JohnWarren
Posts: 3807
Joined: 3/18/2005
From: Delray Beach, FL
Status: offline
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I've been posting messages for a month or so, but haven't gotten around to posting an introduction. Consider that obligation fulfilled NOW [smile]. One advantage of the earlier postings is I think the question of my identity has been pretty much thrashed out.
I’ve been in the scene for quite a while. One of my standing jokes is my first set of nipple clips was made from live trilobites, but in truth, did my first scene in 1964. It’s hard for people now to remember what it was like back then. There was no Internet; even its daddy, Arpnet, was only a gleam in the eyes of a few geeks. There were no nonfiction books on how to do this stuff. The first gay how-to, The Leatherman’s Handbook over half a decade away; the first lesbian one, The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, a quarter century, and the first one basically for heterosexuals, Jay Wiseman’s SM101 would not appear until after 1990. The serious psychological works had taken their cue from Kraft Ebbing’s Psychopathica Sexualis and roundly predicted that anyone who did this sort of stuff was bound, in a few years, to be stuffing dead bodies into trunks and writing missives with human blood. This, I probably don’t need to be telling you, that wasn’t good for my peace of mind.
It didn’t help that this was before the days of open stacks in academic libraries. The procedure in those days was for a student to submit a slip with the call numbers of books he wanted to read. Not only was there more than a bit of paranoia in telling the powers that be you wanted to read about violent perversion, but those books were on a “closed list” and you had to have permission from a psych professor even to look at them. Fortunately, this was also before the days of burglar alarms in college libraries. It’s amazing how much more credible pure bullshit sounds when you are reading it by the light of a penlight clutched in your teeth.
There were no support groups. There weren’t really any groups at all. Oh, there were whispers about a New York/Long Island club of rich men and beautiful women, which we now know was run by Charles Guyette and is probably the model for all the “secret European societies” about which bullshiters love to talk about on the net. But a group like this was hardly accessible to “real people.” For that, we had to wait for Eulenspiegel to appear in 1970, but, even then, unless you lived in or near Manhattan, you were out of luck. I didn’t live in Manhattan or even within 200 miles of the city. Even if I had heard about it, Eulenspiegel might as well be on the Moon.
The lack of groups and direct contact led to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance. It is the feeling that ones needs and feelings are unique, unshared. That one is isolated and alone. This in turn creates a feeling akin to guilt, as if one is a freak, different, unworthy of society. A simple model is a dictatorship with an active secret police. Even if every member of the society including the members of the secret police want to overthrow the dictator, if they can be prevented from expressing those thoughts, they are left feeling that they are the only ones holding them. This makes action effectively impossible. Look at how quickly the Soviet Empire vanished once people began to express their disproval. If anything, the mechanism is more powerful in sexual matters.
Still, I was luckier than most. My first partners were a lesbian couple who needed a top. The switch half of the couple wanted a chance to bottom while the bottom was understandably jealous of other women. As a male, I wasn’t seen as a threat. Believe me, being the “insignificant other” in such a relationship is a sure cure for Top’s Disease. Because of my relationship with them, they occasionally took me to a leather bar in Providence, Rhode Island. At that time, lesbian women were welcome at gay bars because their presence provided the regulars with a “beard” should the police arrive. “Hell, officer, we ain’t queer. Look ‘et the broads.”
This was my first exposure to what has become known as The Old Guard. Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t part of their scene. I wasn’t even particularly welcome. The situation was like a not particularly beloved relative coming to visit with her pet poodle. “As long as he stays off the sofa and doesn’t piddle on the floor, he can stay” sort of thing. But I did get to see the interaction and some of the play, a good bit of which we brought into our own relationship. Hell, I hadn’t even seen a flogger before then. But knowing there were others doing consensually what I wanted to do helped a lot.
Later, I heard about and made a few trips to Hellfire in New York. These were both exhilarating and frustrating. It was wonderful to see hetero people playing and know I wasn’t alone in a global sense, but it was also frustrating to know that but to return to relative isolation, where my play partners were ostensibly vanilla women whom I seduced into kink. There was also a lot of guilt, wondering if I hadn’t awakened appetites that they wouldn’t be able to satisfy once the relationship had run its course.
Much later in the mid-80s, I joined Threshold after encountering the group at The Lifestyles Convention in Las Vegas. Then, I got a job in New York and was able to attend Eulenspiegel events, soon I was lecturing there. Much of the beginnings of The Loving Dominant comes from my lecture notes.
Then, the best thing in my life happened. I got an email through Prodigy saying only, “I think we share some things in common.” That was how I met Libby, my wife, my partner, my best friend, the center of my life.
And this provides a segue into the online world. My first contact with online BDSM was in 1978, at, what was then, a relatively limited network run by Compuserve. Part of their offerings was what they called The CB Simulator. In effect, it was the first group of chat rooms, real-time interaction. Channel 13 had been taken over by the BDSM crowd. It was tentative; everyone was still learning; for many, this was their only exposure to BDSM, but it was another crack in the shell of pluralistic ignorance.
Later there was the discovery of Usenet and the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage. However, the sense of liberation wasn’t total. There were still powerful forces trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. For example, Prodigy, where Libby and I met, explicitly forbad any discussion of BDSM on their bulletin boards (remember, that back then real-time communication was rare and most communication was made up of messages left and read on bulletin board systems). We, the Prodigy forces for kink, got around this by posting in the literature section and making it seem that our messages were about Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty series. The powers that be might have been squicked by any hint that people actually did this, but they were content with our discussing books by a noted author.
It was largely in reaction to this that when Libby and I finally got together one of the first things we did was to obtain a computer bulletin board and dedicate it to open and unlimited communications between people interested in BDSM. This became The Boston Dungeon Society (now known as The New England Dungeon Society.) The plan from the beginning was to let BDS grow until it could stand on its own and then turn the corporation and its treasury over to the members. That happened in 2001 when we took a deep sigh of relief and became “just another couple of members.”
In 2004, Libby and I moved to Delray Beach in Florida where we joined SPICE, a wonderful group, of which we are still active members.
We have a small circle of regular play partners and both occasionally play casually with others at events and parties.
[wide grin] It's a good life.
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www.lovingdominant.org
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A belated introduction - 
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