Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (19 page)

Logan are jolly, and their pony play seems more like child’s play than

a fetish. When Logan offers to let me try on the headstall, the idea

seems silly and innocent, like trying on someone’s absurd hat. Plus,

how many opportunities does a Vanilla get to try on a human pony

bridle?

The headdress is as heavy as a basket of fruit. Once atop my head,

the weight of the plume forces me to stand straight, shoulders back,

proof

and for a second I imagine this must be how a Las Vegas showgirl feels

wearing a gargantuan display of glitz. Then before I realize what’s hap-

pening, Logan pulls the bit across my laughing mouth and fastens it.

Suddenly, I am not a happy pony. A submissive I am not.

Lavender doesn’t look enthused, either. Her boyfriend just put her

bit in another woman’s mouth.

After a couple of minutes of Logan fussing with the fitting, I politely

ask, as plainly as possible with a metal bar in my mouth, to be unbri-

dled. Lavender helps Logan free me.

All is well, nice and giggly, but as I leave the pony people I wonder if

maybe I wasn’t being recruited to join their herd.

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Buddha of Love

egnir Back on the exhibit floor, Wonder Woman is at work crushing human-

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ity. She stomps a miniature city, breaking plastic cars, high-rises, and

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2-inch people. A video camera projects her rampage onto an adjacent

television screen. She appears a giantess in the same way a toy lizard

looked like a goliath monster in Godzilla movies, except with even less

realism. Fortunately, her macrophile fans—men who fantasize about

being dominated by larger-than-life women—by necessity have big

imaginations.

They pay about forty dollars a month to watch similar performances

by Wonder Woman and other giantesses on a private website. “It’s a

pretty good job,” Wonder Woman says while resting her obliterating

feet. “I mean, all I have to do is step on these little men and stuff.”

“Do you ever want to laugh while you’re doing it?” I wonder aloud.

“Yeah, at first. But then I started thinking about it psychologically. I

think people like it because it takes them back to their childhood when

they watched movies with giant women, King Kong. So, so what? It’s

not hurting anybody.”

Touché.

Or not.

Wonder Woman’s giantess videos are good clean fun compared

to crush films, a closely related erotica. At the dark end of the fe-

tish spectrum, these taboo films show living things being crushed to

death: insects, small animals—even humans. And yes, that fetish has

an infamous Florida story. In an extreme case of sexual stupidity, an

proof

Okeechobee man with a crush fetish had someone drive over him in

a Honda Pathfinder. He later died, and the resulting investigation re-

vealed that he had been operating a small crush-film business and shot

videos of his wife stomping small animals to death.

Crush films are illegal in the United States and Europe. Not surpris-

ingly, no one even whispers about them at Fetish Con. Under the bright

lights of the convention hall, sex seems merely playfully twisted.

Jim “the Buddha of Love” Hay (Torvea), a fixture on the sex trade

show circuit, explains that congeniality is what makes Fetish Con

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unique—and fun. “You have DomCon in L.A., which is a lot of BDSM;

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sci-fi kink at Frolicon in Atlanta; and Mr. Leather in Chicago. But here

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you get everything, a lot of diversity,” he says. “There’s a lot of accep-

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tance of one another.”

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A portly man with a ceaseless smile, Jim owns Torvea Toys in

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Atlanta, which is one of the sponsors of the event’s after-parties.

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He stands proudly amid a vast inventory of dildos, anal plugs, rub-

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ber vaginas, remote-control vibrating panties, and various other sex

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toys and seems not to notice that the couple perusing his wares are

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cross-species; the plain-dressed man leads a bikini-clad woman who is

painted like a leopard and wears plastic whiskers.

The leopard purrs as her master examines Torvea’s line of I Rub My

Duckie Toys™, which look like a children’s bathtub rubber duck, except

it also vibrates for Mom’s pleasure.

Jim carries on to me about trends in the sex-toy industry like a car

manufacturer might talk of his top sellers. He says that kinksters are

moving away from traditional plastic sex toys to hypoallergenic gels

and latex-free pleasure tools. Even fetishists are going green.

The sex-toy business hasn’t been immune from the Great Recession,

he laments. The trade show circuit has been cut in half. Fetish Con con-

tinues to thrive because it is “the best party of the year,” he says, tran-

sitioning from businessman to the Buddha of Love. “If we only went to

one show a year, I’d want to come to Fetish Con . . . I get to see all my

friends. You’ve got the after-parties in Ybor, and then there is the pool

party after everyone comes back to the hotel.” Jim says he’s made good

friends with the fetish models at these pool parties and describes him-

self as their protector and somewhat of a boy-Friday, retrieving odds

and ends and assisting them in any way they ask. “I got my nickname

at a pool party here one year,” he says, grinning like a Buddha of Lust.

Having attended the Vamps and Vixens after-party the night before,

proof

I can envision what those after-after-parties may entail.

“I Am a Whore”

Nighttime fetish parties are a highlight of the kinky lifestyle. Fetishists

get to show off their creative costumes as well as their bodies. It’s exhi-

bitionism on crack. For the sake of those who have never attended and

to better understand Jim’s love of the after-hours scene, I must diverge

with a snapshot of how surreal these affairs can be.

For starters, the Fetish Con after-party was held at Ybor City’s Cas-

tle nightclub, which has a regular cast of patrons right out of children’s

fables and dark comic books. Peter Pan, Batman, a coven of fanged

vampires, dozens of Goths, and a man known as “The Senator,” who

wears nothing but sheer teddies, all make weekly appearances. Add two

thousand visiting fetishists in full regalia and the two-story club be-

came a Mad Tea Party.

A male-female couple wore only leather body harnesses; male and

female mimes in Victorian gowns; an Elvira look-alike sauntered

around in a low-cut plastic evening gown; a shirtless man wore a furry

horse head.

Busty women cinched in corsets and pouring out of leather bust-

iers were as common as witches at a Halloween party. Rubberists—

latex and PVC fetishists—paraded around like royalty. Many are part

of south Florida’s glam fetish scene, where the epitome of fashion is

four-hundred-dollar-and-up revealing latex wear that fits like a sausage

casing.

In the Dungeon bar, a blindfolded sex slave with clothespins pinch-

ing his nipples was spreadeagled and tied to a cobweb of chains. Woman

lined up to write graffiti messages such as “I am a Whore” on his un-

naturally tan body.

Upstairs, fetish go-go dancers—saucy wood nymphs, postmodern

geishas, and a host of indescribably costumed nubile women—gyrated

to the frantic beat of the house mix above a sea of leather, latex, and

skin. Occasionally the stage lights came up, silencing the crowd and

introducing sexual sideshows; Gypsy Rose meets Jim Rose Circus.

Kinky uses of otherwise normal objects are standard in fetish per-

formances. One breast-tasseled performer’s shtick was fruit. After fin-

gering a cantaloupe held between her legs and deep-throating a peeled

proof

banana, she pulled a stemmed cherry from her panties and dropped it

in her mouth.

The hourglass-figured headliners got busy with power tools like

those found in a garage—well, almost. A porn star rubbed a spinning

foot-long dildo attached to a drill all over her scantily clad body. A for-

mer
Penthouse
model stripped to a metal torpedo bra, then did what

comes naturally to women in steel underwear: She put a power grinder

to her DDD cups. Grrrrrr!!! Sparks flew like in a welding shop, and for

more than an instant, she lit up like a Fourth of July sparkler.

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Although somewhat daring, these acts were exactly that—acts.

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Jim’s a fetish-show veteran, and I gather his enthusiasm comes from

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the after-after parties back at the Hyatt where the false eyelashes, la-

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tex, and steel underwear come off. During Fetish Con, the hotel houses

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fetish performers, latex models, superhero wrestlers, and the twenty-

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something anime schoolgirls who look fourteen. They have been on

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display all day as human sex toys, signing autographs, posing for model

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shoots, making fetish videos in hotel rooms, and performing kinky acts

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onstage. In the early-morning hours at the hotel pool, they are free to

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party without their temptress facades. No wonder Jim is crazy about

Fetish Con.

For the Love of Fur

At the convention, the scenery gets furrier as the hours bump by. I’m

referring to fetishists like the leather-bound EverReady bunny who get

turned on, or “yiffy” as they call it, by anthropomorphic characters.

Furries have their own language and porn, which in furry-speak is

called “furotica.” In jest, furries refer to furotica lovers as “furverts,”

although the moniker isn’t so funny when coming from Vanillas.

Before you beat up Mickey Mouse for posing for a photo with your

child, it’s important to note that not everyone who enjoys dressing up

like a team mascot gets sexually aroused by it. Fur fans are so for a vari-

ety of reasons; sometimes sex is a component, sometimes not. Though

odd in any context, the world of furry fandom is quite complex. Most

simply, “furry” is an umbrella term for people who have an extreme

passion for anthropomorphic characters. For some, furridom is merely

a geeky pastime that they play online.

The percentage of furs that fetishize cartoon animals is widely de-

bated even in their community. In the universe of fetishes, furver-

proof

sion is so obscure that even the National Coalition of Sexual Freedom,

which advocates for the kinkier set, hasn’t attempted to measure it. At-

tempts to quantify the fetish are complicated by few furs being willing

to openly admit they fantasize about Sonic the Hedgehog or Renamon

the fox. Not just because it’s strange, but the Vanilla world sometimes

confuses the fetish with bestiality, which is altogether different. An-

thropomorphic characters are completely fictional. They have qualities

of humans and animals. They can even be morphs of multiple species,

some of which are purely mythological. Because of that, interspecies

furry mating is common if only of necessity. Finding a fellow furry

zebra-dragon to yiff with is like discovering Cinderella’s slipper in Lake

adi

Okeechobee.

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Despite the cloudiness over the degree of fetishism in fur fandom, it

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is safe to say that Florida has a relatively large furry jungle. An online

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Orlando furry community lists more than 450 members, and another

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statewide group has more than 800, about a fourth of whom actually

dress up in fur; they are called fursuiters.

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The Orlando area has more makers of anthropomorphic costumes

As evidenced by

the bunny’s bond-

age wear, some-

times one fetish is

not enough. Photo

by Lori Ballard.

proof

than anywhere else in the world, according to the Fursuit Database, a

comprehensive online registry conceived by a fursuiter known as the

raccoon Growl. The registry doesn’t include creators of theme-park cos-

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tumes. One of the largest fursuit makers listed, a nonfurry arts major

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living in central Florida, didn’t want to be named and preferred not to