Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (13 page)

But the real surprise—which may be the most disturbing part, or the most honest, depending on your perspective—is what the age play stirred up in me. At thirty-six, I don’t have any children, but I want them badly. “Baby fever” hardly begins to describe it. If I could pick up a baby at the supermarket along with my gro- ceries, I would. And this unlikely sexual dynamic, the big baby literally calling me “mommy,” called forth powerful caretaking

feelings. It was nice, for a short period of time, to be a mother, even a mock one.

Let me be clear: my maternal yearnings in and of themselves are not sexual. But my desire to comfort others does play a role in my sex life. Nurturing has been one of the gifts I pride myself on providing to lovers. That might mean surprising them with dessert, sending them a list of the broken links on their website, giving an intense massage, mailing a package for them, or washing their dishes. Even when I’m in a dominant sexual role, there’s an element of caretaking involved. If I’m slapping or spanking or biting or pinching someone who gets off on me delivering pain, I am fulfilling a sexual need. It may not be the same as feeding them chicken soup, but it is still a form of taking care of them.

So while overt mommy play was new to me, combining kink and nurturing wasn’t. But this scenario brought my previous ex- perience to a whole new level of intensity. We spun a fantasy in which I was sitting in a hotel bathtub, warm and full of bub- bles, while he waited to towel me off, then gave me a foot mas- sage. The stories we shared were far from depraved; they were gentle, tender, loving. I could see myself soaking in that tub, him washing my hair, stroking my feet, fetching food for me, sleeping at the foot of the bed. The sweetness offset the weirdness for me. But it was a lot to process on a second date, or even a sev- entieth. This wasn’t the kind of sex you enjoy and then forget about. Going to such a deeply psychological head space was over- whelming, especially because we didn’t stop to talk about it be-

fore or after.

We engaged in role-playing sex two more times over the course of that night and the next morning. I suspected that might be the only way he could get off. I began to wonder how long I could keep this up: I could do it for another date or two, but

what would happen after that? What would happen if we really did have kids?

I never had to face that question, however, because after our date, I stopped hearing from him. Save for one brief email check- in, he was gone. I’m too stubborn and proud to beg someone to contact me, so I waited to hear from him. Maybe he felt ashamed about what we’d done, or regretted how much he’d revealed; it was impossible to know. All I knew was the comfort I could take in this: no matter how old I get, sex always has new things to teach me.

Dear John

Lor i Selke

Dear John,

Excuse me. I mean:

Dear Leather Community,

No, that’s not right either. I mean: Dear Leather Scene,

I don’t know quite how to tell you this. I hope it doesn’t come as a shock when I suggest that it’s high time that we took a good long look at our relationship and acknowledged the truth—we’ve grown apart, and we continue to head in different directions. Although I am still fond of you and you’ll always be an important part of my life, at this stage, it’s probably best if, from here on out, we became just friends.

It wasn’t always like this, of course, and I will always treasure the memories I have of us together. Especially those first whirl- wind months and years. I really thought it was the kind of match

that was meant to last. And it did last—almost two decades. We definitely had some good times together, I won’t deny it.

I remember vividly the first time we were introduced. It was in a queer women’s support group at college. I was told by the facilitator, a woman only a year or two older than I, that anyone who used any toys or props or costumes during sex could be con- sidered a leatherdyke. Oops! I knew instantly that we belonged together. So glad to make your acquaintance, ma’am.

I met one of the women in that support group again, a few years later, on the end of a very long leash on the Washington DC mall. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I started writing you love poetry. In fact, I wrote a whole cycle and turned it in as my final project for my queer studies class in college. Somewhere in my boxes of papers I still have those poems, with titles like “The Leatherdyke Meets the Animal Lib- erationist” and “Boiling Dildos in the Spaghetti Pot” and “Hand- cuffs” and “Dental Dams in the Midwest.” I hope you didn’t find them too corny at the time.

I began stalking you, just a little bit. I bought copies of the original, super-kink-friendly lesbian sex magazine
On Our Backs
whenever I could find them in central Michigan. I spent a lot of time sitting next to one slim shelf at the bookstore that for some reason housed Pat (now Patrick) Califia and
The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual
, plus a lot of Victorian spanking porn that I never really looked much at, I’m afraid. Maybe that was a mistake. But I was young and in love, and I felt so, so alone without you. You were close, but not close enough. I spent hours on the phone with a very sweet couple who lived about two hours away and tried to hook me up with local resources. They answered my questions and recommended books and asked if I had any access to the Internet. This was long before the Web, by the way, before

AOL, just a little after BBS’s were all the rage. I did have access to the Internet, thanks to my college email account.

So I started reading and participating in a little group called alt.sex.bondage. And I met so many friends there! They were still all so far away, but at least we were talking to each other at last.

One strange thing about this, though, was that people were always stunned that I went by my real name on these groups.
What’s your scene name?
they would ask.
What’s your handle?
I’d never even had a childhood nickname, so this was all very con- fusing to me.

Nonetheless. I moved to Chicago and continued to flirt with you. And you seemed to like me, too. We had a great time once a year at International Mr. Leather, strolling through the vendor area. I met a cute faggy top with a new tongue piercing and a real mean streak in all the right places—he showed me how painful a Wartenberg pinwheel can be when it’s used just under the armpit. He didn’t want to have sex with me, but brunch he could swing. The cigar daddy, too—he invited me to his club dinner, sat me down at the big table in the private back room at Ann Sather’s Swedish Diner, handed me a stogie and gallantly cut the tip off. He lived in New York, though, so I only saw him once a year or so. He taught me the hand trick. Ask me to show it to you

sometime.

And there was that March on Washington I mentioned— where I think we might have gotten to know each other better if it hadn’t been for that terrible sunburn—and the year after that, the Stonewall anniversary celebration in New York City.

I think that’s when we started seriously dating, yes? When I sat in the fisting workshop held by Carol Queen and Robert Law- rence. When the very tall woman from San Francisco snapped her bullwhip down the aisle of another workshop session. When

I sat next to all those men in their leathers, with their Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions spotting their arms and face. When I ate brunch with a man who called himself Mr. Benson, which sounds like the height of arrogance until you actually met him. If you know what I mean.

During the march proper, we linked arms in a big circle around that tall woman and her bullwhip so that she could march undisturbed by overzealous safety monitors. Remember? I do. I was falling in love. I was crushed out on every single person in that circle. In some ways, I still am.

That was about the same time I went to Boston and met an- other lovely fag top who saw me standing alone at the bar, intro- duced himself to me, determined that we had a mutual friend, and then took me into the back room of the Ramrod. Just to watch—he wasn’t into girls, after all. We joked about the back- room policy, which was shirtless or leather, and how freaked-out all those lovely butch men would be if I chose the first option. But I was wearing my leather jacket that night, and even though it was quite, quite warm in that back room, I kept it on so that I could spend just a few more minutes watching the men touch each other in ways that I wanted to touch and be touched, too. I was still content to watch. This time.

We had a little long-distance thing going for a while. I would sometimes stop off at the leather bar on the other side of town— the one located in an alley behind a bathhouse. They had a monthly women’s night, and I’d risk being stranded or having to pay for a very expensive taxi out of a very tight income just to drink a beer at the bar and chat with other women wearing their bar vests and motorcycle jackets.

Then I moved to San Francisco, and our relationship deep- ened. It was definitely a love match. I met so many friends and

lovers here. I was invited to play parties, I was invited to munches, I met a girl who loved to be spanked and we picked out dildos together and she ate pretzel nuggets out of a bowl on the floor of a kitchen that didn’t even belong to me and she wiggled that deli- cious butt at me while she did it.

I guess this was the honeymoon period. We had a good, long honeymoon, we did. I even had several jobs where I could proudly proclaim myself a “professional pervert.” I went from at- tending play parties to running them. I got some very naughty stories about you and me published. Some of those stories were nominated for awards.

It was at the play parties that I first began to notice some things. I was booking space for an upcoming party. All I needed to know were the house rules, the rental rates and could we bring some mattresses in to increase the horizontal space? And the owners looked at me kind of funny, and then started talking to me in a way that made me realize that they thought I wasn’t re- ally kinky at all, because who combines sex with spanking and bondage? It must mean I wasn’t serious about what I was doing and needed some remedial lectures in safer sex, hygiene, and

kink, all at once.

This was not cool. We’d known each other for so long. How could you treat me this condescendingly, just because of my or- gasms?

Maybe it was a mistake, I rationalized. One bad apple, one unfortunate moment. Everybody makes mistakes.

But then I started noticing some other things. Like the fact that whenever I saw men and women playing together, it seemed the women were on their knees sucking cock a very dispropor- tionate amount of the time. I mean, as in five or six couples sur- rounding me and my partner, all doing the exact same scene.

And when it wasn’t cocksucking, it was young thin women being wound in yards and yards of rope by older bearded men. And when I mentioned all this in bewilderment—remembering the days when most of the tops were women, actually, and most of the bottoms were men, and when had that changed?—people got into shouting matches with me. I was being mean, I was told. I was saying Their Kink Was Not Okay. The cardinal sin.

People started frowning at me when I laughed in the dungeon. Or when I talked dirty to my partners. That was chatting and it wasn’t allowed; it was disruptive. My hand could be four fingers up her twat and I’d still be called out for it.

I’ve also never forgotten the woman in a very expensive custom corset who apparently thought a good way to flirt with me would be to say, “You don’t look dressed for the evening,” when I showed up at a party in black jeans and T-shirt—perfectly okay by party rules, but apparently not up to her stringent stan- dards.

I don’t know what happened. But it had become clear that you and I were growing apart.

I started joking to people about how I wasn’t really a pervert, I just liked rough sex. (And knives. And needles. And the smell of leather, and spanking cute girls, and who am I really kidding never mind.) I stopped attending quite as many munches and those play parties. And classes. And clubs.

See, my kinky leather identity grew firmly out of my queer- ness and my feminism. All three of those elements are important and in some ways inseparable. It’s important to me to pursue the sort of social justice that ensures that our consensual relationships are someday entered into from a place of roughly equal societal power. Without that aim, we’re simply perpetuating oppression.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that we need to wait until

after the revolution to have the kind of sex and/or play that we want. I’m saying that we cannot turn a blind eye to the institu- tionalized power imbalances that affect our interpersonal rela- tions when we’re negotiating our consensual power exchanges. To do so is venal and corrosive. To do so with a shrug and a nod to the tired catchphrase “your kink is ’kay” is offensive.

There, I said it.

And the last time I said it, you laughed at me. Mocked me publicly, and turned your back on me. When you weren’t loudly denouncing me as the PC police, that is.

And I wish I could say I saw it coming, but I didn’t. It was a stiletto-heeled kick to my gut.

And after policing my public scenes for years for being too loud, too verbal, filled with too many orgasms and not enough toys, too joyous and not nearly serious enough, where the hell do you get off pretending that I’m the no-fun patrol?

And that’s why I’m writing you this letter, leather community. Because if that’s really the way you feel about me, then I think it’s past time we parted ways. It’s not just the one thing, it’s an accu- mulation of tiny estrangements that I can’t look past any longer. And it may be my imagination, but it certainly appears that you feel much the same way. We have a long, florid, glorious history together. But I don’t think we really like very much who we’ve both become over the years.

I can’t change my history. I can’t walk away from it. And I want to be clear that I’m not trying to. I’m not repudiating you or my time with you. I will always be queer and kinky and kinky and queer, and queer kinky perverts will always have a place in my heart and my home—and, let’s face it, my bed. (And on my spanking bench, and sitting at my feet…) And I’m always going to find boys and girls wrapped in cowhide pretty fucking hot.