cells on the paper towel and shame her for being so filthy. She wears pink frilly socks and matching pink panties, just the way I like it. I choose the pink capped 18g needles because aesthetics always matter and pink matches so nicely with crimson. I unwrap the needle carefully, exhaling as the bevel is revealed, the metal shines under the hospital lighting of my room. I inspect and pinch her breast in a few different places, searching for the first bite to my satisfaction. Ready? I say as a warning and my mouth curls into an evil grin and my eyes get wide with lust. I glide the point of the thick needle—1.5 inches of pure stainless steel—through her tight skin. In one side and out the other, cuts like butter. My prey moans as she sails to her happy place on the endorphin high. 

I fuck her flesh with as many of my needles as she can take, one after the other, until her chest is covered in silver crosses while she prays to God that it never ends. I use my pink-gloved fingers to force the needles in unnatural directions, twisting and pulling her skin to my design. She squeals as I stare her in the eyes as I press down on each needle to remind her that it’s still there, that I am still inside of her. Eventually I start to remove each needle one at a time, slowly so that the bevel scrapes her insides as I pull out. The second I see the little blood drops rise to the surface, all my attention shifts to the anticipation - How much will she bleed for me today? By the fourth needle removal, there is blood everywhere. She is hydrated and I tell her she’s doing a very good job at bleeding. She wiggles with pride.

When all the needles are removed, we both admire the sticky, red wetness on her chest. My lustful gaze is heavy on her, and she meets my eyes approvingly. I use my pink gloves to play with it and draw designs across her flesh. When my hands are covered in her blood, and the room smells of metal, I hold my hand up close to my face and inhale deeply. I hunch over her body and devour her, licking the blood off her nipples and biting down hard. She writhes in ecstasy, my little snack, who lives to feed me.

I’ve written about imagination several times before as it relates to queerness, leather, and gender. In being forced off the hamster wheel of overly busy New York City life, I’ve been thinking a ton more intentionally about imagination. Adults notoriously suck at imagination. Year after year the grind of capitalism and sober reality chips away at innocence and wonder. Imagining is a trait relegated to children— playing pretend and dreaming and fantasizing is for those who haven’t yet been exposed to how the world actually works. The adults of the world even use this knowledge to control children with lies about Santa Claus, or even with threats of the Boogeyman if you also had a sadist for a father. Growing up means orienting yourself within the confines of what’s narrowly defined (the more oppression one faces, the narrower this becomes) as acceptable for being a human. This is not news.

This narrow definition of a compliant human produces a lot of anxiety for people to want to fit in— fitting in means belonging, it means being Good, and it means being loved. This is how most parents raise their kids. This not only stops us from living our truth, it also introduces the shit storm of self-doubt, not measuring up, the deeply fucked up idea of perfection, impossible standards, etc. In some extreme cases the shame of imperfection can take control of people’s lives.

I started reading Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. Kala has talked about how great this book is for a few years now so I figured it was time to read it. What I thought was going to be a self-help book for people to learn how to stop being their own worst enemy is actually inspiration porn for welcoming an adult imagination. This makes a lot of sense— if your doubts and fears are limiting or even running your life, you can’t begin to dream about alternatives. The book is based on Buddhist philosophy so it has lots of beautiful language on hope and the possibility of living fully when we stop battling ourselves. I love reading things that spark my little lightbulb and put me in deeper conversation with other ideas or theories. I haven’t finished this book yet, but I have already drawn a bunch of lines on my chalk board to connect it to other things I’ve been thinking about.

My brain is ruled by logic, I am deeply fortunate in this way that I can almost robotically rationalize my hard emotions until they simply disappear (why I put off reading Radical Acceptance for so long). This is a double edged sword because while I very rarely get bogged down by anxiety or self-doubt, it also means that I have a harder time relating to people. I’ve been able to get over breakups very quickly by telling myself I’m better off. I’ve been able to easily cut family out of my life just by listing the “bad” things they’ve done. Understanding that having feelings wasn’t conducive to me surviving my childhood, emotional intelligence is a skill I have had to consciously develop as an adult by trying hard to not be a cold hearted bitch. Even the shame that I felt in being “broken” (read: internalizing the projections of extremely emotional people) I easily rationalized away. 

The contradiction here in treating my emotions clinically is that I’m also excellent at imagining. I think it’s because my imagination isn’t stifled by the confines of what would make me “good” in our society. Many of the limits or roadblocks that people come up against internally don’t even cross my mind because I dismiss respectability with my gift of logic. Asking “Why can’t I do this?” is giving myself permission to dream bigger. Why can’t I have five girlfriends? Why can’t I be a Daddy? Why can’t I be naked on the internet? Maybe my stunted emotional range just doesn’t include shame, which is wild considering my Catholic upbringing. 

In Radical Acceptance, Brach talks about the etymology of the word radical. As is customary for my newsletters and my logic brain, I often look up words to learn what the roots are. There’s something funny about looking up a word’s root to find out that it literally means root, or the Latin word radix if you’re nasty. When we say something is “radical” —this term has been co-opted so please know that I mean actually radical not radfem or police reform radical—we mean it’s been processed through a dissection at the root. The first uses of the word were in reference to tree roots. How beautiful is that? Radical ideas get at the root, go all the way to the origin and dissect the issues. When I learn another instance of racism rotting at our country’s core, it’s easy to jump to the only logical solution “We must abolish America.” Imagining something better than **this** is not hard for me.

There are so many bad and incorrect stereotypes of anarchism like it’s just burning shit down, being lawless, no regard for human life, it’s only for privileged white kids, etc. Historically, when a way of thinking or being is a threat to those in power, they retaliate by stamping out the opposition. Just last week The DOJ named New York City, Portland, and Seattle anarchist jurisdiction zones, meaning the governments in these cities are responsible for permitting anarchy to thrive thus proving that they have no idea what anarchy actually means. These people think very basic protesting is anarchism, and anarchism is like The Purge. Honestly, not even fucking close! 

Having an imagination for the possibilities of human relation outside of the status quo is a threat to the status quo. The strength of the terrible two party system is shaped by stifling all imagination for an alternative. The mainstream definition of sex is enforced by delegitimizing queer existence. The nuclear family is strengthened by the laws that privilege those who conform over those who imagine different types of kin. The prison industrial complex exists because we lack the creativity necessary to conjure a world where we don’t lock people away. Prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba writes that “It’s not simply that we can’t imagine a world without police, but that we are disciplined into not having that imagination.” Radical means that when you dissect something all the way to the root, you’re able to recognize when it simply needs to be tossed in the garbage. Radical is pushing beyond the anxieties of being good and belonging to dream up the world you would have wanted to live in as a child with an unbridled imagination.

I love math (shocking!) and radical expressions in mathematics are used to find the nth root of a number or equation. Equations have one solution, in order to really solve them you have to think through each step of the problem. Quitting a problem halfway and saying “welp that’s enough for me” is the mathematical metaphor for liberalism. Thinking about how all these issues of oppression and injustice are connected often makes me feel like I’m doing math. Breaking all the shit down to find the root means we are mathematicians. The square root of one problem exposes yet another problem and all of their roots are connected. 

For me, queerness has always been uniquely characterized by a sense of imagination. Thinking about questions we get from clueless straight people like “Who’s the man in your relationship?” proves the absence of imagination. To embody queerness is to color outside the lines, create new lines, hold up your beautiful piece of art and say, “She’s absolutely perfect!” Even the most mainstream parts of our culture, like drag, really exemplify the inherent camp, whimsy, and creativity of queerness. Straight people love drag, and maybe it’s because it is a projection of their longing for other ways of being. We constantly create new paths for existing that make us feel whole, and for the most part our own queer culture validates this. I cannot comprehend queerness that stays inside the lines. When I do the math on my chalkboard, I find myself drawing connections from queerness to abolition, to leathersex, to anarchism, to polyamory, etc. These are ways of orienting that rely on finding the square root of the problem and using our wildest imaginations to begin building a better world.

I am a huge fangirl for Dr. Kim Tallbear, one might even say I’m a stan. If you’re unfamiliar, she is an Indigenous academic and polyamorist who connects really cool dots between settler colonialism, sexuality, and ideas of kinship. In other words, deeply my shit. I recently listened to an episode of the For The Wild podcast where she was the guest. In the podcast she reads one of her “Critical Poly 100s,” short creative writing pieces about polyamory, where she uses the phrase “future hoarding.” I absolutely cannot stop thinking about this idea of future hoarding! 

To put this into context we can think about a traditional monogamous relationship. The relationship escalator has two people dating, moving in together, getting engaged, getting a dog, getting married, having kids, dying together never having had sex with anyone else ever again. Future hoarding is exactly what happens here, your future is planned and you essentially own the rights to the movie of your partner’s mortal life. Dr. Tallbear also drops a spicy take that I absolutely agree with and distinguishes between different kinds of polyamory. There’s the mainstream version of polyamory that functions a lot like what she calls “monogamy on steroids” where future hoarding is still an active part. It does nothing to dismantle The Couple. Then, there are ways of practicing polyamory that don’t involve future hoarding at all. These are expansive concepts of being in “good relation” to other living things that encompass our relationships with animals and with the earth. Dr. Tallbear explains that this type of polyamory is closer to how many Indigenous peoples had relations before settler colonialism, as stolen land was rationed back to Native Americans in the Dawes Act by forcing assimilation through patriarchal Christian marriages. 

When we grow up, dull our imaginations, and behave exactly how society wants, this is also future hoarding. Playing within the scripts of what makes us good and worthy and performing the Perfect Human means we allow most of our life decisions to be made for us. Living in fear or shame is future hoarding in that we only live to please others, and in living to please others we lose ourselves and the ability to imagine any other way. 

When I think of the mathematics of Bad Things, future hoarding is like a variable in the equation. The prison industrial complex is quite literally future hoarding, a lack of universal healthcare is future hoarding, transphobia is future hoarding, voting for the next terrible president to save us is future hoarding. Finding ways to cultivate my imagination not only benefits me, but it benefits my community. Dreaming up ways that bring us closer to freedom puts us in better relation with ourselves and with other living things. Tara Brach says that imperfection is not a personal problem, and I think that failing at finding better ways of belonging is better than never even trying.

The word gossip has been around for a long ass time. Dating back to the beginning of the first century the term godsibb meant "a child’s godparent or sponsor at a baptism." Because words change, over time this became gossip and meant "a good friend, usually a woman." By the 1500s, the word was used to mean "idle chatter and rumor," as well as to describe women who worked as midwives. By the mid-1800s, gossip was used as both noun and verb, and is still used this way today. (source)

I visited the Museo della Tortura in Montepulciano last year, which is the Museum of Torture in a stone walled hilltop town in Tuscany. Hands down one of the coolest places I’ve ever been, the town of Montepulciano dates back to the 3rd century B.C. It’s a beautiful, ancient place where a glance in any direction highlights the disgusting modernity of american architecture. I thought my hundred year old house was old, ha! When you visit a proper museum of torture in a place that was quite excellent at employing such tortures, it adds to the horror. Corporal punishment in medieval Italy was apparently as normal as breathing air. I learned a lot that day and filed it away in my brain under “Fun Facts About Torture” (a large file). One of those facts is that women were criminalized and humiliated for gossiping.

Photos from my trip: Scold’s bridles, beauty, shrew’s fiddle with holes for neck and wrists

A Scold’s Bridle, or Gossip’s Bridle was a locking iron face mask that was placed over the head of the accused gossip or, a woman who was caught chatting with her friends. The torturous part of the bridle is that it has a mouth bit, sometimes sharp to cut the tongue, that kept the woman from being able to speak. Then, her husband would walk her on a leash around town (over the very same stones I stood on) so everyone would know she had the gift of gab. There were other torture methods for women’s crimes of opening their mouths and being assertive like the cucking chair (!!!) and the shrew’s fiddle. At this time gossiping was condemned as a frivolous act for idle women, and people believed it was the devil’s work. Women’s actions were heavily controlled and monitored for signs of Satan or witchcraft, which we now know was a result of men being scared of losing control. The consequence of this insecurity was forbidding women from creating support systems amongst each other, sharing wisdom for survival, thus isolating them. 

This isn’t a heady history lesson, but Silvia Federici is an expert in how the control and oppression of women advanced capitalism. It’s so interesting to have the dots connected like this. She writes about gossip in her book Witch­es, Witch-Hunt­ing, and Women.

Then, in 1547, ​“a procla­ma­tion was issued for­bid­ding women to meet togeth­er to bab­ble and talk” and order­ing hus­bands to ​“keep their wives in their hous­es.” Female friend­ships were one of the tar­gets of the witch hunts, as in the course of the tri­als accused women were forced under tor­ture to denounce each oth­er, friends turn­ing in friends, daugh­ters turn­ing in their mothers.

When I say Gossip, what I mean is the sharing of vital information. It’s intimacy. It’s vigilance. It’s love. It’s your truth. It’s a red, yellow, green flag. It’s a call for help. It’s a call in. It’s a celebration. Gossip is an important aspect of community. People can control their own narrative if they talk about themselves more— share both the good and bad stories. Tell your friends how you fucked up and how you’re being accountable. Tell your friends who hurt you and how you’re healing. However, sharing information maliciously that isn’t true is not gossip, it’s a rumor and it gives gossip a bad name. 

I’m not one for privacy— as you may have noticed I share a lot (but not all) of my life on the internet. Maybe it’s because I grew up with extremely secretive parents that I didn’t know much about? I was raised in a house with lots of lies, cheating, and gaslighting, and put up with that behavior from others until I figured out how to have boundaries. I detest lying, and even when people close to me withhold information it can make me feel betrayed. I want all the information all the time and I respectfully accept “no” when I hear it. Sharing my life and being an open book is very much in line with my values— in this house we have no secrets! 

It seems as though I was primed for the life I live. Because my social life and relationships revolve around both polyamory and BDSM, not talking about experiences or dates or play partners is not really an option. In a small community of gay freaks and loving perverts, if you’re badly behaved people will know about it. I don’t say this in a way where I mean people should be shunned and excommunicated, I actually mean it in a way where this should be motivation for people to get their shit together, or for people to swoop in and collect their friends. But these are the things that often do not happen, and in that case gossip serves as a warning to others. 

In relationships, people should always be given all the information they need to make decisions at any given time. You lay your own truth cards out on the table and let others decide what’s best for them. I call this risk-awareness. Anything less veers into manipulation (you’re allowed to disagree with me, but not if you’re dating me). 

Because it takes me a long time to trust people, I daydream about a yelp-style review website but for rating your experiences with people. You could leave good and bad reviews of a person to which they’re allowed to reply with a public apology or a public fuck you. Maybe it’s my drama-starved brain thinking this mess would be a good idea? Either way I’m thinking of it as a form of public service. Sex workers keep bad date lists to keep each other safe. Rope bottoms have a huge google doc to share experiences with riggers. I’m just saying that “What would your ex-girlfriend say about you?” doesn’t seem like such a bad first date question. 

On Instagram, someone I follow was cross-posting her Tik Tok videos where she rated her exes on a scale of 1-10. I was enjoying the show and the very public display of honesty (basically my yelp idea) when my ex-girlfriend popped up. I didn’t know that they had dated! To my absolute surprise, she was rated a generous 3/10, whereas I place her no higher than a 2. We started messaging about our experiences dating her and had the exact same things to say. Imagine if I had seen this rating on her Tinder bio before our first date along with the words “pathological liar.” Maybe I still would have fucked her, but I would not have dated her. 

In BDSM we have a word for this— vetting. I was having a conversation with a friend recently and we were sharing stories we’d heard about a domme who has a really bad reputation for using D/s to abuse people. The cost of secrecy here exponentially increases. When SM and power play are concerned, it’s a safe practice to vet your partners. If you’re interested in playing with someone, you should ask around and talk to people who have played with them for their feedback and recommendation. This doesn’t happen as often as it should; new people to the scene usually don’t know enough other people to ask nor do they know it is a standard safety measure. People also mistake friendships as a positive endorsement. Just because someone is friends with someone great, doesn’t mean they’re great by association. How many people openly tell their friends that they’re abusive? How many friends are invested in pushing for accountability? Just imagine if fetlife profiles had a rating to display.

The way I practice polyamory is very open, everyone is acquainted and is friendly with each other. Relationships aren’t compartmentalized. This means that in bringing in a new date, you’re not just looking out for yourself, you’re looking out for your partners as well. Dating someone who is badly behaved, with bad boundaries, or toxic in some way, etc impacts you directly but also impacts the whole polycule. The same goes for bringing in an amazing person— you level up your polycule. Guess what? This means we vet our dates too! I think this is being responsible and if someone protests a background check, it usually means they have something to hide that they should have been honest about in the first place.

If you don’t talk about your experiences, your friends, your partners, and what’s happening around the community, what’s left to discuss? Business and politics? Sharing about yourself means being knowable. Being knowable breeds intimacy. Talking about your relationships could bring some important perspective. Obviously there are ethics around things shared in confidence but even then— secrets that shield people from accountability or reinforce the shame of fucking up are not serving anyone. When I dream big and imagine my ideal community, I imagine one where everyone is an open book. Everyone shares freely (I said sharing, not oversharing) and knows what’s going on. Everyone thinks critically. Everyone is aware of how we’re all treating each other. Everyone is supportive and helps out others who are going through rough times. Everyone holds each other, without judgement, to be better. Here, gossip is a pillar, a facilitator of transformation. 

In closing, I just wanted to add that my favorite perverted text, The Bible, has a lot to say about gossip. The mouth is wicked, gossiping is the devil’s work, the serpent tongue must be tamed, hot hot hot! There’s lots of wise advice for keeping one’s mouth shut or else face dire consequences like cities falling and death. One passage in Romans 1 likens gossips to homosexuals and those who are disobedient to their parents. Sign me up!!! Although these biblical warnings are directed almost exclusively at men, it’s again interesting given what we know about how gossip is gendered and how medieval punishment for gossiping was used to control women. Medieval me would no doubt be a very young widow ;) Enjoy these bible verses about gossip, I got a little carried away! 

“For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.” James 3:2-8

“Whoever belittles his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent. Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered.” Proverbs 11:12-13

“There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.” Proverbs 6:16-19

“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” Romans 1:24-32

“The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body.” Proverbs 18:8

“Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander. For some have already strayed after Satan.” Timothy 1:13-15

I tweeted about this the other day, as I do, and someone asked, as they do: Why is The Argonauts bad? (God forbid I make a claim and actually back it up lol) Honestly, one does not simply read The Argonauts and ask why it is bad!!! These types of media are polarizing to me in a way I feel almost militant about. Again and again the way in which I engage critically with queer media can only be summarized with one response— I’m a leatherdyke. Reading the really weird way a cis author handles the gender of her trans partner while coding pregnancy as a thing reserved for women (read: cis) and then not understanding why this is bad, is … bad!

I haven’t read The Argonauts since it came out in 2015. I read the memoir about marriage and pregnancy, two things that I could not be less interested in, begrudgingly because literally everyone was raving about it. It has 4 stars on Goodreads!! What my peanut brain does remember, and what was half-heartedly supported by the one (1) critical review I could find online, is that it is straight up embarrassing for someone to have written it. Embarrassing to write about fumbling through (errr, exploiting?) the gender transition of your partner when you could just do better. Embarrassing to appropriate a Native American name for your (expensively conceived) child when you could just not. The embarrassing vibe to me is the same (but different) feeling I get when heterosexual women write think pieces about how much they hate being heterosexual when they could also just not! It pretends to be self aware without closing the loop of simply being a better person, which is especially disgusting when coming from someone with a ton of privilege. 

The community I’m part of doesn’t prop up cissexism. I’ve gained a critical lens from discussing and reading and engaging in criticism from people whose perspectives I trust. I always want to do better as a cis person, and the legacy of being a leatherdyke constantly complicates gender in a way that makes it very clear when someone can’t handle a super chill idea like genitals don’t equal gender. Stepping into leatherdyke community, it’s a totally normal thing to reimagine gender in ways that might make people’s heads spin—a woman daddy fucks his creature boy in both of it’s cunts at once. This is the perspective with which I engage with the world and I have no time for modern queerness or feminisms that severely lack gender imagination or project notions of respectability onto bodies.

I was sent some academic papers about leather a few months ago and just got around to reading them (thank you Athénaïs). What a treat for me to have saved these to devour in my unemployed leisure time! Both of these papers discuss the dungeon and SM as (trans)gender technologies, which among so many other feelings got me missing play parties pretty hard. Especially within the context of dungeon space being a tool for gender exploration—there’s so much life-affirming that we’re missing out on by having our social spaces closed for so long. I love looking around a dungeon and seeing all different roles, and rhythmic moving bodies, and outfits, and hearing pleasure screams... It’s almost taboo to talk about all the things we miss because the world is on fire and people are dying. We can hold all of these truths at once. Pleasure is important, especially in times of crisis. I am thinking about what Tourmaline calls Freedom Dreaming. What do we have that we want to keep? I am thinking about what I want from erotic spaces like play parties when we are able to have them again. 

On Our Backs Sept /Oct 1990

Glorious, perverted fun aside—the world of queer play parties is troubled by gender policies. There are usually parties for men (some trans inclusive, some not), and one for non-cis-men (usually suspicious of anyone who doesn’t look a certain way). These gender policies are highly controversial for a few reasons, the main one against Gender Cops. “Women only parties” of the past have since become “no cis men,” which usually gets enforced as “no trans feminine people who don’t pass as cis.” Anyone impacted by gendered violence can understand why people may want to exclude cis men from sexual and erotic spaces reserved for queers who are not-cis-men. However, policing gender is gross and creates a false sense of safety in spaces where we know that unsafe players have no gender. Lastly, the fact is that if you advertise a dyke play party, the dykes are going to show up, so what is the real goal here? 

Being a leatherdyke, or a dyke in general, is sometimes hard for me to describe even though I feel it deeply in my body. It’s like lesbian, but not. It’s like queer, but also not. It has a bite to it. Last Fall at a Dyke TV screening here in Brooklyn, Ann Northrop said that being a dyke is about lust. Me and my friends cheered, I may have cried a little, and I have definitely been thinking about it ever since. The carnal lust of it all explains why leatherdyke spaces, unlike many capital L Lesbian spaces, have historically made the political choice of welcoming trans women as dykes when they could have easily taken the violent Mitchfest route. Leatherdykes have been fucking with gender since the very beginning and not just in a nice palatable way that larger society is just starting to accept—but in deliciously fucked up, perverted, three dimensional ways. That’s not all, we have also cultivated an entire social landscape that prioritizes the wide range of pervert genders created and recognized in community over the limited options imposed by society. 

This introduces the idea of dungeons and/or play parties as a form of radical gender technology that is created specifically through leatherdyke sociality. In Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies: How to Have Sex without Women or Men, C. Jacob Hale explores how “leatherdyke genderplay functions as a means for gender interrogation, solidification, resistance, destabilization, and reconfiguration.” He discusses how his relationship to a leather Daddy in the role of leather boy in leatherdyke community in 1990s Los Angeles led him to eventually transition. I wouldn’t say that leather’s primary role is to function as a gender playground, but in looking at it as a form of technology we see it indeed serves many purposes. 

“Is a leatherdyke daddy a woman or a man? Is a leatherdyke boy a woman or a man or a boy? These questions, I think, are badly misguided: they presuppose overly simplistic understandings of how gender categories work, and in so doing they reinscribe the hegemonic stranglehold of the dominant sex/gender/sexuality system… 

For example, when my Daddy goes to a women-only play party, probably the first thing she does is pay an admission fee and sign a release form. During this encounter, her operative sex/gender status is woman, since she must be a woman (however that is defined by the party organizers) to be admitted... Once Daddy is in a scene with a butch faggot boy, once Daddy's dick has become a sensate dick in Daddy's phenomenological experience of his own embodiment and in Daddy's boy's phenomenological experience of Daddy's embodiment, Daddy may be simply a very butch gay male leather bear-daddy. Or something else entirely, depending on the specific content of the interactions between Daddy, Daddy's boy, and any other participants or observers. Thinking in terms of multiple, context-specific, and purpose-specific gendered statuses allows us to make better sense of this cultural phenomenon than does thinking in terms of (two or more) unitary sex/gender statuses.”

What do we have that we want to keep? Why do we feel like it makes sense to police gender before people walk through the dungeon door when, once inside, they are encouraged to wholly embody the same genders we want to keep out?

In her paper Dungeon Intimacies: The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism (which absolutely gutted me, wow, I can’t believe I hadn’t read it until now), Susan Stryker describes the landscape of San Francisco as she locates the site of a queer play party of the past. She presents a case for thinking about the “relationship between embodied subject and material environment” through her own formative experience at the invite-only LINKS play party started in 1989 San Francisco. She describes LINKS as having a guest list of those who might not fit into “other” “leather” “parties,” which I read as mostly transgender or women. “Queer” is chosen purposely here to describe the LINKS party, a word not yet defanged. Stryker recalls that the LINKS “Gender Play Party” was where she first saw the word transgender used in 1991. At LINKS, gender was regularly engaged with the same intention as power and pain.This is precisely the point of it all.

When you walk through the door of a dungeon into a leatherdyke party, it’s like passing through liminal space where gender is reconceptualized. There’s darkness, sexy music, and maybe dim red lights that are reflected in the metal chains and the shiny tops of PVC shoes. You leave behind the person you’re expected to be on the outside in the world of convention and rigidity and become the creature of your own wildest fantasies. Here everyone is delighted to be reduced to an object, meat, feral trappings of flesh and bone on display for one another. Being in a place of corporeal fantasy, you unzip your flesh suit and put on something more tactile and erotic, say leather or latex or even a fluffy tail. The pain and pleasure of sadomasochism disappear conventional notions of corporeality, and thus gender. In the leatherdyke party we have creatues, Men, Women, thems, boys, girls, its. We have pups and kittens. We have time travel, age regression, and world building. But what we actually have is so much more. 

Stryker says that in dungeon space transsexual sadomasochism is an act of artistic creation that she names poesis. It is here that she describes her SM body as chora—“an ancient Greek concept with the double meaning of both an enclosed space and the act of enclosing”— a generative space undefined by containment. The breaking of her skin in SM is an energetic release, “a movement that becomes generative as it encloses and invests in a new space, through a perpetually reiterative process of growing new boundaries and shedding abandoned materialities.” She speaks of the transformation of her own body within dungeon space, of SM as an activity, and dungeon space itself all with the same capacity of poesis. 

“So much that constitutes me I did not choose, but, now constituted, I find myself to be in a place of agency. I occupy a critical space, a distance between stimulus and response created by the complex social pathways converging in the dungeon, in which through my presence I gain the capacity to choose which patterns I will repeat, or which new patterns I might envision and enact. I invent new choreographies of space and time as I dance my whip across the creature’s ass. It is not that I somehow internalize as my own the structure or content of the scene in which I participate, receiving its impression the way clay would receive a sculptor’s mark. It is rather a proprioceptive awareness, as I flog, of the role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, and of the material efficacy I possess in my subjective ability to choose one thing rather than another or to poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern.”

***I would be remiss not to mention Stryer’s archival work on Lou Sullivan’s diaries, in which he also documents use of the gender technologies of SM and dungeon space in gay leathermen’s community.***

Above is Susan Stryker featured in On Our Backs from Jan/Feb 1995. My shitty scan is hard to read but if you want the pdf email me :)

One of the first leatherdykes I ever befriended was a leatherboy in an age play dynamic with his much older Mommy. At the time I didn’t have much exposure to anyone participating in this level of power dynamics in real life and I was definitely scandalized by this relationship. I think about what these dynamics then do for us outside the dungeon, functioning again as technologies of sorts. It doesn’t take an expert to notice the opportunity for both healing and play in these spaces where we locate our leather identity in someone’s else’s desire for us; every time they call us by our name it reenforces an erotic power dynamic that is given life through choice and intention. Stryker’s chora is now a receptacle in which we are willingly molded and scarred, stretched, embodied and disembodied, born and reborn. The relationship is this new play site outside the dungeon, but also witnessed in community, around a shared value of transformation. 

Anyone who has been remotely exposed to leatherdykes has probably met someone who has a fucked (in a good way) idea of their own gender (or age, etc) as activated by SM sexuality, and those who haven’t think that sissies were invented on Tumblr in 2013. In leatherdyke space it’s normal to reimagine your own flesh, reinvent yourself, call your asshole a pussy, be a genderless hole, or to coexist as a faggot and a girl all at the same time. The culture we created supports and affirms all of these truths and more. 

All this further complicates the idea of a gender policy for leatherdyke parties. In leatherdyke space gender is not located in the same plane as the vanilla world, it is expansive and limitless, and for some people it doesn’t even exist. Through SM there is an emphasis on the flesh in which the meat market subjectivity enables both the dungeon and SM to become technologies of gender. This is a rich legacy we have inherited from the likes of Styker and Hale, and countless others. The politics of enforcing a gender policy beyond the fuckery of what is already coded into dyke spaces means a prioritizing of hegemonic gender ideas over our own beautiful culture. Leatherdyke spaces are so important and we should protect them. By turning away people who don’t look a certain way, we’re gatekeeping very specific experiences of gender euphoria and gender technology from people who might need them the most. This, too, is pink pussy hat energy. 

In January of 2019 I released Linked —my little zine on polyamory. Honestly, I wrote it in reaction to hearing polyam horror stories from friends and acquaintances who were asking me for advice (and rarely taking it tbh). I hoped that I could summarize some big ideas in twenty-something pages to help people get their shit together and stop being so messy. I have been blown away by the interest and positive feedback I’ve gotten from both people new and experienced in non-monogamy. At the risk of sounding corny, I truly believe that relationships are revolutionary sites for healing and growth. If we do nothing else, at the very least we can try to treat each other well. 

The main idea here is that not everyone who chooses to practice polyamory has the friends, community, or therapist to act as a support system or sounding board. Not everyone has the friend to give you great advice you never take :) Sometimes even close friends can judge us because they cannot fathom non-monogamy for themselves. It really sucks, and it’s hard, and I’ve been there!

This is all to say that I’m super excited to announce that I’m offering polyamory/non-monogamy coaching for individuals and couples!! This is brand new for me as a formality, but after years of being “polyamory domme” to friends, partners, and strangers alike (hi, every DM I’ve ever gotten and answered out of the goodness of my heart) why not lean into what I love doing!?! Each person will receive personal guidance with exploring your own goals, desires, and strengthening your boundaries. While I set up a website with more formal language and information— if you’re interested in booking a consultation with me please send me an email at [daemonumx0 at gmail dot com]

I thought it would be fun for this announcement to come with some “Dear Daemonum” in the style of a good old fashioned advice column!  

Timid: I used to be in polyamorous relationships until I met my current partner, with whom I’ve been monogamous for years. We’ve decided that it’s time to open ourselves to more relationships- individually and as a dyad. This is something I’ve wanted, so, yay!

The thing is, I have no idea how to do this now. I used to meet dates through my bandmates or extended social circle, and I never had a “primary partner.” In contrast, my social circle has shrunk since I moved twice across the country, I am in a new city, and I’m in a long-term relationship with a partner who I think of as… well, “primary.” So my desires are the same, but my circumstances are different now. How do I meet folks (strangers?!) who want to date my timid, polyamorous ass? 

(Addendum: I’m almost *never timid* This is a new feeling. I don’t like it) 

Hello Timid, and thanks for this thoughtful question! Two moves across the country, a shrunken social circle, and years of being monogamous are all very real reasons to feel timid. Being social and meeting new people is absolutely a skill and when you’re out of practice (as well all are now that COVID has made socializing unsafe) it’s really easy to lose your confidence! First of all congratulations on being ready to start meeting new people again. That is exciting! 

I think that I first want to recognize the social landscape for dating is now completely transformed. Learning how to safely meet new people and/or date while there is a global pandemic poses its own unique challenges. Luckily we know more about the virus now and testing has become slightly easier so you can figure out ways to navigate this that feel good for you and your pod. Additionally, this bolsters your skills for clear communication, consent, and negotiation that will also help you navigate polyamory.

The thing that jumped out here for me is that you’re living in a new place and have a smaller social circle along with one partner you’ve been with for years. That sounds like you could be a bit isolated (even on top of the pandemic isolation). I always recommend to not prioritize romantic relationships over all other relationships *and* I think there’s a careful way to move forward with expanding your social circle while also being open and ready to meet new partners. Building a solid support system in your new city is really important. A crucial component to successful polyamory is self-accountability. In an ideal situation our support systems of friends, lovers, and partners all help us in this practice of self-accountability in that when we fuck up and our actions don’t align with our values, they are the people who call us in and help to course-correct. 

My advice to you is that when you’re meeting new people, maybe keep a really open mind and don’t become attached to a box you want to fit someone in? You could meet new friends and potential dates at the same time. In my personal practice of polyamory, I like to get to know people first to make sure our styles of polyamory align before I decide I even want to date them. This is important also because it shields my partners and polycule from the potential drama of jumping right in to dating someone who’s not a good fit (ie messy). This means that my new relationships are rarely romantic at first. Casting a wide net and seeing where things go is a great way to build up your social circle too! That being said, maybe consider putting the idea of dating together with your partner on hold until you’ve had some success in expanding your social circle solo. 

As for the logistics of how—that part is a bit trickier, especially now. I recommend trying all the dating apps and making sure you are 100% honest with what your relationship status is and what you’re looking for. Social media is also a great way to connect with people in a new city. Try to follow like-minded people and in a not creepy way ask them to hang out. It is totally cool to tell people you’re new to town and trying to meet people and open to dating or friends, and that you are polyamorous with one long-term partner. Luckily it’s still warm outside for a few more months so go forth and have your masked, outdoors, socially-distant dates before winter comes! Good luck!!!

Seeking Security: Me and my girlfriend are beginning to experiment with polyamory, and we’ve discussed seeing other people separately. How can you feel secure that they (or you) won’t fall for someone else therefore ending your relationship? 

Hi Seeking Security! This is a really common question and feeling, especially for someone new to polyamory. We are so used to feeling that our relationships are secure when we are monogamous and that fear of being left for someone else is activated when our partners start to date other people. The hard truth is that your monogamous relationship is no less secure than a polyamorous one. Monogamous people meet others, or cheat, or leave their seemingly secure relationships every day. I have seen my monogamous friends go through just as many (if not more) break-ups than my polyamorous friends. So let go of that idea right now!

The beautiful thing about being polyamorous is that it usually (and should tbh) comes with a perspective shift of unlearning this false sense of security that monogamy brings us. At its core, polyamory means that your partner can, should, and will fall for someone else (and if you’re not ok with that, maybe revisit your interest). It is unrealistic to believe that you can have an open relationship and not catch feelings for other people. The nature of being polyamorous means that you are open to having multiple romantic/sexual/intimate relationships at the same time, this means that you don’t need to *leave* anyone when you fall for someone new! You should absolutely have some kind of feelings for everyone you have relationships with. The possibilities here are endless and you can create all different kinds of connections that work for you. It takes a lot of intention to shift your perspective from that scarcity mindset, or move away from a more activated fear of being abandoned, to one of comfort and abundance.

Most people begin practicing polyamory by opening up an established monogamous relationship. Because there are so many different ways to be polyamorous, make sure you do your research and really think about what kind of relationships you want to have. What does your ideal landscape of partners and/or lovers look like? What about your girlfriend? Hopefully you have some alignment and overlap and can be supportive and loving of each other in your exciting new adventures. Lastly, I want to implore that you and your partner are being completely open and honest with each other because secrets, hiding, and lies will exacerbate scary feelings of being left for someone else. 

It’s so exciting to be navigating non-monogamy for the first time! It’s also terrifying and can force us to confront past trauma, bad boundaries, and make you work on your shit! That being said, make sure you are really doing this with care and intention. Here’s to lots more love than either of you have ever imagined! 

My first tarot deck was gifted to me by an old friend L, who was very serious about the superstition that you had to be gifted your first tarot deck. The gift came with a certificate to call on M, someone I had never met, for a lesson in how to read the cards. As an introvert, the idea of meeting someone I didn’t know at all made me anxious, like being set up on date. I never cashed in on that lesson, but we did end up meeting in a less anxious circumstance when the three of us went to a mediumship circle at the Theosophical Society. 

We all met at the building on East 53rd Street, a part of town unfamiliar to us, unsure of what to expect. Meeting a new friend immediately before you see a medium together is a distinctly queer femme experience. We climbed the stairs and were ushered through a narrow hallway with about eight other people into a small, dark room. We sat in chairs forming a circle and could see each other only by the light of the candles and salt lamp. The medium was a woman who went to each of us one by one describing which dead person was present to speak to us. For me, it was a young girl who came through. When I said that I didn’t know any children that had died, the medium named the lonely spirit as my deceased inner child. Great save, really hit the nail on the head.

We all left that experience feeling very suspicious of the authenticity of this medium, and while I was out $20 I had at least made a new friend. L, M, and I began to hang out a lot together after this. M lived down the street from me, we were all femmes, and interested in magic and the supernatural. Over time we got more familiar with a group dynamic and an inside joke amongst us had formed—M started calling L “Mom” and me “Daddy.” L was extremely maternal and nurturing and always wanted to hear about everyone’s feelings. In stark polar opposition, I was just learning that I even had feelings. I was the logical, practical, authority figure (I swear I’m fun). In addition, due to income differences I would often pay for most, if not all, of our meals when we went out to eat. At the time I worked at a fancy handbag company so I was also always giving everyone gifts. Daddy made perfect sense. M being our daughter also made perfect sense—she was younger, a bottom, and definitely baby long before the “I’m baby” meme entered the lexicon.

There was something really exciting about being called Daddy and having this platonic daughter-friend that really made me feel new things. It made me dream about what it would be like to be called Daddy by a lover who let me do filthy things to her. At this time I was still discovering my pervert identity, I identified as a switch, I was just starting to dabble with learning rope, and just starting to top. I felt that I must be a Daddy, but I wasn’t ready to fully claim it; I didn’t really know how or what that meant beyond it made me feel good. I needed to understand the history, the weight, and the responsibility of this identity before I claimed it, which I realize now was very Daddy of me.

The cards I was gifted never really resonated with me (a queer deck that felt too tender with art that I would not hang on my walls) and I eventually started searching for a more on-brand tarot deck. I wanted to feel something from the imagery and a connection when I held them in my hands, a feeling like M described from her beautiful deck adorned with flowers and ladies. The witch shops in New York unfortunately didn’t have anything that did that for me. On destination trips to visit a long distance witch girlfriend, we would stop at the local occult shops as part of our tourist activities. She had just moved to San Diego and had already found a favorite shop to show me on my first visit to her new home. The occult shop was perfectly situated right by the ocean and happened to have the largest variety of tarot decks that I had ever seen. 

A few minutes after we entered the shop, my girlfriend saw her uncle—also gay, also psychic, and a world-renowned tarot scholar (I honestly cannot make this up). This gave me time to browse the shelves alone and focus. I pulled out one that caught my eye —The Byzantine Tarot — I felt the vibration in my hands, it was the one I had been looking for. The cards felt erotic, adorned in Byzantine-style art and themed for the Christian empire. My Catholic fetish was very pleased and the idea of drawing from my erotic energy to read cards felt extremely right. Along with the deck, that day I also bought a new book that had some interesting concepts I hadn’t explored before.

In the book I learned that you can calculate your tarot birth card by adding up all your 2-digit birthday numbers and continuing to add them until they reduce completely. Like horoscopes, birth cards are another way that divine intervention puts people into easily understood boxes. My birthday is 12/05/1986, which translates to:

12 + 05 + 19 + 86 = 122

12+2 = 14

1+4 = 5

Thus, my birth cards are 14 and 5. In the major arcana Temperance is XIV, and The Hierophant is V. 

The more well known Hierophant card translates in the Byzantine deck to The Patriarch or, as I immediately saw it, The Daddy Card. Obviously there are lots of negative connotations with the history of a patriarch—namely patriarchy, which is systemically responsible for ruining all our lives. Additionally, it’s not like many people I know have pure and good associations with their actual fathers. But with every tarot card there is both an upright and a reversed position. When upright, Patriarch stands for all the positive ways I wished to embody this Daddy archetype.

“In the tarot system, the Pope, known since the early twentieth century as the Hierophant, acts as a teacher, guide, and guardian, thus ably fulfilling the role of his more ancient counterparts, while not necessarily being Christian. In the Byzantine tarot, he continues to be a source of knowledge and wisdom to whom all may apply.

This is a card that has most to do with long-established wisdom, with rigorous and sometimes hidebound patterns that lead to certain specific revelations. The word ‘hierophant’ refers to one who brings light where there is darkness — who illuminates the path of the seeker of traditional wisdom, and offers illumination and inspiration to all. 

Key words: Inspiration - alliances - overseeing others - teaching - tradition - acknowledging the lessons of the past”

Maybe it’s because I had to grow up too fast, but this card description is extremely close to how I have always been. I read, I learn, I push, I tell it like it is, I am disciplined, I support and build my people up. Even before I was in any D/s relationship I often fell into playing this role for other people in my life. It wasn’t negotiated, but it also didn’t need to be. It was an easy transition to consensual D/s relationships where I am actually *someone’s Daddy* very intentionally and specifically negotiate the ways I show up for another person. Even the imagery on this card resonates with me. The Byzantine art famous for gold paint and deep gem colors screams with all the faggotry and sparkling regalia of the church. I see The Patriarch immortalized as a femme daddy, he says I look damn good when I’m telling you what to do. 

In the tarot practice when you lay down a card upside down it’s called the reverse position. In a reading, this shows up as the negative, stuck, or opposite aspects of what the card symbolizes. The reverse Patriarch card can be read as a projection of all the ways we think of the Patriarch as an evil force. The shadow side of the Patriarch gets off on control, has sinister motives, and has absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

This is also me. 

The reverse side of this identity is the perverted and sinister Daddy, the Daddy who corrupts. What’s different between the benevolent and evil Daddy is that in contrast to everyday life, when I am in these scenes or slip into these roles, I actually embody a male persona—Doctor Daddy, the Priest, the breeding demon, the serial killer, the creepy virgin pervert who orders a sex doll (you know, just to name a few). My most fucked up fantasies are informed by two things: 1) the real life horror stories that happen to real people and are most often perpetrated by real men 2) fake horror stories inspired by books, movies, and TV perpetrated by either men or monsters, and sometimes both. When I’m embodying a backwoods butcher stalking victims for my kill room, I may be wearing extremely femme lingerie but it is the dark energy of the Patriarch that I channel to get off. 

There is a lesbian stereotype that no one makes the first move because both people are terrified of recreating the ways that men prey on women. This palpable sexuality-as-predatory, avoidant, overly cautious vibe is something I have experienced many times, although mostly outside kink community. There’s that pesky yearning for something you’ll never do. The repercussions of this fear are vast, from tenderqueers desexualizing everything, to the insidious ways our own community treats trans women, to everyone being afraid to cruise. This has me wondering if my Daddy identity is somehow a response to this fear I have internalized. Maybe embodying Daddy is a way to feel less shame about my aggressive and dark sexual fantasies by enacting them (always consensually) through a persona that doesn’t “look like” my actual identity. Channeling the monstrous and evil reverse Patriarch as the sexual predator feels better, feels right, feels natural, when it’s a man.

In the queer bubble where anything goes I know that Daddy has no gender, but that hasn’t stopped me from interrogating why I, as a cis femme woman, am erotically drawn to embody a traditionally masculine Leather archetype. And further, why specifically the “dark side” of this persona shows up for me as a man. Why didn’t the equally nurturing but traditionally feminine Matriarch appeal to me as much? While I’ve only ever met Mommies who are femme, I have absolutely met many Daddies of all gender presentations. I have heard many of my peers name the popularity of Daddy over Mommy within the dyke community as old fashioned misogyny. I don’t think this is completely wrong, but I also think it’s not so simple. I speak for myself when I say that misogyny is not why I didn’t choose Mommy, but it may be a big part of why I did choose Daddy. 

Leather is beautiful because it gives us a container to play and create community around a culture of sexy make-believe (as much as I absolutely hate some of the outcomes of this I must respect that we all deserve love). We choose new personas for ourselves, sometimes several, that make us feel good and powerful, and let us enact our wildest fantasies. While kink doesn’t exist in a silo and we should work to challenge recreating harmful aspects of dominant culture, it is also deeply personal and driven by experience. Daddy has always clicked for me in the positive archetypal ways the Patriarch tarot card describes. It also serves my shadow side in all the ways I desire to devour, to draw blood, and be violent. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that for me it is easy to draw a connection between the (consensual!!!) sexual violence from my fantasies and the violent misogyny of this same Patriarch. 

Good thing my other birth card is Temperance.

Listen to the audio above, or read below!

I want to talk about respectability. What does it mean that a person is deserving of respect? What is at risk when we can’t fit the mold? What does respect mean when we think about the state as the most egregious upholder of white supremacy? What happens when the disrespectable join forces to fight together?

Every ounce of my political beliefs, inclusive of sexual freedom, comes back around to this very idea of respectability. Shunning or legislating the socially unacceptable is the American way; it’s in our laws, the punchline of our jokes, our prayers, our media, our schools, etc. Many of us are taught from a young age by our parents how to fit in and be a nice kid—what to wear, how to speak. This guidance is usually racialized and gendered. If our parents didn’t fill our heads with ideas about how to occupy a place of respectability, society picked up the slack. 

The Mattachine Society, urging for a respectable riot. Stonewall 1969.

The idea of a “politics of respectability” has deeply racist roots. Although Black scholars and theorists were writing about the subject for a long time, the term itself was first introduced by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in her 1993 book Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880–1920. The concept of respectability politics is in reaction to racist stereotypes, meaning that in order to be seen as human and gain the respect of white people, Black people had to abandon cultural practices and appeal to white morality. This is tied up with upward mobility and capitalism in that in order to hold jobs or get advanced degrees, many would argue that whether you bought into it or not, it was necessary for survival to play by the white man’s rules.

We owe the articulation of this concept to Black academics, but if we look around just for one minute in any direction, we notice that literally everything is soaked in respectability politics. From voting disenfranchisement for felons, to drug users, to the criminalization of sex work, to fat people simply existing—if you don’t comply with perfect white Christian morals you’re subject to being deemed a stain to society or legally stripped of your rights (if you had any in the first place). 

My first major “Ah-ha!” moment as a young person just learning about my own politics was when I attended a presentation in 2010 by Ryan Conrad to promote the Against Equality book Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage at the NYC bookstore Bluestockings. My hatred for marriage started when I was young and was completely irrational to me for a long time. I didn’t understand why gays wanted to get married so badly, I thought a great thing about being gay is that we didn’t have marriage. I attended this event on a whim not knowing that Against Equality was founded by radical queers with abolitionist politics. A lightbulb went on for me that caused a domino effect when I listened to the presentation that night. The politics of the mainstream gay movement to legalize same-sex marriage was an assimilationist top-down approach to both participate in the institution of marriage and clamor for the respect of the state. It hit me that so much of this struggle was ultimately about respectability. (I’m gonna stop here because I could rant forever.) 

Postcard by Ryan Conrad for Against Equality

The Marriage Equality movement, and Equality in general, spat directly in the face of trans activists who had long been fighting for the right to simply stay alive, it drowned out their struggles with wedding registries and rainbow capitalism. The reason—respectability. These gays *white, cis, wealthy* are more palatable and acceptable to homophobes than these gays *PoC, trans, poor*. The idea of what is referred to as “trickle-up” queer politics threatens the white, wealthy, cis, gay voice by praxis, it centers the survival of those most vulnerable in our community, Black trans women. The equality activism of these neo-liberals fails to understand that we can’t actually move forward if we leave anyone behind.

All this to say that hating marriage was my entry point into abolition politics. I quickly learned that abolition politics were basically anti-respectability politics. These queer activists lead the way to other struggles for queer and trans liberation. I remember closely following Cece McDonald’s fight for freedom in 2012, a Black trans woman in Minneapolis who stabbed her attacker in self-defense. Her case was championed by Tourmaline and Dean Spade of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. I was inspired by Jay Toole’s passion to advocate and care for street-based queers in New York City by founding Queers for Economic Justice. When introducing herself at events she proudly named that she was a real stone butch, a disclosure I’m sure some would find disrespectable. I read furiously and learned all the ways the state has historically kept us down by criminalizing Blackness, queerness, and gender deviance. 

Now that we are again in June, the “No kink at Pride” queers are coming out of their fun-hating caves to denounce sexuality at Pride while somehow still maintaining a queer sexual identity. They say they want to protect children and place puppies on leashes on the pearl-clutching pedestal of visions that scar children for life. The way that I have approached self-soothing over this yearly debate is to remind myself that like most other bad takes, it is completely ahistorical for more reasons than I have time to dive into. This moral panic is the grandchild of the one that said all gay people are child molesters. The new blatant shift to individualism evidenced by young people requiring 700 different pride flags for each varying degree of sexuality (thus validating their special snowflakeness) tells us that being queer has morphed from a practice or action, and is now merely a defanged identity. Today, with a rightful middle finger to gatekeeping, all you need to do to be a queer is to identify that way, and especially on the internet. Building bonds in queer community and learning from elders and fucking and loving AND FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING are no longer rites of passage. However, our rich history reminds us that both the joy and weight of embodying queerness has always meant so much more. 

No kink at Pride contingent of young queers, names blurred because I don’t want anyone harassing them :)

I would argue that gay community emerged to spite criminalization. Sodomy and buggery laws date back to the 1500s born from morality and respectability. In 1600s Florence there was a special patrol called the Office of the Night to catch gay men in the act of cruising. In London they had the Society for the Reformation of Manners (sounds like my new kinky school for brats tbh), which focused on policing street-based acts of buggery and sex work. Queer community has always had an open atmosphere of sexuality precisely because it was forbidden. We separate the sex from sexuality because we forget that queers have been criminalized for hundreds of years LITERALLY for the immoral sex we have.

Once law enforcers realized it was harder to catch evil gay sex in the act, they created new ways to target and criminalize us with decency laws. The Lavender Scare of the 1950s allowed the government to fire any employee even suspected of being a homosexual, which sent a ripple of anti-gay moral panic throughout the country. To criminalize gender variance, bullshit masquerade laws were used to arrest anyone suspected of cross-dressing. The “three article” rule enforced that you had to wear three pieces of clothing traditionally worn by your gender. Historians confirm that this cannot be found in any laws of the time, and was made up by police for an excuse to harass gender deviants. Police considered being gay in public a crime for “disturbing the peace” and bars owners refused service to anyone who looked gay or appeared gender deviant because in doing so they could get shut down. When New York City “cleaned up” the strolls worked by trans women of color, the “Walking While Trans” statute picked up the job of criminalization. 

Image from SF Chronicle 1965 people attending a drag ball and breaking gender clothing rules

In Coming to Power (1981), there is a detailed account by Pat Califia about the ban on leather and SM regalia at the 1979 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Can you imagine being gay and being hassled and targeted by police for what you wear, and then a few years later you try to police what other gay people are wearing at a parade celebrating gayness??? Samois and allies campaigned for the right to wear whatever they wanted to the parade, and thus the famous “Leather Menace” t-shirts with the whip across the chest were born. The sentiment was part of the anti-porn crusade of second wave feminists. This created a feminism of respectability by shunning those who didn’t fit into a made up idea of what the women’s movement needed to look like. Beyond hating porn, they believed SM was abuse and promoted violence against women, and that femme and butch dykes were roles that upheld the patriarchy. The idea still stands—if you check these boxes and fit into this mold, you will be a good and acceptable lesbian. 

Image from Coming to Power depicting The Leather Menace t-shirt created by Samois

The thing about respectability politics is that it’s a slippery slope in that if you practice it in any form, you often end up on the side of conservative moral values. You also end up being a cop. It means that you believe what society has told you about what’s good and bad, who is worthy of love and redemption. It means that you don’t have compassion or empathy for other humans and you have decided that your idea of what’s moral or acceptable should be pushed onto people with different experiences. It means that you choose not to see the humanity in someone who doesn't meet your moral standards. 

Respectability politics and on a larger scale, moral panics, uphold policing and white supremacy in any way you cut it!!! The history of queers, and the history of sex workers, and the history of Black liberation are inextricably linked from Compton’s Cafeteria to Stonewall. You can’t stand up for one and deplore the others. June 2020 is Black Pride month and we’re all living through a massive reckoning like we’ve never seen before! I hope everyone is doing their best to show up for Black lives and each other right now and always. Anti-racist work is ongoing and one way you can challenge yourself is to think about allll the ideas you might hold about respectability. Sit with what makes you uncomfortable. If you think anyone is exempt from respect or redemption, or that anyone deserves to be policed, I’m asking you to kill the cop in your head. 

If you need help getting started, here are a wide range of things that society may consider disrespectable, and the consequences are vast:

-Slutty/revealing outfits-Having visible tattoos-Speaking AAVE/BEV-Being undocumented-Blackness-Being houseless or unsheltered-Being transgender or gender variant-Dreadlocks, cornrows, other traditional African hairstyles-Sex work-Fatness-STI Status/HIV Status-Non-traditional sex-Queerness-Public displays of sexuality-Working in fast food/other low-wage jobs-Cursing/Swearing-Watching pornography-Being a drug user or having an addiction-Mental illness-Disability-Having a history of incarceration/being currently incarcerated-Nudity-Not having an education-Being poor-Being a person of color-Being unemployed-Receiving welfare or social services

See you in the streets!

xx