America Unzipped (32 page)

Neither of them dreamed about being tied as youngsters or considered any alternate meanings to old westerns. As far as they know, they have not harbored latent fetish drives. Nor have they ever attended a fetish convention. Coming to one wouldn't surprise any of their friends, though. “Homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality—it's all accepted and welcome,” Chris says. They do have friends they won't tell about being here, the ones who lean fundamentalist, but not because they feel ashamed. They don't want to make anybody uncomfortable.

Both were raised in churchgoing families. “I was a Bible beater,” Chris recalls, from Joe Beam's old denomination. “Church of Christ. No music, no dancing, my Christian high school did not have a prom.” There was no sex education in his school or from his family except “fire and brimstone” about the evils of premarital sex. “I knew early on I did not identify with that personally. As time has gone on, you find a middle ground, what's okay with you, with your relationship with God, and you incorporate that into your personal life. I think I have a personal relationship with God that is part of my life structure, but it would be nondenominational. I would go to any church to get a chance to worship the Lord.”

Religion and sex are not connected in Chris's mind. But he does believe that “when we are intimate together, that is the highest celebration of my love and his word. If I did it with a rope tied around her wrist or a clutching embrace, what does it matter?” He and Linda, who happily had premarital sex, also use porn sometimes, of many different genres. It's just another instrument, like rope.

Both say they are liberals who happened to vote Republican in 2004. They often feel torn between their liberal social leanings and conservative economic philosophy and wish they didn't have to choose. Someday, they won't, they believe, because they find people their age just aren't concerned about the way other people have sex. They cite reasons I have heard before, like digital media and an omnipresent sexuality that serves up every possible variation. To be sure, they do have concerns about the sexual climate in the country, mainly the sexualization of children, especially young girls. “I hate seeing a third-grader looking like a twenty-five-year-old out at a club,” Linda says. But the sexual terrain they are navigating as newlyweds is vastly different from any generation that has come before, even the vaunted “free-love” generation.

“People our age and younger are not scared to explore many different parts of their sexuality,” Linda explains. “Being bisexual or homosexual is just much more widely accepted than even five years ago.”

Nothing is off-limits for them. “Everything is open for discussion,” he insists. “If there was just something she absolutely desired, I would probably try to overcome whatever personal issues I had to get there because it would be important that she feel fulfilled, and I think vice versa.”

 

T
he party on the final night of Fetish Con, Guilty Pleasures, is more manageable than the chaos at the Castle. The sound track is the same—fetish seems to have an official list of industrial and goth music—but Club Chambers is less nightclub and more “play space” as designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The entire second floor is given over to instruments of torture, and many people from the convention are using them.

When I arrive, Mia Voraz has her submissive, duct-tape man, strapped to a big steel X-shaped structure in the middle of the room. He's out of his tape and stripped to a black jockstrap and black socks, a steel collar held fast with a padlock around his neck. Mia is hitting him with a hairbrush.

Wait. Now she is caning him like a sadistic schoolmaster, creating a cross-hatching of diagonal red stripes on his butt, his legs, his back. She works on him for about fifteen minutes, then releases him and orders him to pick up his pants and shoes and get dressed. He follows her dutifully as she walks away.

In one corner, an elderly man lies curved over an incline, his ass shining up through leather chaps. His wife, kitted out like a dominatrix French maid, her reading glasses perched at the end of her nose, is using a kitchen whisk to transmit electricity from a violet wand to his back, butt, and legs. Blue sparks fly out of the whisk as she rolls it over his body and he jerks up and down. Then she shocks the bald spot on the back of his head with the attentiveness of a grandmother knitting.

A woman lies tied up in a coffin on a small stage. A man, about six foot five, with a chiseled body is prancing around in his socks and a tiny white G-string, chatting up women, which seems to be working pretty well for him.

A professional flogger—there is such a thing—a thin man, with long black hair, his naked torso gleaming with sweat, his black eyeliner beginning to run, is making a show of twirling two cat-o'-nine-tails across the backs of young women who take turns in his iron cross. This is a show, really. It is performance and an audience is appreciated, because, like the theater, the object of fetish is to create a new world to escape into, a place better than reality.

But there is a determined self-consciousness about it all that feels forced. For three days I have been noticing a young woman, tall and thin with extraordinarily black hair, walking around the lobby bar of the Hyatt and at these parties. I have been noticing not because she is beautiful, but because she always has a dress or a top that reveals a big tattoo on the small of her back: “God Forgive Me,” in gothic print. Like the name of the party promoter, Jsin, it seems too precious. I spoke to the sales manager of the Hyatt yesterday and he said he liked having the fetish people there because they bought rooms in August in Tampa and they policed themselves and were better behaved than a lot of other so-called mainstream business organizations he has hosted. The Hyatt doesn't care if she is into fetish. So she appeals to God.

Tonight, while we were waiting for the shuttle bus to take us here, about twenty of us had gathered outside the lobby door of the hotel facing the street. It was hot out and PVC doesn't exactly breathe. So people sat wilting on a flower bed, griping about when the bus was coming or chatting desultorily in small groups. A carful of local young men drove by slowly, the occupants staring at us and then shouting, “Freaks! What a bunch of fuckin' freaks!” To which everyone stood and whooped and hollered and shouted, “Yeah! We're freaks! Betchur ass!” and they remained enlivened, standing outside the Hyatt hotel in downtown Tampa, their sin reaffirmed, until the bus arrived.

CHAPTER
8

Playing with Fire

I D
RESS
U
P, BUT AT A
S
EX
C
LUB,
C
LOTHES
D
O
N
OT
M
AKE THE
M
AN

It is very important that I feel in control.

—Paradox, 2007

I
want to beat the asinine grin off his face. He is lying there in her arms curled like an infant against a mother's breast and all I can think of is wanting to slap him so goddamn hard he'll know what real pain is. Get up! Stand up, you pathetic noodle! You giggling little schoolgirl. You mewling, murmuring, disgusting kitten.

I feel such an overwhelming contempt I am alarmed. This man has done nothing to me. I don't even know him. He is in computers—that's all I have been told. Maybe he's the nicest guy in the world, but he is really pissing me off.

This is it? This is the end of my journey and I get this guy, a white-haired, bearded, sixty-something “computer guy” nuzzling into her lap as if he's trying to return to the womb? This is what we've all been looking for? Mommy? Come on, you sonofabitch, tell me it's more than that! Tell me we're looking for heaven or hell or enlightenment or something to replace flat-screen TVs and McMansions. Tell me this huge burst of sex we're living through is about something more than wanting to chuck it all for milk and cookies and a pat on the head.

Maybe it's just my pants. They are punishingly tight. My testicles are aching yet again, screaming at me because they have been turned into a meatball panini by the PVC inseam. When I take these fucking pants off, I expect my boys to have become two-dimensional. I am also sucking in my gut because I am wearing a clinging muscle T-shirt with a skull on the front and I am too vain to show my body fat. Goddess Heather explained how to produce washboard abs, but I have not had a chance to implement her program. I'll get right on that.

Not that anybody would notice or care. Nobody else here seems at all concerned about their own bodies. Over on the dance floor, a topless woman, about thirty-five, wearing a short, flippy pleated skirt, is swaying hypnotically to the music. Metal again. Several feet in front of me, three obese people, two men and a woman, are taking turns lying on a mattress as one partner or another works their nude bodies over with a violet wand. Two feet behind me, a mostly naked woman is lying across the lap of another woman who has made a fist of her right hand and is shoving it in and out of the naked woman's vagina as if churning butter. Meanwhile, a tall, bald man in his fifties, wearing a sleeveless reptile-skin shirt and leather pants, is throwing jabs at the back of the mostly naked woman's thighs—jab jab jab, Joe Frasier working the heavy bag—as the fist churns in and out.

Jab jab jab. In, out, in, out.

 

I
arrived in Seattle several days ago to put myself in the hands of Allena Gabosch. I had asked Allena, the director of an organization called the Center for Sex Positive Culture, popularly known as the Wet Spot, to mentor me. I wanted to know what it felt like to be a member of a sex club where BDSM, fetish, swinging, pretty much the entire gamut of America's sexual menu, played out. I thought becoming one with my inner perv, overcoming my intransigent vanilla persona, would allow me to reach a new depth of understanding.

Allena was a good choice. She is hopelessly funny and has a sense of humor about the scene and the people in it. Yet she is also a big, dominating, tattooed, tender, earth mother, with long, dark, stringy hair and a gapped-toothed smile and a lot of pounds she would like to shed because she thinks skydiving ought to be her next adventure. Finally, Allena has the advantage of having been around awhile. She has seen how much sex, and our attitudes about sex, have changed over the past decade. Mostly, she is encouraged, but she is no blind cheerleader.

Before I arrived, we talked about my travels so far and how sex had become such a cultural focus. I told her about the mail I received and she wasn't surprised. A new era of sexual experimentation had clearly taken hold, she said, and not just by the usual suspects of free-love hippies and dissolute hipsters with too much money, but everybody from all walks of life were starting to show up at the Wet Spot seeking information about sex that heretofore had been considered edgy and rare. She wasn't sure exactly why this was happening now—we talked about the Internet and pop culture, but these didn't seem completely satisfying—just that over the past five years or so, her clientele had boomed. The Wet Spot now had eight thousand members in the Seattle area, the eldest eighty-one years old. All of them had redefined “normal” for themselves. Allena was most excited by the center's new status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Many companies in the area have programs that match employee contributions to 501(c)(3) charities, and Allena was joyful from knowing that companies like Microsoft and Boeing, both of whom have employees who are Wet Spot members, could help subsidize the organization's operations.

“Bill Gates is going to be supporting Sex Positive!” she said several times. This was a sign to her that sex-positive culture, a vague term that implies a celebratory attitude about all kinds of sexual variation among adults, had arrived and was now an ineluctable part of mainstream life in America.

 

O
n the afternoon of my arrival in the city, I drive over to the Wet Spot. It is situated not far from downtown Seattle almost under a bridge overpass. From the outside, it's not much, just a white concrete-block building with a rutted, mainly dirt, parking lot and a small sign by the steel front door saying SPCC. Not just anybody can walk in. A small reception desk inside the front door is always manned and there is paperwork to fill out and identification to provide and releases to sign stating you know what you are in for.

People are also asked to provide a name to be used by the organization in case they prefer their real names never to be spoken. There are a few prominent citizens who belong despite the risk that some unscrupulous fellow member might contact an employer, say, and out a member. The fake name option is a layer, albeit thin, of protection. I fill out my paperwork and show my identification. I promise to abide by strict confidentiality rules.

Despite never having seen Allena in person, I recognize her right away. Though a half-dozen or so other people are here, late in the afternoon, nobody else could possibly be her. She runs up to me and gives me a hug as if we have known each other for years.

Allena shows me around with all the pride of a woman who has built something from virtually nothing. She and her volunteer staff overcame the obvious social and political barriers, and constant financial troubles, to create a place Allena feels is safe and welcoming to everyone. The club resembles spaces I have been in before, places where under-the-radar rock bands play for one hundred cognoscenti. I saw Liz Phair a long time ago in a place almost exactly like this. A small snack bar with soft drinks and bottled water and juices is built into the wall closest to the front of the building. Facing inward, three rooms line the right-hand side: Allena's office, a small library offering reading materials on sex, and an operating room with medical equipment.

The operating room isn't just for show. When I ask about it I am told that they “don't actually remove any organs or anything” but small bits of tissue might be taken or incisions made. (If you want some serious operations, you'll probably have to go to Mexico. They do amputations down there. A few years ago, a guy with an amputation fetish died in a San Diego motel room after his leg was cut off in a Mexican clinic. You could say he had a paraphilia.)

The far left side of the building has a small shower and locker room, an after-care room with a futonlike bed where subs recovering from a sub-space trip can be comforted, and a play space with BDSM gear. A custom-made steel and wooden bondage bed, more gear, and a cubicle with a regular bed where people can have sex await in a back room.

I have come this evening specifically for the Fire Play seminar. I'm not sure what fire play is, and having learned my lesson after the cock-and-ball torture incident, I have not asked for details. But Allena tells me I'll love it because it is one of the edgier modes of BDSM action. I will learn from a man named Paradox. I find some of these BDSM names a little annoying, like Dungeons and Dragons identities, but Paradox has a good reason for adopting his BDSM handle. He is the forty-five-year-old dean of libraries at a major state university where the administration has no idea their dean is well known in BDSM circles for lighting naked women on fire. Paradox thinks this news might cause consternation because at his previous university, a large midwestern institution, somebody outed him to higher-ups. That partially explains why he moved jobs.

As people begin arriving for the seminar, I think I notice a type. A short, muscular, bald man in a canvas kilt and Doc Martens stands off to one side. He introduces himself to me as Fandar. Another man, tall and bald (the same guy I will see later punching the woman's thighs), arrives wearing a black leather tricorn hat, a silky black poofy pirate shirt, leather pants with a codpiece attached, and leather boots that extend over his knees. The T-shirt on a large woman reads: “I let my mind wander and it never came back.”

“These are Renaissance fair people,” I say to Allena.

“Oh yeah, and sci-fi geeks. Totally. I know I was. It's all about fantasy.”

We all settle down into folding chairs in the middle of the Wet Spot. Paradox begins. “Fire touches our inner core, our animalistic side, our fear. But it also touches our intellectual core…”

I spent a half hour talking with Paradox while he set up and he seems like a fine person. Everyone here seems nice. Once again, I am amazed at their openness. They know I am not one of them, necessarily, and yet here are people who no doubt have reason to fear condemnation, who fully realize their sexual tastes are different from those publicly expressed (though perhaps not privately indulged in) by most people, and yet they will answer any question, tolerate any intrusion. Still, I'm bristling.

At first Paradox was afraid to play with fire. But nine years ago, a dom in Nebraska (a dom in Nebraska? I'm not sure I ever expected to hear that exact pairing of words) taught him how to do it safely, and ever since he has considered it “one of the more fun aspects of BDSM play. This is very much edge play,” he says ominously. “It is very easy to screw something up badly. With this stuff, safety protocols are all important…Play with fire long enough, you will get burned.”

Fire and nudity are two things I would have thought are best avoided in combination, but Paradox keeps emphasizing the fun. He starts with a list of safety precautions, explains the importance of using 70 percent isopropyl alcohol as our fuel source (30 percent of it is water that acts as a barrier between the alcohol and the skin), and explains why the head of the submissive should be covered: burning hair puts a damper on the mood.

Still, “a male submissive I knew in Kansas, a big bear of a guy with a hairy back, loved to get torched across his back because for the next two or three weeks, he felt it as it grew back, and it itched like all get out. That was a turn-on for him.”

Paradox is a handy fellow. He makes much of his own equipment, mainly from stuff he finds at Home Depot. Bob, of Bob and Melissa, told me he calls the store “Dom Depot.” Paradox says he walks down the aisles looking for “pervertibles,” hardware ostensibly for one use that, with a little imagination, can take on entirely different uses. For example, a few wooden dowels, some cotton batting, and string can be used to create “fire wands,” small torches. Paradox has a half-dozen of them arrayed on a stand next to a table where his demonstration model, Jenny, is lying topless, a long skirt still tied around her waist. Each one of these constructions must have taken Paradox fifteen minutes to create, and that was after the trip to Home Depot. Yet the flames will last seconds. BDSM is a lot of work, which may be one reason why I've never taken to it. I'm more the “feed me grapes and bring me wine” sort of hedonist.

First, Paradox applies flaming Q-tips to Jenny's naked back. This is the “warm-up period.” He rubs them up and down her spine until the flame dies, then repeats with another, a series of blue and yellow dancing fairies tripping up and down her body.

Next he lights his fire wands and gently beats Jenny. The flame wooshes through the air, the wand hits Jenny with a thud, and the wand goes out, usually after one or two hits. Jenny stands up. She's a short, fleshy young woman with a number of healing bruises. Paradox whaps her, not very hard, with the fire wands, and I look around to watch the dozen or so people observing Jenny being hit by the wands and the flames. They like what they see, but I sense no erotic charge at all.

Fire wands are just the beginning, the easy intro. Over the next half hour, Paradox uses canes, exploding flash cotton of the type used by magicians, and then twin floggers made of Kevlar that he soaks in alcohol, lights, and uses to flog a naked Jenny as she stands up against a big wooden X. Allena dims the lights so we can appreciate the full effect of the whirling, flaming floggers.

“Whoa!”

“The sound is just so great.”

“Cool!”

“That is awesome!”

Woosh, woosh, woosh, the floggers fly in big blazing circles, hitting Jenny and then wheeling back in an arc of fire.

For his pièce de résistance, Paradox lays Jenny back down on the table and forms trails of alcohol in patterns across her back, butt, and legs. He orders the lights dimmed. Then he fires up a violet wand and lets the blue and yellow sparks zzit zzit through the air. The glass tube at the end of the wand glows purple. Holding it just above her back, he activates it again and a spark flies from the glass tip onto Jenny's back, igniting the trails of alcohol.