Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (21 page)

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to find magazines that children aren’t supposed to see. I found one of

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these early BDSM magazines. As I was paging through it, I came across

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this girl decked out in full pony gear. I thought, ‘you mean people do

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this for fun?’” Lyndsey says. “She was holding herself so proud, and I

thought, ‘Oh my God, I’d love to do that.’”

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As the son of a University of Virginia music professor and part-time

Southern Baptist minister, Lyndsey tried to suppress her desires and

attempted to live a conventional life. She married her college sweet-

heart, and they raised two children in Indiana while Lyndsey taught

school.

Privately, she cross-dressed and enjoyed being bound and whipped

by her wife. When her masochistic needs became too extreme, her wife

turned her over to a professional dominatrix for a few years. Their mar-

riage eventually crumbled.

Divorced, Lyndsey moved to Florida in 2003 to start a new life. She

publicly came out as a transsexual woman. Four years later she met

Tim and other things came out of the closet, too; namely, a pony.

Lyndsey listed an interest in pony play on her profile on a Yahoo.

com fetish group site. Tim, a member of the group, pounced. He al-

ready had a ponygirl, but what’s not to like about having a small herd?

After some online chat, he called Lyndsey and asked, “Do you want to

be a pony?”

Without hesitation, Lyndsey responded: “Yes, Sir!”

Tim drove across the state to meet Lyndsey at a munch. They ar-

ranged their first training session. Lyndsey remembers the date as if

it were branded into her hide. On April 14, 2007, she became Tim’s

proof

ponygirl.

“What I wanted for Lyndsey was to become comfortable in her skin,”

Tim says of their early days. “As I was getting to know her, I thought

that a lot of what she had done with kink was about wanting to be a

pony, but not knowing how to ask for it. So I thought, ‘Let’s see how

she takes to this.’ Boy! Did she ever take to it!”

With little practice, Lyndsey achieved the Zen of pony play. When in

tack, she goes into pony space and loses awareness of her human self.

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She later doesn’t remember anything she did as a pony. “I can say I did

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something as a four-legged pony because I have my four-legged pony

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gear on,” Lyndsey says matter-of-factly. “I can’t tell you how many rides

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I might have given.”

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Because of her trance-like state, Lyndsey is at the mercy of her mas-

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ter’s care. As Lavender and Logan earlier mentioned, this goes to the

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core of every BDSM relationship: trust. The emotional bond that devel-

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ops is one of the appeals of the fetish. “You have to be able to trust the

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person who is handling you. You have to know that they aren’t going

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to do something that will injure you or harm you,” Lyndsey says. “You

become very close emotionally. For me, when I do pony work, I’m not

here as a human. I have to put my trust in him.”

Lyndsey finds being a pony very relaxing, even cathartic. It takes her

back to her childhood. “I had a pony when I was little,” Lyndsey says.

“Nobody could ride her but me. Now that I’m into pony play I think

that maybe she knew something that I didn’t at that time.”

As unusual as Lyndsey’s gender and desires are, down in the rabbit

hole with them it all seems almost natural. That is until the couple re-

veals that they believe that while in pony space Lyndsey becomes her

childhood pet Buttercup, an Arabian mare. “She acts like Buttercup,

sounds like Buttercup, and responds like Buttercup as she has told me

Buttercup acted,” Tim says.

No doubt reading the puzzlement on my face, Tim tries to explain.

“It’s an alternate personality, and it wants to come out, but it can’t

come out on its own. Twelve years ago, this wasn’t talked about even

in the kink circles. It was thought to be witchcraft, magic,” he whispers

for emphasis. “For most people, being a dominant or a master is about

training somebody when they are conscious all the time. I’m talking

about training somebody when they are another personality.” He gig-

gles. “There’s no guidebook for that.”

proof

Not all ponies go into pony space. Many just enjoy the role-playing,

the leather get-up and pageantry, even the competitiveness. Human

ponies identify with specific breeds of bio-horses, all based on their

skills and temperament rather than appearance, of course. “You can

often figure out, ‘Oh, I’ve got a Clyde,’ or ‘I’ve got an Arabian.’ Some of

’em are hard to determine, and they call themselves paints. They say,

‘Oh, I’m a paint of any of six different breeds.’ There are those that just

race, the Thoroughbreds,” Tim explains. “Everything you can imagine

from the equine world has been replicated in the human pony world.”

This includes the competitions Lavender mentioned at Fetish Con.

Human ponies barrel race, perform dressage, pull carts, harness race,

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and every other traditional equine competition along with some added

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challenges such as blindfolded performances. There’s even a human

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pony steeplechase, which Tim says Lyndsey is quite good at, given her

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long legs and hurdling experience in high school.

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I picture Lyndsey’s hulking frame in leather tack, red horsetail float-

ing behind as she gallops across a field, passing petite human ponies,

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her size-13 feet launching her over steeples. Yes, she could be a Grand

National champion in pony play world, except she’s the wrong breed.

Steeplechasers are Thoroughbreds, not Arabians.

Lyndsey and Tim practice gaits and pony routines in their open

backyard. They live in a semi-commercial area of town with no adjoin-

ing neighbors. Lyndsey pulls the red two-wheeled cart that Tim built,

maneuvers around pylons and sometimes jumps the hurdles. In winter,

when it gets dark early, they carry a flashlight.

Tim has high aspirations for his pony, but he keeps them secret. “I

have a plan and she doesn’t even know it,” he says as she sits silently.

“It would actually harm things if I told her.”

He’s proud of her progress. She picked up a third-place ribbon in her

first pony play competition held on a Texas farm. “She feels very confi-

dent with the cart. She can do tricky things with it,” Tim says. “She gets

competitive when she jumps. She likes to run, likes to run fast. She is

a well-rounded pony, which she knows is part of the program.”

It all sounds like people playing as children. After all, many pre-

video-game-era kids rode a rocking horse or played with a stick pony.

What’s so sexual about playing horse in your backyard or even in a large

arena?

The sexual aspect seems clearer when Tim shows me a photo essay

proof

that he arranged for
Equus
Eroticus
, an international pony play maga-

zine. A pretty young woman in tack is leaning down on all fours and

drinking like a horse from a murky stream. Aside from her horsehair

tail and bridle, she is totally nude, her female sex fully exposed to the

Florida sunshine.

My Vanilla mind assumes, given the pornography, that after the

high-stepping, barrel-racing, and general horseplay is over, these

scantily clad ponies end up being mounted by their masters.

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Tim says, no.

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Pony play for him and most others doesn’t culminate with a sexual

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act, he explains. “It’s never even been foreplay. It has roughly the same

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chance of becoming sex as dancing does. That’s true of most of what

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I do in the scene. I do a lot of strange things with people, but it’s not

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foreplay. It might excite me, but we don’t go home together.”

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Vanillas might consider this the most mind-blowing aspect of fe-

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tishes, and it is worth repeating: Fetishists, not just pony players,

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rarely have genital contact with their partners, at least during cosplay.

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Orgasm isn’t necessarily the goal. Some may later have conventional

sex, but during fetish play, particularly BDSM, the only fondled sex

organ is usually the mind.

Fetishes also often overlap, Tim explains. While pony play for Tim

and Lyndsey is an extension of their BDSM lifestyle, it also involves ex-

hibitionism, hence the competitions. “We’re sluts out in the open with

pony stuff, but we keep the rest at home, and that’s true with most of

the others you will meet,” Tim says. “At Fetish Con I’m a show-off. She’s

an exhibitionist. It’s a fetish all to itself. Most of the people there are

exhibitionists. That’s what we all have in common.”

Tim says there is also kinship between pony play and fursuiters, in

that they share animal cosplay. Tim founded a pansexual group, Flor-

ida Critters, that is open to all animal/anthro cosplayers and has more

than 350 members. He said a small group of BDSM furries who are os-

tracized by the wider furry community regularly attend their monthly

meetings held at various fetish clubs and farms in central Florida. They

have make-believe hunts where human ponies chase the furry canines,

felines, and even a dolphin. Tim says the furs invariably give up too

easily because they want to be tickled and scritched—fur language for

affectionate scratching. “It usually ends in a big puppy pile.”

Tim and Lyndsey offer to introduce me to the BDSM furries at an

proof

upcoming gathering. I later get an e-vite to “The Menagerie” being

hosted by Master Logan and his Ponygirl Lavender. The agenda prom-

ises a presentation by three furs and pony play performances by Ponyg-

room Tim and Ponygirl Lyndsey and the revered world champions from

Ocala, Foxy and Sherifox. I mark my calendar.

Finding the Inner Animal

I’ve never been to an official fetish dungeon before, much less one in

the middle of the afternoon. For all I know, it could be like the Fetish

Con after-party, or people might be running around wearing nothing

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but horse heads. Since the invite noted a potluck, I bring cookies.

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The private club is tucked at the back of a half-empty industrial

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building on a dead-end road in Largo, a middle-class city and retire-

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ment locale of about seventy-five thousand that abuts Clearwater. The

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metal building with its big garage doors owes its rise to the 2000s Flor-

ida real estate boom. Next door, pillars of an unfinished structure are

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overgrown with weeds, a skeletal reminder of that folly.

Inside, a bearded man wearing a black collared shirt and a shiny

silver pendant sits at an old desk and acts as the gatekeeper. The entry

room doubles as a fetish quick-stop retail center with a small selection

of torture implements for those who may have accidentally left their

cat-o’-nine-tails or crop at home.

The gatekeeper is the owner and only agrees to let me enter under

the condition that I don’t use his name or that of his club. He doesn’t

want publicity for fear that “religious extremists” will run his business

out of town—trepidation not completely unwarranted given the moral

outcry after the city manager came out as a transsexual woman in 2007.

The City of Largo fired her.

An odd mix of about thirty people mill around the make-believe

dungeon that under fluorescent lights could pass for a Disney day-care

center. Walls are painted to look like the inside of a castle complete

with crests. Folding chairs line the room. A bridle-less pony nibbles on

Little Smokies near the buffet table.

About half the crowd is dressed in street clothes, clearly the audi-

ence, and the others are in some degree of performance-prep.

That is except for Kevin, an older, bearded man and his chunky,

much younger submissive. She wears only panties and a black leather

hood. Her hands are crudely mitted in pink tape, and it’s impossible to

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tell if she is supposed to be a pony or just a run-of-the-mill sex slave.

Kevin doesn’t allow her to talk to anyone other than him. “She has to

ask me to go to the bathroom,” he says. They aren’t on the agenda.

The world champion pony couple are tacking up in the far corner be-

side a table of their Native American Exotics handicrafts: human pony

gear made with leather, feathers, and bone handles. Foxy is a man of

many talents. He’s also a taxidermist and a professional turkey and al-

ligator hunter. Ponygirl Sherifox is half Native American and claims to

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be a direct descendent of the celebrated Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce

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tribe. She and Foxy met on his cowboy travels through the West.

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Foxy is hard to miss. He looks like he just walked off the set of
Lone-

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some
Dove
. He has a graying handlebar mustache and a beard parted in