"Dear Patrick..." (February 2013 GROWING PAINS)

"Watching people play is both sort of boring and sort of uncomfortable for me. I was raised as a super conservative Catholic schoolgirl (complete with all-girls high school) so maybe I'm still trying to break out of that. Where are the inspiring places to go and watch?" Okay, maybe the problem is you. If you can’t break the joy-killing stranglehold of that Catholic girls’ school, enlist the help of a therapist from the Kink-Aware Professionals list, some of whom advertise with SOJ.  (None of them close by?  Lots of counseling is done by Skype these days.  Better the right therapist on your laptop than the wrong one in the building next-door.)

But your complaint is common enough that primary suspicion falls on the play you’ve been seeing. 

Public play seems to be in crisis, locally, nationally and every which way, for lots of reasons:

• An education scene that emphasizes technique and safety over passionate engagement.  The result is a shitload of play that manages to be complicated, clinical, stagy and boring all at the same time.
• Scene etiquette that drives serious players away.  Talking and laughing in the dungeon, uninvited touching (of bound bottoms yet!), screechy scenes that demand everyone else stop and watch Me, me, me! or move somewhere else.
• Dungeon monitors who are poorly trained, intrusive, or forever off monitoring the Doritos.
• “Nanny rules,” imposed by venues or municipalities, insisting on gloves and latex barriers or prohibiting blood, piss, wax, electro play, insertive sex.  Experienced players and players with fluid-bonded partners feel competent to assess and address for themselves the risks they take.  At home they can.
• The loss of brick-and-mortar leather/kink spaces, meaning fewer and more crowded dungeons, more competition for equipment, meaning not more but fewer opportunities per capita for play.
• Lack of quality control.  Somehow the notion has evolved that a play space is a public accommodation, like a movie theater, and the cost of admission should be all it takes to get in the door.  Which in our fewer, more crowded spaces adds up to more dreariness per square inch.

Newcomers to our scene bring talent, heat, perspective and energy we would languish without. But when the new and awkward are learning from the only slightly less new and awkward, we have reason to worry about the quality of play being modeled and emulated.  We need balance.  We need environments that attract players of all levels of experience and expertise, where the play on view expresses our longing, our passion, our values — is play that inspires, as you put it.

I don’t think you’re looking for new locations.  Few public dungeons are as roomy and well-appointed as our own S.F. Citadel.  What I think you want are different assemblies, different mixes of people, or maybe even just a little redirection. (Try approaching one senior person, even the party host or a dungeon monitor, to ask:  “If you were starting out, which players here would you watch and learn from?”)

Only you can say what turns you on, what genders and orientations and modes of play you find meaningful to watch.  Where does that community of players come together, and how often?  Sometimes it’s at regional events.  I’ve seen superb nuanced play at Southwest and Northwest Leather, at South Plains in Dallas, at Leather-Levi Weekend up north every August. I notice that a number of conference and event producers have begun to dispense with barrier rules and prohibitions against sex, which to my thinking is a step in the right direction. 

If you already know players you trust and want to see more of, why not organize your own party?  Rent public dungeon space on an off-night, or ask around and buy a couple of hours in one of our local private dungeons.  Don’t forget the Center for Sex and Culture; Carol and Robert are nothing if not game.  Hell, almost any garage or basement can be outfitted for play.  My friends Race Bannon and Larry Shockey have a handout on how to throw play parties; look me up and I’ll send you a copy. 

Patrick Mulcahey

(First published in Growing Pains, newsletter of the Society of Janus) 

BDSM Education, Has It Gone Too Far? (October 12, 2012 — RACE BANNON)

This post is a general response to a lot of online posts and discussions lately surrounding the topic of education within the BDSM and kink communities. I’m probably going to get a lot of crap for what I’m about to say, but so be it. Also, please realize that I say what I’m about to say as someone who values education considerably. I write about education a lot. I manage the education function in a large corporation including the development of instructor-led classes, e-learning modules, job aids, knowledge repositories and informal learning empowerment. One of my former careers is corporate trainer. I have an extensive background teaching kink classes and facilitating kink education events that goes as far back as when that trend began. Education is near and dear to me. So with all that said, I think the kink community (BDSM in particular) has gone off the deep end in terms of placing extensive education so front and center as essentially a requirement to being adequately kinky. I think this is a dangerous road to go down. My reasons for this opinion are many. Quite a few of these points were also brought up during the recent Leatherati Online Town Hall on the subject.

While there are many variations of kink classes, I’m going to focus specifically on BDSM education here because that’s been the focus of most of the kink education being done today, at least in the circles within which I run. And I will admit to some redundancy here having said some of this before elsewhere, but I think it’s worth repeating.

I think we have set up a false impression that for someone to be a skilled and safe BDSM player one must necessarily submerge themselves in a plethora of classes. That’s simply not true. For one thing, I contend that I could teach someone enough basic BDSM technique and safety guidelines in about a day to satisfy the bulk of a kinkster’s needs in order to have a safe and fun BDSM life. Would they know everything? Of course not, but the truth is most BDSM players don’t want or need to know everything. They simply need to know a few basics regarding the specific types of play that work for them and their partners. I don’t think there’s a BDSM player walking the Earth today that could honestly say they know how to do everything there is to do in BDSM with the utmost skill and confidence. That’s because few people want to do that. We like what we like. We might gaze from a distance upon various kinds of BDSM play and find it interesting, but when it comes to our own erotic lives we might have very little interest in such play.

Many people today are mingling amidst their fellow kinksters with an ongoing sense of self-doubt bolstered by the belief that is hammered home to them repeatedly that all good BDSM players are constantly taking classes and mired in a lifelong, never-ending formal educational process. Of course they feel this way. This is what is being fed to the newcomer BDSM player time and time again. Go to all the conferences and go to all the classes. Attend all of your local BDSM educational events. Read all of the books on the subject. Oh, and while you’re doing all of that, make sure you have a detailed knowledge of our history and current hot topics. It makes one wonder how anyone can find the time to actually play. Honestly, if you were just dipping your toe into the bathwater of BDSM to see if you liked it, wouldn’t you be dismayed and likely dissuaded if presented with all these supposed requirements. Many are.

We are doing our fellow kinksters no favors by promulgating this belief system. In fact, I think we’re doing our newcomers, and even our old timers, a tremendous disservice by doing so. You can get more details about my thoughts on this in my post, Can We Become Erotically Over-Educated?

The entire realm of “education” in BDSM is getting muddled. Far too often I’m hearing the education moniker being applied to BDSM technique classes while what I consider the far more important aspects of the learning that we do informally, in discussions and through experience relegated to the nice to have category. BDSM, like all good sex, must be rooted in passion, connection and individuality if its to rise to the levels of bliss and erotic contentment. That is never learned in a classroom. That is never taught by a teacher. It can be talked to, discussed and shared between players, but it can’t be taught. And if something that is so integral to the joy and meaning of good BDSM can’t be taught in the classroom, why are we focusing so much of our efforts on classroom-based education. We should be fostering more mentoring, socializing, playing, discussion and personal sharing opportunities. Yet we don’t. Go to any of the many BDSM-focused conferences or local classes and you’ll most often see a bunch of people in chairs staring at an instructor in front of the class detailing how to connect shackle X to chain Y. Useful knowledge perhaps, but it is simply the technical detail that must serve the overall BDSM experience. It is not the experience itself. We must never forget this.

I talk more about this in my post, Are Our Educational Efforts Backfiring?. I won’t reiterate what I wrote there again here, but suffice to say that I believe that many of our current approaches to BDSM education don’t optimally serve either newcomer or experienced kinksters, and they might actually be setting the entire movement back.

Add to all of this the fact that education in the general community is currently undergoing a transformation from a nearly entirely push (classroom) to more of a pull (self-education and informal learning) paradigm. There has been strong evidence for years that classroom-based teaching is not always the best way to learn things. It has significant shortcomings, especially for certain subjects. I contend that classroom-based teaching is one of the worst ways to learn BDSM except in certain specific instances. BDSM is about relationships. The entire experience takes place within the context of people interacting and doing things together. The classroom model of teaching is typically a passive experience for the learners and that does not engage their learning much at all. You simply can’t teach in any effective way the core attractions of BDSM, yet we think we can. I don’t think we can even always teach the mechanics all that well since how they’re applied in BDSM varies so much person to person, as it should since we’re all unique. We must move beyond the classroom model and into more engaging and effective approaches. We need to reduce the number of classes we teach and replace them with informal social learning opportunities. At the same time, we must consider that much of the supposed education we push out to kinksters really has no place in a classroom at all. There are simply much betters ways to foster the growth, connection and skill among kinksters.

One of the greatest minds of the BDSM scene and a friend, Tony DeBlase, hammered home to me repeatedly that we must never become slaves to technique. We must never elevate technique to a place where it trumps the internal connections and visceral erotic joy that good BDSM brings about. To do so does, in my opinion, demean BDSM and relegate it to nothing more than a bit of technical acumen rather than the mechanism by which people intimately connect. I fear that how we’ve come to approach educating our own kind is indeed often demeaning the experience and that gives me tremendous pause and concern.

Race Bannon at bannon.com

We Need to Let the Younger Guys Take Over (September 7, 2012 — RACE BANNON)

Before I start rambling here, let me state upfront that this post is specifically for gay leathermen. It’s not a topic that’s as relevant for others. With that said… Today I had a chat with a casual friend of mine who is a long-time leatherman. He was excited that a former leather bar of ours here in San Francisco, the San Francisco Eagle, is reopening after being closed for a while. The entire kink/leather community here in San Francisco is hopeful that the new bar will offer us yet one more venue in which to meet and socialize.

During our chat my friend started to say something like (not an exact quote) “Our entire scene is built on the foundation of us older leathermen.” I think he even used the term I’m not a huge fan of, the Old Guard. His tone and fervor seemed to indicate that he believes the bulk of the scene is in our hands today. I took exception with him.

No, I’m not saying that leathermen did not, indeed, build the foundations upon which much of what we today refer to as the modern leather/BDSM/fetish community has flourished. My friend though was implying that even today’s modern leather/kink scene is primarily fueled by us (yes, I’m one of them) older leathermen. I contend it is not.

All around the country and in Europe I’m seeing younger guys stepping up to the plate and taking charge of our clubs and organizations, events, venues, retailers, and so on. Yes, us older guys still have our place. We are still vital members of this community. We still contribute on all fronts. Many of the younger guys do look to us for information and wisdom. But far too often I see many older guys like myself failing to step aside on the kinky path to let the younger guys do their thing unencumbered.

At times I sense my older leathermen peers adopt an attitude that implies they are doing it all correctly and the younger guys must replicate what we do, how we dress, how we socialize, how we play, and how we identify with our kink. I think that’s a recipe for the atrophying of our scene, not its growth.

Change is inevitable. It’s one of the few universal constants. If anything in the universe stays the same, it eventually withers and ceases to exist. Why should we think the kinky scene we all love is any different. Change is good, not bad. Change breathes new life into things. And typically a large part of the energy for such change, no matter in what context, comes from younger people. So it is with leather and kink.

To the younger leathermen’s and kinksters’ credit, they have generally been quite inclusive of us older guys. I have rarely felt any sense of youth entitlement or feeling left out of things because of my age. Sure, younger guys at times want to be with their own kind. Good for them. That’s natural as human beings that we sometimes aggregate in clusters of those who are most like us. But overall I find the younger men ready to embrace and include us older guys in their midst.

The younger guys bring with them a new perspective on the leather and kink scene. They often dress differently than the classic leatherman. They often play differently than the classic leatherman. They often socialize differently than the classic leatherman. They often see their erotic identities differently than the classic leatherman. I think this is a good thing. I love to see our scene grow and morph into a wider variety of erotic and identity expressions.

So, I’m one old leatherman who is quite happy to wave the younger kinksters past me and encourage them to do the things many of them are doing so well. I’ll continue to contribute in the ways I can. And when you mix it all together, you have a healthier and better leather and kink scene. There is room for everyone.

Race Bannon at bannon.com

San Francisco Leathermen’s Discussion Group 15th Anniversary (December 17, 2011 — RACE BANNON)

Good afternoon. Welcome to what I personally consider to be an event that marks an extremely important milestone in our local kink and leather scene. I think it’s safe to say that LDG has established itself as one of the more important education and social resources within our community here in San Francisco. I’d like to add my thanks and congratulations to everyone who has been involved in making LDG the successful and highly valued institution that it’s become. I must admit I found it somewhat amusing when I was told that the history of LDG began in 1996 when Salem Bucholz organized a few guys to get together to discuss kinky topics and that erotic Greek vases was among the first of those topics. Yes, LDG was born, in part, from a discussion about erotic Greek vases. I think that’s sorta cool, and it’s illustrative of the fact that you never quite know where something you start is going to go. So if you have an idea for something that might benefit the kinky community, take inspiration from LDG and go for it. Salem, along with Alan Selby, who led the first LDG discussion meeting by the way, Don Thompson and perhaps others whom I’m neglecting to mention, started something incredibly special that we are here today to celebrate.

I was told that the original vision Salem had was to get guys together to talk about something within the kink spectrum while also fostering camaraderie outside of the bars. In that sense, perhaps he was prescient in seeing what we now so clearly know – that we must foster socializing opportunities outside of the bars that had formerly served as one of our primary central meeting places. LDG serves as one of those great socializing opportunities that also educates and informs us at the same time.

Rather quickly the casually organized group morphed into a discussion group tackling a broad range of topics that spanned the entire realm of leather and kink. Education had become its focus and by around 1997-1998 it was well established that education would remain its primary focus as it is today.

LDG has since had a wonderful history of people who have taken it upon themselves to continue as the driving forces behind LDG. I could begin to name names, but I fear I will miss someone and there are a lot of important people who have contributed to LDG along the way. Some in big ways, some in small ways, but valued contributions all. I think I speak for everyone in this room when I say thanks to all of you, every single person, for helping to continue this tradition of discussion, learning and community that LDG has become.

The true impact that LDG has had upon the community isn’t necessarily best represented by how long it’s been around or how many discussions or presentations it’s hosted, but rather the impact it’s had on the people who attend LDG events. And LDG has impacted many lives in profoundly positive ways. I asked some people if they would share with me how LDG has benefited them and they generously did so. Out of respect for their privacy I’m not going to name names, but they represent a diverse cross-section of the people I’ve seen attending LDG events over the years.

One of the most moving comments came from someone who said “I guess for me, LDG is giving me sort of what feels like a 'last hope' in making my dream of being a leather boy come true.”

Think about that statement for a moment. My “last hope.” I saw this person at a recent LDG event and I could see how engaged they were with the presentation, and LDG may be responsible for this person staying within our fold when he might otherwise have left in frustration. How amazing is that?

Another person told me that “LDG has been, for me, a symbol of what I think community organizing should be at its best. Over the past couple of years I have witnessed their dedication to camaraderie, members building relationships that bring amazing opportunities for the group and the larger community, a deep respect for history but not at the expense of including new ways of thinking, and an understanding of the power of marketing. This is in sharp contrast to what many other groups suffer from – in-fighting, officers that are over-committed, and disrespectful communication.” And they added “Thank you to LDG for setting the bar high and giving the rest of us something to aspire to.”

I think that clearly pays homage not only to the founders and subsequent stewards of LDG through the years, but also to the current folks managing LDG who are doing such a great job. You do give us something to aspire to.

Someone else gave me a bit of background on himself and I think that his background clearly illustrates why LDG’s inclusiveness of newbies and the curious is so important, and then he mentions why LDG is so important to him. His story is worth hearing.

“When I came to San Francisco in my mid-twenties I’d been playing in leather and kink for a few years. When I turned 21, I hit every old-school guy’s bar and leather bar available. I didn’t own, and couldn’t afford, any leather but I’d heard that tight 501s, white tee-shirts, and boots were acceptable gear for boys. That’s all I had, so for many years, that’s what I wore. Eventually, I saved to buy my first belt, which ended up being used on me a lot.” Then he joked that he wished it hadn’t taken him so long to buy that damn belt!

“Moving to San Francisco was a dream. I was a kinky hippie. Where else should I be? I hit the ground running, horny, hot, and ready to find men who would work me over. I guess I started really playing here in 1995 by swallowing the nervous lump in my throat and finally taking out ads in the Bay Area Reporter. The more I played, the more I wanted to play but, again, it was without community or guidance or fellowship. At that age, whether I knew it consciously or not, I was hungry for community.”

“I really don’t remember where I first heard of LDG, but I think it actually was an ad in the Bay Area Reporter. This was probably around 1996 or 1997. I remember going to a lot of LDG meetings. I felt like such a newbie and I was, a newbie in the community I’d been hoping I’d find eventually. I made so many friends at LDG meetings and after many meetings we’d hit SOMA Leather bars for a drink and cruise guys.”

He mentions that due to scheduling conflicts he as away from LDG for a couple of years. His schedule freed up and he said: “LDG was the family, the group, the organization I came right back to. LDG will always be my home base, no matter where I go or whatever organizations and clubs I may feel a part of or support. LDG is home… it has been since I moved here.”

Home. To call something your home is a powerful and telling statement. What is a home? It is a place where you “live,” and I contend that LDG offers the kinky folks of San Francisco just that – a place where they can truly live and be who they are in a safe, caring and nonjudgmental atmosphere. The value of that cannot be emphasized enough.

Lastly, in addition to asking people who attended LDG events for their thoughts, I also asked some of the key people who were involved as LDG organizers for their thoughts. One stood out in particular from someone with heavy involvement in the early years of LDG.

“Through all the blood, sweat, and occasional conflict that it took to keep LDG surviving through its 15 years, and despite our different perspectives and experiences, it is undeniable that all the people who have committed so much time and energy over our history have shared a common vision. That common vision was that the San Francisco Bay Area leather scene would be stronger and more cohesive through what we created and have maintained – an organization that could foster community, teaching, learning, hands-on, and sometimes hands-in, kinky experiences for both newcomers and experienced players. And we all shared the realization that unless each and every one of us stepped up and got the job done week after week, we would feel like we had let our community down. For all of us, that was simply unacceptable, and it remains unacceptable to those who are carrying the torch now. We should all refuse to accept that a leather capital like San Francisco can ever lose an asset like LDG – luckily, it seems we don’t have anything to worry about.”

Let me add to this person’s commentary and say that based on my observations of LDG lately, that person is correct that we don’t have anything to worry about. The recent history of LDG suggests that it’s serving the needs of San Francisco’s leather and kink community admirably and the popularity of recent events suggests they are reaching out and engaging some folks who perhaps haven’t always felt part of our community.

There is an old Kenyan proverb that states “Having a good discussion is like having riches.” LDG is one of those elements of riches that we in the San Francisco Bay Area get to enjoy over and over because of great people who give a damn that the rest of us have the fulfilling and enjoyable kinky lives we want and often need.

To everyone in this room who had or has anything to do with organizing LDG, I thank you on behalf of the countless folks you’ve helped over the years. To those who are no longer with us, but have done the same, you are in my thoughts and you have our collective thanks. And to those here today, and those not here today, who attend LDG events, it is you who make the discussions and presentations come alive. Keep coming to LDG events. It feeds the kinky soul.

Congratulations to LDG on 15 wonderful years. As for the future of LDG, I hope I’m at their 20th, 25th and 30th anniversary events because I think it is more important than ever to maintain things like LDG’s education and discussion events. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can replace the power that face-to-face discussion and communal learning has to empower and bond people.

Thank you for your time.

Race Bannon at bannon.com

It’s Sunday and I Want to Talk about Love (January 27, 2013 — Patrick Mulcahey)

(Keynote speech delivered at the Southwest Leather Conference 2013)

It’s Sunday and I want to talk about love.

Not “the Love that moves the sun and other stars” as Dante puts it, but the love between human beings. And I want to talk about Butchmanns, and about the maturing of our Master-slave community, and about my own.

I wonder if I can convey to you how it feels to stand before you in this room. Back in its younger years (and, I suppose, mine), Southwest Leather was the first leather conference I ever attended, in this same hotel. I’d only ever gone to big rowdy men’s events like International Mr Leather, which nobody would call a conference. Here is where I had my first exposure to Master Rick and slave Tina, who’ve become family to me; to Master Steve and his blustery good nature; to sweet excitable Master Taino, who introduced himself by saying, very nicely, “Don’t you know who I am?”; to Master Z, also a friend now, but at the time a hot fantasy DILF; and the astonishing Wayne Brawner, whom I watched throw a long, long whip at a small jumpy woman and make it coil around her ankle like a kitten curling up to sleep.

Southwest Leather, though, was not my first contact with Butchmanns. I have looked in vain for it since, but I have a powerful memory of running across (in the 90s, I can’t say just when) an early Butchmanns website, or possibly just a webpage authored by someone driven a little gaga by the thought of Butchmanns. I suppose I must’ve told my trusty search engine — anybody remember Excite? — to find me something about GAY MALE LEATHER MASTERS AND SLAVES. I was used to relying on Nifty.org porn for Master-slave imagery, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it.

Well! For once Excite deposited me somewhere truly exciting. There was a black-and-white photo of a windswept desert place: a few sun-bleached outbuildings, I think some wire fencing, a fringe of dusty shrubbery, low merciless hills in the background. No human presence. Ideal for an alien or non-alien abduction. The text, there wasn’t much of it, talked elliptically about Butchmanns slave-training camp. My hair stood on end as I read you could dispatch your would-be slave to Butchmanns, to surrender his clothing and all resistance to the demands of two implacable seasoned instructors.

What could be more awesome than that? And I surmised that one of those fearful Master trainers must be the titular Mr Butch Man.

Okay, my memory’s never been any match for my imagination, which I’m sure shapes my recall of that first encounter with the Butchmanns brand — but it didn’t feel so far removed from my overheated Master/slave fantasies. I remained in the dark about who trained the Masters, if such a thing was even done, and whether they were allowed to keep their pants and their inhibitions. But theirs was the role my fevered libido liked to cast me in: The One Who Is Surrendered To.

Alas, I had one glaring deficiency: the lack of a surrenderer. Butchmanns seemed to be doing a brisk business in them, and I only needed one or two.

Truth is, now that I look back, I had already met a few such men, without understanding what drew me to them.

My very first man, a complete surprise. He was a flight attendant. (So maybe not a complete surprise.) It was about three in the morning. We were strangers, relieved to be escaping the same nasty mescaline-fueled party. We walked. Forgettable words were exchanged. He turned to me in the dark. If I’d shifted my face just a quarter turn, that would have been the end of it.

His kiss felt like the antidote to a slow poison. If he was prepared for the fierceness that erupted between us, I was not.

That was the first time I made love. Rough as it was, I’d be lying if I called it anything else. I never saw him again. But because I knew love had happened, I couldn’t ignore it, I couldn’t forget it.

This, by the way, is how most of us with non-standard orientations discover it. It isn’t the sex. Sex I’d had before. It’s that other thing.

Love can lead you to who you are, but you have to follow.

I’ll gloss over the part where, because I couldn’t ignore or forget it, I found myself committed to an adolescent psychiatric ward.

Nobody really wants you to love the way you want to love. They want it locked down and channeled toward real estate and onesies and plasma TVs.

Then there was Bill, the first man who ever called me Sir. I’m not kissing and telling today; I would change his name out of courtesy if I could remember it. I never called him by it. He kept suggesting “boy,” but he was almost twice my age and I could hardly spit the word out. Mostly I just grunted and heaved him around. It was all so new and thrilling to me, and I was such a polite young man, that sometimes I got confused about which one of us was “Sir.” He’d crack a quick little smile when that happened, and we both understood that slip of the tongue represented something true, because Bill was training me.

Bill loved me but I was too wildly ignorant of my own nature to return it. He had a collar in a drawer that he put on when I came to see him. Now I can guess at the need it answered for him, but at the time I thought collars were toys, like cockrings.

Then there was Renzo. With him, I carried a leather collar and put it on him when he knelt. Renzo had been a victim of serious violence, sexual violence that had come close to killing him. He wore the scars of it, like the runes of a dead language, all over his beautiful furry body.

When we played, Renzo made me tie him up. He was afraid if I didn’t, the memory of that old trauma would overwhelm him, and he’d lose control and hurt me. I was worried that what we were doing was wrong, was harmful to him. He said, “Shut up and do what you came to do.” In time I began to understand he wasn’t reliving the attack that scarred him: he was un-living it, triumphing this time, robbing it of its power to terrify.

There were men I loved on loan who belonged to somebody else. Men who couldn’t decide if they were afraid of me or of themselves. As in the natural course of things, there were outbreaks of heartache and dread; but it seemed to me that the closer I got to what I would now call a power dynamic or authority-based relationship, the happier I was, and the more freely I loved and was loved.

Was it just the time? Sometimes I wonder. Was something happening to all of us in the 90s? Nowadays we can’t shut up about same-sex marriage, but back in the bad old 70s, there was a great and ultimately fatal sadness in the attachments I tried to make. We didn’t know what success at love between two men would look like. We’d never seen it. Some laws had changed, but the way we’d been raised to think about ourselves and what was possible for people like us was not legislatable.

Certainly the following decade changed us, when we were visited by that terrible socio-politico-medical scourge that threatened to erase us from the planet. We lay down in the streets, we marched on Washington, we took every stranger’s death personally. We smuggled medications from Mexico and Japan through Customs for men we would never meet with names we would never hear.

Maybe you can’t really know love until dying is at least a nodding acquaintance.

Whatever the reasons, by the mid-90s, in my world of gay men and leather, we all seemed able and open to love: it was a love stampede. (There has to be a country song by that title.) We knew what we wanted, and that was a heart connection, whether for an evening or a season or a lifetime.

So why am I yammering on about love? It’s not Valentine’s Day. This is Southwest Leather! It’s about The Woo, not The Wooing!

Well, maybe the distance between the two is not so unbridgeable as we tend to think.

I met a man who wasn’t like any other man. I felt I knew him before I was born. I felt we were made from the same clay by the same hand. I felt he should belong to me, almost the way at a party you reach for one leather jacket in a pile of leather jackets, or one half-empty glass on a table full of half-empty glasses, and say, “This must be mine.” Even his name was mine.

People I hardly knew had been calling me “Master” for some years, to which my response had always been, “Uh, no.” But here was my slave — at some level I knew that the minute he walked through my door. So I must be his Master. But how?

And just when I needed you, so serendipitously it could almost make me believe The Universe sent you (but not quite), Butchmanns jumped off my monitor screen and into my life, in the form of Master Skip and SlaveMaster.

I had been to MAsT and D/s discussion groups and support groups for Dominants, etc., but never had I heard a coherent philosophy of the Master-slave dynamic the like of which those two men presented. For the first time I heard out loud things that I knew to be true but nobody said on Recon — for instance, that the slave must be in service to something higher than the Master’s crotch. I heard other ideas entirely new to me that I recognized were true as soon as I heard them. Master and the slave as Jungian archetypes. Locating the M/s connection not in the body but in the spirit.

Between them they articulated an entire mythology of consensual Mastery and slavery, including even something like a creation myth, embedded with stunning metaphorical insights. I was fed up with hearing, in my discussion groups, slaves compared to cars and toasters and so on, as “property.” Imagine how thrilling it was for me to hear, in SlaveMaster’s words: A slave is owned in the same way that the Master owns his own hand. The Master expects the same obedience from his slave that he does from his hand. The Master cares for the slave as he does his own hand.

The Butchmanns philosophy, if I may call it that, is not monolithic, I know. Distinct differences in the styles and practices of its chief proponents are easy to spot. But it is consistent enough and powerful enough to have helped lead thousands of us, myself included, on the path to sound relationships with our slaves or Masters, in fulfillment of our most profound longings, for wisdom, intimacy, self-acceptance, self-definition. Butchmanns’ founders and instructors gave us a whole new lexicon with which to talk about how our relationships work: “heart of a Master,” “slave heart,” “orders from the Universe,” and let us not forget, “the Woo.”

Hell, now that MAsT is part of Butchmanns Inc., it’s no exaggeration to call Butchmanns the home of the international Master-slave community. Such a distance we’ve come since that windswept, wire-fenced, sand-choked compound that filled my head with “Yes, Sir, Mr Butch Man!” fantasies.

Have we maybe come too far? Might a mild correction be in order?

And why is it, if we’re honest, that so many of us quietly feel we don’t measure up to the Butchmanns standard?

Partly it has to do with that most traditional Sunday subject: religion. Like it or not, Woo is now an amateur religion. It doesn’t make any money. But it has a deity, a.k.a. the Universe, a rough cosmology, an epistemology (we know what we know because the Universe tells us so). It has high and low priests and diehard adherents and even a few fairly sacred texts. It’s a pretty loose and gluten-free religion. It goes down easy, and it’s a simple matter to ignore the parts you don’t like. (Unlike some of the more established religions, where 80% of what you’re told makes you mentally stick your fingers in your ears.)

I can’t in all honesty do that anymore. As I say, I know and love Master Skip and SlaveMaster. If they tell me they are receiving and transmitting orders and messages from the Universe, I absolutely believe them. But I’m going to ask for the reciprocal courtesy when I tell you the Universe isn’t talking to me. I don’t think I’m defective or stuck with a broken receiver. Do I hear voices? Yes, and all of them are mine. I recognize their fear, their fake outrage, their sadness, their longing all too well. I make the best decisions I can by the light of my conscience and nothing else. It does no good to tell me it’s really the Universe or my neural pathways calling the shots. I don’t experience that. I don’t believe that. I don’t think I should have to.

The other part — and by now you’ll have guessed where I’m going — is that there seems to be no room for ordinary love in the Butchmanns scheme. I love my slave. I don’t want to overcome loving him or pretend not to love him, and I decline to indulge in the customary hairsplitting about loving and being in love. It’s taken me almost sixty years to figure out who I am when I love and how love happens for me, and I’m not giving that up. Again, I do know there is no rigid “Butchmanns scheme,” it’s more like variations on a theme, but love seems to have a bad name in all of them. If any of you Butchmanns instructors cops to being in love with your Master or slave, you’re very quiet about it. Leading those of us who confess love to feel like very slow learners.

I’m trying to make an observation, not an accusation. You are all too good, too humble and too kind to tell me or anyone, “You’re doing it wrong.” Let me give you the closest analogy I can think of:

When I was just thirty and traveling in South America for the first time, I got lost a lot. I would stop and ask directions, then promptly ignore them and get even more lost. Upon examining this pattern, and with a shock of horror at myself, I recognized that somehow by osmosis I had absorbed, from television or God knows where, some preposterous stereotypes. When anyone spoke Spanish to me or even English with a Spanish accent — which was everyone I met (hello, it’s South America) — I mentally dismissed whatever they had to say. I mean, I’m asking where such-and-such a museum is, and some local resident is telling me, but the look on my face, which they see perfectly well, is saying, “That’s all very nice, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

We Masters and slaves who claim love out loud are very familiar with that look. But love is our country, we live here! It’s perfectly safe to believe that we know our way around it.

Granted, it only seems fair that we who love are the ugly stepchildren of M/s, since in mainstream culture, love is The Shit. All the songs and the stories are written for lovers and about lovers. But you know? That radio love is not for me either. I think my slave nailed the reason the day I dragged his ass down to Mr S. to get him outfitted with new leathers. Most of you know him as quiet and mild-mannered, and he is; but take him shopping — for himself — and suddenly he’s Spartacus. “I hope you don’t think I’m like one of your soap-opera characters!” he snapped at me on the way home, eyes blazing. “Buy me a big shiny present and I’ll dance around like a little girl? I don’t think so!”

Did I mention that my slave is also very smart? In those mainstream depictions of love, there always seems to be some kind of submerged, unacknowledged quid pro quo going on. “I did X for you, so I expect you to do Y for me.” (Which is like a meta-country song title.) I bought you dinner, you better put out. Unclog the sink and I’ll forget the lie I caught you in. And so on.

I don’t bargain with my slave. Hey, those nice new leathers were never going to belong to him. And he’s not in charge of meeting my needs: I am.

Most of the centuries-old conventions of romance are, let’s face it, fucked up. To be worthy of him, a lady must always say no to the hero’s advances. (What, he refuses to join a club that would have his member as a member?) Fortunately, there comes a point when he knows her better than she knows herself and sweeps her off her feet despite her resistance. (Down at the courthouse we call that rape.) He doesn’t burden her with his troubles, such as the mad ex-wife in the attic. (Details!) Her love so improves him that he gives up his old habits and bad companions — a development common as crabgrass in romance and as rare in real life as the Rapture.

It couldn’t be more apparent to men who love men and women who love women that that shit doesn’t apply to us. When my slave comes home with flowers, I don’t think, “How romantic,” I think, “Oh, we’re having company for dinner.” I appreciate how difficult it must be for you of the heterosexual persuasion to break free of those persistent roles and images, but it has to be done. What’s the alternative? Discounting love because you notice the version you were handed is synthetic is like refusing to wear cotton because cotton candy once got stuck in your hair.

Butchmanns, I love you, and I want you to change. I’ve had some sleepless nights about saying these things to you in your own house, but I decided it would betray our friendship not to tell you truthfully what I think and feel.

It’s not your fault that no other model of Master and slave is so persuasive or widely embraced. Nor are you responsible for the way your message can be corrupted in transmission, as is inevitable when big important ideas enter a subculture numbering hundreds of thousands. I can’t be the only one in this room who has seen the emotionally stunted prop themselves up with the dogma that Love is weakness and has no place in a power dynamic!, to entrap partners in technically consensual but actually abusive relationships, because they heard that’s how it works if you’re doing it right.

Not your fault. But perhaps not entirely beyond our power to address.

When I say change, you have every right to give me That Look again and say, “That’s nice, go build your own desert sandbox.” But maybe you’ll see your way to enlarging the sandbox we’re already in: you’ve done it before. In the dark ages of M/s (and Nifty.org), Master and slave was an erotic authoritarian dynamic, expressed in SM practices designed to subjugate and “break” the slave for the Master’s pleasure and convenience. It was you who insisted that SM was optional, sex too; that what linked Masters to their slaves was something more fundamental than gender or orientation. And okay, we’re convinced: our community is full of non-sexual M/s dynamics in which we see all partners are happy and fulfilled. Is there any other measure of success?

So might it be possible for the pendulum to swing back, just a little, and readmit to the fold those of us who love sex and SM — and each other?

I don’t believe love can ever be the enemy of happiness or goodness or growth. It’s the fear of losing love that drives us to desperation, that tempts us to desert ourselves in hopes of impersonating someone more lovable than we think we are. As I told you once, Master Skip, I consider M/s my protection against that fate. The one sure way I know to lose my slave’s respect and obedience is to pretend to be other than I am.

I will confess to you all I did that once — it was only for a moment — and it was almost the end of us. We came back from that catastrophe once; I’d be a fool to risk it again.

I’ve said enough, I’m sure more than enough. I ask you to receive it with an open heart. It is offered in thanks for what all of you have done to support me in coming into myself and coming finally into love. It brings full circle across the years that first day I sat with you, here in this room, never thinking, never dreaming, of this distant, joyous, unlikely Sunday to come.

Thank you.

Patrick Mulcahey