National Leather Association International Awards? Why yes, I would be most honored!

May 122013
 

Greetings from Sweden…where I’m in bed having my ass kicked by my very first ever combo sinus-throat-ear infection. Sinus and throat infections I’ve had before but the ear thing is new and I had no idea how awful they can be. Add to that I’m in a beautiful country with awesome, kinky folks who have phased out the use of antibiotics unless, you know, you’ve been stabbed with a knife made of pus, and who do not sell ANYTHING that resembles real pain relieving drugs and you can imagine the agony of the last 4 days.

It doesn’t help to relieve the pain but it is pretty cool to see that results of the National Leather Association International 2013 have hit the streets!

NLAI personally had three pieces I’d written make it to the finalist round, and I am SOhumbled and honored to share that I did win the Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award (AND the honorable mention. !!!) for my work.

You can read Collars & Closure & Owning Myself.

And the book that Lee and I worked so hard to create and share, also won! The 2013 Geoff Mains Non-fiction Book Award went to “Playing Well With Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities.” In an excellent moment of win, the Honorable Mention in this category which was to the book Tristan edited, The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge
in which two of my finalist essays appear, so I feel like I can raise the roof a little on that one, too.

The full list of winners are below…congrats and kudos to EVERYONE who participated!

NLA-I AWards 2012 Winners.
Continue reading »

Dropping in to London!

May 012013
 

sh!I am on my way over to Europe for the Stockholm Fetish Week and I will be popping over to London to see what kinky mischief I can make!

I will be at the Sh! Women’s Store on May 15th, 16th & 17th teaching three classes and would love to see you there!

There will be copies of Playing Well With Others for sale, as well as copies ofToybag Guide: Playing With Taboo and I will also have DVDs of my talks on Submission as I recorded them for Kink Academy!

I also offer private coaching, mentoring and Kink Counseling sessions, about which you can read here. Please contact me directly if interested in scheduling one while I am in London! Continue reading »

Sinful Sunday: Oracle’s crop.

Apr 282013
 

Oracle

I was able to attend the International Ms Leather contest last week and for the main event, I did myself up in my pony garb. I am still getting used to showing up places in that character, and it took me quite a while to get comfortable with that facet of my kink.

I am not sure I am still entirely comfortable.

But what is life as a pervert for if not growing and challenging what it means to be a fully realized sexual creature?

have some pony gear, and I do enjoy the look and feel of it. Last winter when I was in London, my dear friend Patti, who was also visiting from the US, took me out to the theater. And then took me out to Harrods, where she gifted me with some pony accouterment.

One is a stiff, bristly brush. This show crop I am holding in this photo is the other.

It has not been used yet…I did, however, stumble across it as I was repacking my suitcase. It is beautiful…bouncy yet firm. And tightly stitched in leather, capped with tidy silver ends.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to have either the crop or the brush incorporated into a scene, but perhaps soon…I will be in Sweden where Mistress Rebecca Wilcox will be delighted to see Oracle again. And I’ll also be in London, conducting a few classes. Perhaps I will bring Oracle along there, too, and see if anyone might be interested in meeting Oracle. I do love finding the strange headspace of animal role-play…and I  have been told she is quite charming!

Happy Sinday!

Sinful Sunday

TheGrio tackles “Race Play…” rather well, actually!

Apr 232013
 
S&M gear

Yeah, I’d pull that apart in about 90 seconds. But it IS pretty!

I was contacted recently by award-winning journalist Alexis Stodghill, writing from an MSNBC e-mail address and on the staff of TheGrio.com. She asked me if I’d be interested in answering a few questions about BDSM, specifically race play, since I’d been quoted in a column that is getting a whole lot of talk and that touches on that topic. The column, a response to a letter sent to Abiola Abrams, hit on the critical issue of consent and boundaries in relationships. The most important thing, from my perspective as someone who speaks and teaches about consensual BDSM, was that the fact that some people do consent to edgy role-playing in a CONSENSUAL manner was addressed in Ms. Abram’s response.

Ms. Stodghill, seeing the resultant discussion, decided to ask me to expand on the topic. Yep yep, I was hesitant. The Black community is just starting to have more open discussion about sex, and to zipline right into dissecting a type of play that even some  jaded, hardened perverts won’t tough with a fen foot bullwhip and that incites completely understandable visceral reactions from the majority of people is…daunting. To say the least.

I wrote a response and hoped for the best. The full text of my answers to the questions is here.

Controversial letter goes viral as readers discuss ‘race play,’ a sexual fetish involving racial slurs

 I am most gratified to see that very difficult topics are starting to hit more mainstream media outlets with a careful, respectful, nuanced perspective rather than the easy and obvious take on BDSM and Alternative Sexuality. I am very grateful that Ms. Stodghill deftly handled this difficult topic, and if you appreciated her reportage, please consider letting her know so on Twitter or on Facebook.  We take small steps towards releasing shame and gaining understanding, small steps every day. These discussions are steps in an amazing direction, leading us closer to the place where we don’t have to live in fear of losing jobs, friends, family, being shunned by those we thought were friends because we live and love differently. May we continue to walk forward.

Mo Masocast!!!

Apr 142013
 

Ms Regan Black

Unspeakable Axe runs the Masocast, and I am delighted to have been invited to sit and chat with him for a while! We recorded it in… December, I think? My memory isn’t awesome and I don’t care all that much…at least not enough to so dig around in my Google calendar and scritch it up!

It was wonderful chatting with him. Intelligent, thoughtful, smart, funny…these are all things that have been said about me, and I am sure they apply to him, too. Fuckin’ with ya, man!

I had a wonderful time visiting and I’d love to have a rematch somewhere down the line…there are always more adventures to share!

 

 

Enjoy!

Small Pool Problems.

Apr 142013
 

In the midst of some pretty intense discussion of d/s and M/S stuff, a friend asked -

Her: So, who IS TheDominantGuy, really?
Me: His actual fake name is [REDACTED]
Her: OhMyGod I met him at ___ a few years back! [Insert titillating recounting of a fairly standard smoking hot TheDominantGuy breathless encounter] He’s really hot…
Me:I wouldn’t argue with that.
Her:…aaaand this probably isn’t making you feel any better.
Me:  No, but its a familiar owie.

It is funny how you can have a shared experience, a moment that seems like a funny passing coincidence and then it has an oddly deeper resonances. I mean, hey, it is a small subgroup, the kink / Leather / BDSM/ swinger / AltSex / Tantra wide world umbrella, right? We are bound to have people in common. And I don’t mind it, except, sometimes, I do.

And I wish it didn’t feel so strange to me to have people I know having had intimate moments with people with whom I have been intimate. But, it is. The friends I tend to play with tend to be prolific in their love and appreciation of the pleasures of the flesh. Or they’re just really slutty. Some days, I wish I were back in one of my sluttier phases. Enjoying playing and fucking and not limiting myself by needing to have deeper connection in order to get it. That would be cool…wouldn’t it?

Because right now I’m a little icy and cold with the loneliness thing. Which is ironic, because I am surrounded by so, so much love and warmth and awesomeness.

And I am grateful for it, because it keeps me from freezing over.

The Master’s Voice.

Apr 122013
 

His master's VoiceIn the midst of listening to my friend Midori conduct her most excellent class on “Aural Sex,” I had an epiphany and a small heartbreak. This is awkward when one is trying to simply listen and learn and absorb the teachings flowing through the moment.

While she was describing how one might use the voice to seduce, I thought about how perception of one’s own voice often varies from the reality of others. This is a science problem- we will not ever be able to hear our own voices as others hear it, because the speakers we carry in our skulls and ears will not have the emotional fidelity that hearing the voice of another carries. Add to that I am hyper-critical and hear each and every pitch break and plosive and slippery lisp whereas others give that shit a miss and just listen, and you’ll have a clue what is going on in my head and why it confuses me when people say they find my voice pleasing or sexy or what have you.

I realized though that the people who have triggered, in me, very visceral submissive responses all have had their first incursion via some particularly telling moment where they conveyed, in whispers and growls and lilting accents, their will, their lust, their desire, their curiosity, and that brought me to my knees.  Once surprisingly, once quite literally, and once a bit reluctantly but inexorably. Continue reading »

“Race Play:” hitting the mainstream media…?

Apr 112013
 

As a result of the fallout from Abiola Abrams most excellent column that dealt with non-consensual race play – in which I was quoted – I was contacted by The Grio, which is a pretty big deal news outlet geared towards African-Americans.  Or Blacks. Whichever you prefer. I’m all for brevity and I like saying ”BLACK!” so I opt for the latter.

But I digress.

So, The Grio is seeing this huge blowup about this column, they see me being all “No, you guys, sometimes it is OK.” And so they were all “So, race play. Tell us about that.”

!!!!!!!!

<deep breath>

OK. I’ll try. Again

I wrote as well as I could, and I doubt the’ll run my replies unedited. In the interest of journalistic integrity and shit, I’m posting the whole of what I wrote so that, if something is lost in translation, (or oft-necessary brutal editorial brutality) there will be a record of all I shared.

Q & A for The Grio (complete)

Continue reading »

Look, Mom! I got quoted in Essence!

Apr 082013
 

Fierce!

I am sure my Mother will be tickled. We used to love reading Essence. As a kid, it was amazing to see a magazine that was for Black people that had Black models looking beautiful and talked about our lives. All-around Sensuality Guru Abiola Abrams does a column for them,(which is, apparently, cross-syndicated to Huffington Post!) and she quoted me in it.

Peep it here!

I think Ms. Abrams’ response is spot-on. Fact is? This woman is in a situation where she is being emotionally abused beyond the limits of her consent. It is INSANELY effed up. I know love is powerful and shit but if someone I loved were THAT thick, that callous, and that dismissive about respecting my boundaries I’d be the fuck outtie and sue his ass for emotional abuse. I bet that would learn him something about buying people. No matter how far from the mainstream we might swim in order to fulfil our fantasies or explore kinky, twisted sex, we sure as hell had best be swimming in a stream of ongoing consent, assent and explicit permission. Otherwise…yeah. Straight fucked up. End of story.

It is still kinda funny to me to see my name cropping up with increasing frequency here and there in mainstream media news outlets. HOWEVER, this is a deeper and more subtle clue that the discussion of kink & BDSM is creeping toward a more nuanced level of discourse. It would be easy for a sex columnist – especially one writing for a magazine targeted towards the Black American demographic – to dismiss this whole situation as horrible and worthy of scorn. But the fact that Ms. Abrams saw the opportunity to disambiguate between sexualized racial play and what this woman’s husband is doing – which is non-con emotional abuse, IMO – isDEEPLY gratifying to see.

Go pervs!

Masters & Slaves & Love ~ Part One: Patrick Mulcahey’s Thoughts.

Mar 262013
 

“Big P” is also a pleasure to behold, no?

One of my friends who is also, secretly, someone I adore without boundary is Patrick Mulcahey. Not only is he one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever met on pretty much any topic involving Leather and BDSM, he’s also someone who walks the walk and talks the talk and steps up to the plate on many issues that other Leatherfolk decline to address. While I will never, ever forget how he took a stand, unlike so many other gay white Leathermen, in the face of the flagrant racist blackface act that was booked at the Portland Eagle. I won’t forget that, even as hundreds of other Leathermen belittled those of us who pointed out the hateful underpinnings of this act, he not only spoke to he spoke to his peers, calling out some pretty ugly truths.

Over the years, Patrick and I have had conversations about our lives, and about Leather, and about power exchange and so when I learned that he was doing a keynote at a Leather convention known for a very strong Master / Slave presence, and even more specifically aligned to certain beliefs that have become cannon on the M/S community, I was intrigued. And then I was hopeful that he might actually step up and share some of the more troubling realities of modern consensual m/s relationships  And, of course, he did not disappoint.

Below I am, with Mr. Mulcahey’s permission, posting the complete text of his speech. I cant read it without goosebumps and tears an…well.  A broad palate of emotional reactions.

I’ll be talking, a bit more, in another post, about my own struggles and thoughts on love within the Master / Slave dynamic. I have very strong opinions on this topic…and my opinions don’t  align with the social climate of  ”slaves are property and love will spoil, degrade and denigrate the purity of the master / slave relationship.” I have some very dear friends on all sides of this debate. And they’ve come to their own conclusions based on their experience, and their desires. It is less comforting to know that many come into the community see how others behave, and simply pick up on those beliefs without examining the level of resonance that they carry personally.

I invite you to read Mr. Mulcahey’s words, see where they resonate, and open your heart for a few minutes.

Continue reading »

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