Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (18 page)

their bikes.

Talk turns to the mechanics of motorcycles, and Sassy from Orlando

mentions she’s having problems with hers. With Sassy’s permission,

Keri, a young fire department paramedic with a smooth, rosy complex-

ion and a body that could take down a tree, comes to Sassy’s aide. As

the unofficial road captain, Keri later explains she is one of the few club

members who have authority to ride another sister’s bike (yet another

biker code: Members don’t sit on each other’s motor).

The
Throttle
Junkies
crew arrives in a huge van spewing cameramen

and boom mic operators. A director trailed by a female assistant with

a clipboard gives orders while the on-air talent stands by, seemingly

along for the ride. proof

Light is growing scarce. They need to shoot Jenn and club members

riding while they can, the director tells his crew. Jenn hops on the back

of her bike. Gripping the handlebars, she cranks it. “Potato, potato,

potato . . . potato, potato, potato.” The deep guttural, gravelly pitch

and irregular cadence that define Harleys ignites the group. The sisters

scream and shout adding melody to the rhythm of the engine. “Yahoo!”

“Alright!” hands clap, fists raise.

For a woman, little can compare to seeing, and almost as impor-

tant, hearing, another female straddle an 800-pound mass of rubber,

chrome, and steel and bring it to life with a roar. The feminist symbol-

ism is empowering, and the engine’s sound evokes a primal energy.

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Swept up by the force, I holler and cheer along with the sisters.

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Cocked back on the seat with her heels pressed forward on the

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footrests, hands chin-high on the handlebars, Jenn seems to propel

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the machine forward with her presence alone. Once on the street, she

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opens it up. Long blond locks fly and the hot-pink scarf floats behind as

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Jenn disappears in a rumble down the empty, palm-lined street under

09

the reddening Florida sky.

re4

tpahC

The Other Wild Kingdom

proof

Wonder Woman is taking a break in the lobby of Tampa’s downtown

Hyatt Regency. From what, isn’t clear, but apparently she is invisible to

everyone but me. None of the passing, casually dressed conventioneers

give her a second look.

Nearby on the escalator, a gray-haired man in red latex pope vest-

ments is trailed by a vixen in a saucy rubber nun’s habit. I follow them

up to a kingdom of kink.

On the convention floor, leashed sex slaves and nearly nude exhibi-

tionists weave through the aisles of kinky clothing and sex toys. Young

fetish models with breasts like basketballs and names like Bloodbunny,

RubberDoll, Velvet Slave, and Ghettobutt push website memberships

and pose for fan photos. A legless man wearing a T-shirt that reads

“Walk on Me” flattens out like roadkill on the carpet to let a fetish

model do just that.

Is that a man or a hefty woman shrink-wrapped head to toe in a

latex Orphan Annie outfit? And how does he/she breathe? Something

1

that looks like the EverReady bunny is cinched in a black leather body

9

harness and striding up the aisle like a mascot about to break out in a

cheer for the fetish team.

I have fallen down the rabbit hole and landed at Fetish Con, the

largest fetish trade show in the eastern United States. Every year, the

kinky event takes over the Hyatt for four days, drawing more than two

thousand Floridians and visitors from around the globe who dare to act

out the strangest of sexual fantasies.

I’m a Vanilla, as lifestylers call those of us with more conventional

sex lives. I’m seeking those whose sexual obsessions have a Florida

bent and hope to later visit them in their element, wherever that may

be.

In the process, I’m getting a fast introduction into deviant desires.

Dressed in jeans and a black shirt, I blend in with the mere dabblers

who shop for whips and sex toys to spice things up in the bedroom.

Given that you can buy leather bustiers at many swap meets, toying

with the basic tie-me-up, spank-me, leather-and-whips BDSM fetish

is practically mainstream (BDSM being shorthand for bondage/disci-

pline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism). Florida, the capital

of make-believe, can do better. In the subtropical sunshine, the most

obscure fetishes flourish to national prominence and the more com-

mon morph into cutting-edge strange.

proof

Case in point, the hulking transgender redhead coming up the aisle

dressed as a woman and a horse, a ponygirl.

The 6-foot 3-inch ponygirl is dressed in a black bustier, red leotard,

red tights, and a bridle get-up with pointy ears. Her teeth clench a rub-

ber bit the size of a hotdog. A red feather plume tops her head, and

a long, red-haired tail hangs from her rump. Wearing over-the-knee

black boots, she marches with the gait of a draft horse, although she

later tells me she’s an Arabian.

And if her dress isn’t eye-catching enough, she’s also pulling a two-

wheeled cart that holds a buxom leather-clad fetish model. A pear-

shaped man with a crop follows up the rear, intently watching his tow-

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ering pony’s every move.

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I trot after them and he hands me his business card: “Ponygroom

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Tim.” He’s too busy to talk. His pony is at work.

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I soon learn from a small herd that pony play is one of Florida’s

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claims to fetish prominence. Such assertions are hard to verify given

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that there isn’t an official census for human ponies. However, sev-

29

eral online fetish registries back up their claim; Florida has the most

proof

Ponygroom Tim and Ponygirl

Lyndsey following a pony

cart performance at a Largo

fetish dungeon. Photo by Lori

Ballard.

human ponies per capita of any state. Even still, serious pony players

are rare. Online sites indicate Florida has more than 250 pony players.

San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles are also hotbeds.

Some semblance of equine costume play—or “cosplay,” as it’s called

in the lifestyle—has been around since before Christ. In her book

Deviant
Desires:
Incredibly
Strange
Sex,
chronicler of obscure fetishes Katherine Gates notes an Assyrian frieze from around 2000 BCE that

shows human ponies pulling chariots. Legend also has it that the Greek

philosopher Aristotle liked playing pony; a famous fourteenth-century

bronze statue
Aristotle
Ridden
by
Phyllis
depicts him on all fours with his wife on his back holding his hair as if it’s a mane. Around the turn

of the nineteenth century, erotic ponygirl shows were a hit with British

colonists.

Then came novelist Anne Rice, who under the pen name A. N. Roque-

laure cracked open the stable door again in the 1980s with her erotic

trilogy
The
Claiming
of
Sleeping
Beauty
. Rice told of nude princes and princesses being turned into harnessed sex slaves who wore hooves

and horsetails plugged into their rears and pulled carriages.

By the late 1990s, a small subset of the BDSM community was living

the fantasy, horsetail butt-plugs and all.

In pony play world, the submissive is the beast of burden, the one

proof

controlled by reins, the one who pulls the cart and rides the dominant

on his or her back or even shoulders, which looks a lot like kids playing

chicken.

In the hallway outside the trade show, a small Florida herd nays, can-

ters, and snorts. One ponygirl prances on all fours, her hands gloved in

shiny plastic horse fetlocks and hooves, and her feet covered in match-

ing boots soled with horseshoes.

Prize ribbons like ones given at a state fair hang on the top rail of

a purple and black pony stall. Ponygirl Lavender is taking a break. She

removes her bridle headdress with purple braids, silver medallions, and

a plume of black hair that spews from the top like a mane. A match-

ad

ing strap-on tail sways as she walks. The well-known children’s toy My

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Little Pony has grown up.

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Lavender is middle-aged with a matching shape clearly outlined by

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her leotard, dark stockings, black boots, and lacy bustier. She lives in

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Largo and has a professional, mainstream job and a teenager. She pre-

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fers to go only by Lavender, her pony play name, saying she wants to

49

be discreet about her fetish. I don’t point out the obvious: Parading

around a convention hall in downtown Tampa dressed as a horse might

blow her cover.

Lavender and her boyfriend, Logan, are newbies to pony play, hav-

ing only gotten into the scene a couple of months earlier. They already

have the fanciest of tack plus the purple corral. Logan, a professional

set builder, constructed it for her as a romantic gesture and set it up in

her living room.

“We didn’t wade in. We dove,” Lavender says and laughs. “When we

started we couldn’t do anything.”

“Agh, we were horrible,” Logan says.

Turns out pony play involves even more than modified horse tack

and an abundant imagination. Learning how to canter, trot, and re-

spond to the reins and bit takes practice. Even tougher is forgetting

that you are a human who is pretending to be a horse. I am not being

facetious. The pinnacle of ponydom is mental transference, a horse-

autopilot, which they call “pony space.”

Lavender hasn’t achieved that stage and is not sure she wants to.

“To me it’s a little intimidating because they actually become ponies,”

she says. “They actually have problems with mirrors. They look into a

mirror and don’t know who they are. They think it’s another pony.”

To Lavender, pony play is more about control and performance, an

proof

extension of the BDSM lifestyle she’s been into for about four years.

Logan was playing master long before they met. They are both Florida

natives.

“There have been many nights when we’ve spent hours on the phone

going over what we did the night before, talking about what we liked or

didn’t like, where we want to go with it,” Logan says. “That’s the thing

with this relationship—you have to spend time working at it.”

Lavender suggests I talk to more experienced pony players and

points out Foxy, an Ocala cowboy who trains equines and human po-

Mod

nies. She speaks of him and his wife, Sherifox, in a reverential tone.

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They are the reigning Grand Champions of International Pony Play.

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This explains the ribbons hanging on the stall. Human ponies com-

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pete. But what does one do to win an international pony play title? And

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is competition another fetish in itself?

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The answers will have to wait. Sherifox isn’t around, and Foxy is

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leaving for home.

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Being a former owner of a real horse—or bio-horse, as human po-

5

nies refer to them—I’m intrigued by the bridle headstall. The thick

9

leather tack with its colorful doodads is fancier than anything my horse

ever wore.

Lavender says it and the tail cost $650. She bought the custom-made

gear from Foxy, who’s also a leathersmith.

I run my fingers across the coarse black hair of the plume that mim-

ics a mane and marvel that it feels natural.

“It’s real horsehair,” Lavender says. “It’s from a real horse’s tail.”

These people take their role-playing seriously. The person who wears

this Gucci of pony play tack also isn’t likely to get away. The steel bit

and curb chain, which fits under a bio-horse’s chin, are heavy gauge

and appear to be made for an actual equine. In real-horse world, the

bit forces the animal to be submissive. The metal bar fits in a horse’s

tender mouth so that if the steed resists, it will feel a slight pain.

At the moment, the symbolism doesn’t fully register. Lavender and