by Gloria Brame
Keynote Speech delivered at Leather Leadership 2009, Atlanta, GA
Tonight, I want to talk to you about the past, the present and the future.
I’ll start in the 1980s, because that’s when I started going to SM clubs and events. To people of my generation, leathersex and sadomasochism were forbidden, hidden, radical activities. The guilt and shame about it were crushing. For many of us, accepting we were into SM meant accepting that we were just plain fucked up. That’s what we’d been taught to believe, anyway.
Paranoia ruled: everyone was profoundly aware that, at any time, in any place, the revelation that you were involved in so-called perversion could mean you’d lose your job, your family, your reputation. We all used scene names, held firm to the social code of never outing anyone, of never even acknowledging someone you knew from the clubs when you saw them on the street. We tiptoed around like people who could, at any time, be arrested: because we were people who could, at any time, be arrested, simply by virtue of the toys we used and the type of sex we enjoyed.
In the early 1980s, we also believed ourselves to be a tiny sexual minority. Particularly in the het scene, which was the scene I knew best. There were only a handful of clubs in NY, and many of the same people showed up at them. SM seemed like a small world. When the Internet came along in the mid 1980s, things started to change. People who would never step into a club began to participate on SM boards. People who lived in remote places and didn’t even realize there was anyone out there who shared his or her weird sexual fantasies suddenly discovered there were entire websites and chatrooms catering to those fantasies. Masters and slaves crawled out of the woodwork — well, ok, the slaves crawled. The dominants swaggered out.
I remember walking into Paddles in NY one Saturday night in 1987, just in time to catch the tail-end of a Mr. Drummer contest. I was surrounded by a couple of hundred of impossibly hot gay men, dressed (and undressed) in leather, head to toe, all of them openly affectionate, upbeat, idealistic, and utterly beautiful to me. Most beautiful of all was that the men looked so proud and so comfortable with themselves. If the club had started levitating I wouldn’t have been surprised. The energy was that high. I marveled at these people, and many more like them, who had achieved the sense of unity and oneness in leather that I witnessed that night.
You could feel it. These men shared a unified vision of leathersex, centered on a shared community vision of ethical behavior and personal honor. There was a lot of work to do to spread that vision, and they were doing it. Some of the men in the room that night built the backbone of our assumptions about what leather is, what leather can be. The 80s gave birth to “safe, sane, consensual.” It was a time when the language of SM was being defined, when issues of consent in power relationships were fiercely debated. People cared deeply about the issues and politics that affected BDSMers’ lives.
By the early 1990s, political activism to advance the acceptance of leather people kicked into high gear — from marching in Pride Parades to forming committees and organizations to help educate the vanilla public on the truth about BDSM. The 1990s were in some ways the fruition of the vision of the activists of the 1980s. We saw an unparalleled growth in sympathetic information and education about BDSM, a dizzying rise in attendance at clubs and events, more sash queens than I could shake a whip at, and successful efforts to found critical BDSM institutions such as the Leather Archives and Museum, the Domestic Violence Project, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, the Woodhull Foundation and many others you’ll learn about this weekend.
A new public dialogue about BDSM emerged as well, in part prompted by the publication of Different Loving by Random House in 1993. Perhaps most significantly, however, was the growing popularity of the Internet where hundreds of players and activists began to build influential sites and groups which, in turn, began attracting thousands and then millions of visitors.
Tragically, even as the Scene was growing in size and dimension, we were losing the very people who’d once led us. AIDS took so grave a toll on leather leadership that, by the late 1990s, many of the most skilled and politically astute leaders were dead, and many of those who remained were exhausted and grieving. The people who stepped up to the plate to keep the projects and missions alive gave their hearts and souls to fulfilling their lost leaders’ goals. It still wasn’t enough. Some groups and clubs vanished with their leaders; some were abandoned because they couldn’t draw high-quality volunteers. Others ran out of funding and didn’t know how to raise more. Others are still hanging in there, but many are struggling.
And now we’re nine years into the new century. Now, at a time when BDSM appears to be more mainstream than ever, when we know there are not just a few hundred of us in the world but millions of us, we seem to be drawing fewer people than ever to leather events, while support for BDSM businesses and institutions is dwindling. Even though there are very few people for whom a five or ten dollar donation would be a genuine hardship, many BDSM organizations are in desperate financial straits. It’s not the economy, either. It is, I believe the mentality. Or, more precisely, it’s that we, as a community, have not developed a new agenda for the 21st century that inspires contemporary kinksters.
In the 21st century, people under 35 can barely remember a time before the Internet. They’ve seen all the porn and gone to a lot of parties. They’ve attended clubs but felt bored. They are so aware of the vastness of the SM/fetish worlds, that they don’t feel amazed with delight just to meet another kinky person, the way many of us did back in the 70s and 80s.
There was a time in Scene history when just talking with fellow perverts was enough excitement to keep coming back. These days you’re never more than a few keystrokes away from hooking up with one for casual play. So what does the organized scene offer this generation that is new or different? What can they find they they aren’t finding already on-line?
Ironically, even as the BDSM/fetish/leather communities are undergoing a sea-change, not a whole lot has changed in the way the straight world treats us. Progressive media outlets may be speaking candidly about us, and more clinical studies — such as two published recently, demonstrating that SM leads to increased intimacy — may be proving that, gee, lots of sane people do this stuff and have a good time too; but media reports and the laws governing consensual sex still paint BDSMers into a grotesque Victorian corner.
For example, you may have read about the murder last week of George Weber, a NYC radio personality who hooked up on-line with a young SM hustler. The story was reported all over the media and in almost every case, you could read the moral of the story between the lines: it was SM that killed George Weber. He was asking for it. Or perhaps you read about the tragic murder in Philadelphia last year, when a NY Scene regular kidnaped a prodomme he was obsessed with and fatally shot her fiance before killing himself. The NY Post headline read SLAIN BY S&M MADMAN OBSESSED WITH VICTIM’S WHIP-MISTRESS GIRLFRIEND. In fact, the story was a classic love triangle. A pretty young woman split her affections between two men and a dangerous rivalry developed. Things gradually escalate to a horrifying but almost predictable climax: murder. We’ve seen it on Forensic Files dozens of times. But when did you ever see a headline describing someone as “Vanilla Madman?” Or an “Only Likes Missionary Position” Girlfriend?
When it comes to people like us, the press — and the law — always feel entitled to target our sexuality and hold it up to public ridicule. When media and courts put the spotlight on bondage and SM sex acts instead of treating us like other human beings, they show a bias against BDSM. The common belief that crime and BDSM are intrinsically linked, which is statistically untrue, is another subtle form of hate speech which fuels more fears and lies about who we actually are.
We should learn a lesson from gay and lesbian non-kink activists who have done a superb job controlling their image and steering dialogue away from “what we do in bed” to “what rights should we expect as Americans.” If the gay community had made butt-fucking and pussy-licking the center of their activism, I don’t think they’d be where they are now. Similarly, I don’t think we should try to win consensus approval for our love of whipping and bondage. We don’t need straights to give us permission to have the kind of sex that satisfies us: we just need them to agree that we deserve the right to have it.
And this leads me to question whether there is something about the things we, as a community, stress and show to the world that encourages people to cling to their prejudices. I believe wholeheartedly in the value of candor and being yourself, without apology. But more than ever, I question the proliferation of explicit details about WIITWD, especially in the absence of solid public debate about who it is that we are. When we educate — to non-kink communities or even in our own spaces — why do we put all the emphasis on the toys we use and the methods we devise to intensify our erotic pleasures? When our events stress elements of play is that activism or is it exhibitionism? I’ve met people who think they’ve changed the world by teaching people how to do a hot wax scene.
By emphasizing play at parties, or focusing on skills with toys, education about the reality of being and living as a BDSMer is obscured. It sends the message that we are what we do with toys, not how we treat our partners. At the very least, we are both and, from my perspective, how well people can use a toy is meaningless if they are shit human beings. Honestly, I love a good play party, and have learned from demos, and definitely don’t want to take the toys out of kink. But why have the things we do become the definition of our community, rather than the values we uphold, the amazing dialogues about sex we have built, and the creative ways we live?
I think the new century presents us with new opportunities to embrace the challenge of completing the work our leather forebears began. It isn’t enough that cops tend to leave us alone now; we need to change the laws that give prosecutors the right to arrest us on whim. We need to fight back against the ongoing onslaught of ignorant condemnation that spews from conservative think tanks, anti-porn feminists, and other groups committed to denying people sexual freedom. Indeed, most people in the BDSM community will tell you they can’t come out because they are afraid of the social and legal implications. So what are we doing about changing that? Under existing laws, any prosecutor who really wants to screw a BDSMer can do so. There may be more of us, and we may be more open, but we are just as legally vulnerable today as we were 30 years ago when I first came out.
I think that leather activism in the 21st century must become more relevant to the world as it is today. It’s a world that needs a lot of fixing when it comes to equal rights for sexual minorities. It’s crucial for BDSMers to start taking themselves seriously as an oppressed sexual minority and to fight back. We could develop the political power to fight job discrimination, selective prosecution, and all the other social injustices we face.
Maybe if newcomers could come into a community that had some clear political goals and a unified vision for change, they would spur new passion and commitment.
I dream of a world where people recognize sexual rights as human rights, a world where adults are never penalized for mutually consenting sex. If we are to maintain the health and vitality of the SM community, we all need to dream about what the future could hold for us if we take action now.
I hope that as you go through your classes this weekend at LLC, you will ask yourself “what kind of world can we build as a community?” and “what can I personally do to make the BDSM world a happier, prouder, more unified place?”
Set aside your past grievances and look to the future. The tools for change are all here this weekend, the ideas are all out there. We have any number of groups represented here who are depending on you to rally support for them when you return to your local community. Visit with as many as you can. Find the project or projects which intrigue you the most and learn all you can. Bring that energy back home and use it to motivate your people to do something meaningful at your next meeting — like hold a fund-raiser or hold intensive discussions about BDSMers’ place in the world. Step out of your comfort zone and make alliances whenever possible. Join arms with all consenting adults whose sexual rights are routinely trampled — be they trans, poly, swing, sex-workers, or anyone else — and stand up for every adult’s right to choose what kind of sex to have.
The past is over. Let us honor it. The present is here. Let us do something meaningful with it. The future is coming. Let us build a vision for it together.