Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (83 page)

Kelly and I met on the computer about three years ago. Computer sex was an important part of my life at that point, because I was quite ill with what used to be called Epstein-Barr Syndrome and is now being called Chronic Fatigue and Immunological Dysfunction syndrome. [The changed label] doesn’t seem to help matters much. I was partly bedridden and mostly housebound. The computer became an important link between me and the world. I met Kelly, and the first time we did a scene on the computer, the chemistry was absolutely fantastic. He was an almost ideal partner: If I could have brought him to life across the wires, I would have. He presented himself as a 19-year-old gay male living with a lover, a shadowy figure whom I disliked intensely. He seemed quite bloodless and distant. He seemed oppressive, in that Kelly seemed to be carrying a major weight of household duties and emotional support. I took an enormous dislike to this lover.

Kelly and I had long, elaborate, and quite stimulating conversations. [There was] sexiness on the computer; however, it very quickly branched out into other matters, and we became friends. Kelly has qualities that are essential for me in any relationship that I have. I like sweet people. I like people who are kind and generous and thoughtful and emotionally open: inquiring people, people who have intelligence and some kind of quickness about them. Kelly was all those things. It wasn’t very long before he became very important to my emotional life. And I grew to love him.

There was a year and a half of virtually daily contact and multiple
contacts most days. We arranged to meet for on-line chats at a specific time each day, [sometimes] twice a day. Then we moved to regular phone calls. We did leather scenes, and we talked about a lot of other things and shared ourselves pretty completely. And then Kelly had an emergency hospitalization, and I found out that Kelly was biologically female. I’m not sure that “biological” is a good term; “legally female” may be a better one. [I felt an] enormous sense of disorientation. I didn’t know what any of it meant in terms of me. I had already committed myself to relationships with men only. And here I was involved with somebody female. Yet all my experience of Kelly had been experience of a male. There was a lot of conflict about that; I worked very closely with my therapist on it. Kelly and I decided we were people who were connected to each other. [Our relationship is] of enormous value—crucial in a way, because I was so ill. For a very long time Kelly didn’t know that I was severely ill, including a brain infection and other complications. We didn’t know where it would lead, or how it would lead there, but we decided we would take it one day at a time and see what happened. And that’s what we’ve done.

Kelly’s very turned on by spankings. My reaction—and I think that’s true of most tops—is that what ignites my fire is whatever is getting my partner going at the time. The consequence is that spanking is one of the most important activities, and I think [it] would be if we lived together on a day-to-day basis. There are some glitches there because of the physical difficulties. I remember I went on a club run one summer, and, as I usually do at those things, I visited the local leather shop, the toy shop. I remember going through about 25 cock-and-ball harnesses—this was before I knew that Kelly was plumbed differently—and picked out a very nice one and sent it as a present. It’s now a joke between us. We both enjoy [tit play], but I’m a little tentative about it now, because that’s different tissue. I’m very familiar with the way the female tissue is and how sensitive it is. In tying up [men], for instance, you don’t pay particular attention to where it’s going on the pecs so long as it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, but with breast tissue you have to deal with [it] differently. I don’t know what will happen in the future, because I don’t know whether Kelly’s going to have the breast reduction and, if so, when. The nipples are wonderful; the nipples are extraordinarily responsive to touch, which makes it good. That’s good stuff.

A transsexual who was on a talk show recently said, “My gender is in my head and in my heart and not between my legs,” and that’s true. Kelly’s got to make the decision about what happens to that body. I can live with almost any results [including no surgery at all]. Just in terms of the physical, I think it would be neater, easier, and in a lot of ways more rewarding for there to be a breast reduction, so that what you’re dealing with is not a
full-grown breast but actually the pectoral muscles. [But] transsexual reassignment, from what I can tell, is awkward, expensive, not very satisfactory. The making of a phallus is complicated and not at a very high level, partly because the surgeons who are doing it don’t understand the wiring very well. I’m a little different, too, from a lot of gay men. That was part of the confusion in my self-identification, because I was never particularly aroused by male genitalia. That’s not an essential focus of my erotic life.

I think both Kelly and I share a degree of androgyny. It’s a good match. It’s pretty wonderful. There are those few limitations, and they need to be worked around. The plumbing [requires] a female orgasm, and I doubt that that will change very much, whether it’s surgery or not, whether it’s hormones or not. So that has to be dealt with.

I had to put my faith in my deepest instincts about what there was between us and put as little weight as possible on the materialistic dimensions of that relationship—the skin, the flesh, where it was, and what it looked like. That was only part of meeting somebody with whom you’d gotten emotionally close. And I think both of us fairly quickly found that the substance of the relationship, the way it had grown, if one thinks of it as a kind of organism, was true, however difficult it is to define. All the stuff about Kelly that I liked and loved was there. What wasn’t there was a particular kind of flesh, and some things were there that weren’t in the picture. But we worked through a lot of that on an emotional level, and I was completely convinced that the person I was going to meet was the person I loved. I had a sense of shock and transition [when I first found out that Kelly has a female body], but I had a firm enough foundation of who that person was. I was so sure of our emotional clarity that when I got the phone call that day a couple of summers ago, I felt as if my head had been turned around, but I didn’t feel betrayed.

To borrow a phrase from Oliver Sacks, life—when it’s really life—is musical, and when the music stops, it’s just skin and bones. And you know when the music’s being played. I’ve asked urologists how exactly erections work, and they can’t tell me. They don’t really know the final answer. I don’t really know how I know, but when Kelly and I were together, it was pretty clear that this physical body was a container for a gay man. And the lovemaking was lovemaking between two men. It’s something that happens in the nerve fibers, in the mind. And I know that Kelly is and always will be important in my life.

Twenty-Three

W
hile D&S sexuality is a highly ritualized and controlled expression of primal energies, erotic combat is the drama of championship played out in blunt physical terms. A wide range of competitive sports, and particularly wrestling, hold erotic appeal to men and women. The carefully regulated, blatant expression of dominance or aggression celebrates not only the joyful physicality of the human body but heroic ideals of gender. Also significant, gender heroics—as epitomized by erotic female combat—challenge stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.

In this chapter we examine the erotic pleasures of combat sports. Our profiles include:

When most Americans and Europeans think of wrestling, they think of the kitschy Grand Guignol in which costumed entertainers, such as Hulk Hogan, enact a choreographed struggle between good and evil. But the roots of erotic combat lie not in the broad satire and low comedy of professional wrestling, but in an ancient sport whose competitors engage in a match between peers striving for physical domination.

We found no clinical discussion of wrestling as an erotic interest. Historically wrestling as sport is a pancultural and virtually all-male phenomenon. Three general styles of wrestling are documented. In
belt-and-jacket
wrestling participants obtain holds by grasping the opponent’s clothes.
Catch-hold
wrestling requires that prescribed holds be assumed before the match begins. In
loose-style
wrestling, the contestants stand apart; they are free to take any hold except those barred, such as choke-holds or holds that allow unfair advantage. (The expression “no holds barred” derives from wrestling competitions which did not proscribe any holds.)

The
Epic of Gilgamesh
describes Sumerian belt-wrestling, and roughly contemporaneous (circa 3000
B.C
.) art from Babylonia and Egypt depicts the same sport. Loose wrestling was well established in India prior to 1500
B.C.;
it was reported in Chinese texts by 700
B.C
. and in Japanese texts from the 1st Century
B.C
. By 776
B.C
. several styles of wrestling were practiced in Greece, but loose-hold wrestling was probably that culture’s most popular sport.
Palestras
(wrestling schools) were important social gathering places for young Greek men. The Spartans apparently trained girls in wrestling as well.

Although comedic wrestling bouts were staged before gladiatorial contests to warm up audiences, ancient Romans seemed to prefer the bloody main event to inspired grappling. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, wrestling vanished from the written records of Europe for at least three centuries, regaining status as a martial art by the early 13th Century.

In 18th Century Europe and the United States, fairs, theaters, and circuses featured wrestlers who challenged all comers—a practice that survives in a limited fashion today. Although these bouts were usually
bona fide
contests, the carnival wrestler, who was typically billed as a monstrous, unholy villain to be vanquished, was not above throwing a match to increase profits.