In this episode of Hard Left News Calpi & Todd had an important talk with Author, Educator & Activist Race Bannon. We all discussed Race’s most recent book, his history of activism, politics & direct action, fascism and what that means for the kink, queer, trans and non-binary communities, as well as vetting and creating safer spaces.
On our resources page we have a ton of info on Security Culture and what to do about your phone, computers, and online presence depending on your risk profile.
Hard Left News is community supported. Your support allows us to produce instructional & educational content, and to be able to talk with BIPOC, Queer, Trans, & Leftist voices that need to be heard.
Next week we will be talking with Sassafras Patterdale about their book Kicked Out that covers homeless queer youth and the importance of community, on and off the streets.
Race Bannon has been an organizer, writer, publisher, educator, commentator, leader, speaker, and activist in the LGBTQ, leather/kink, polyamory, and HIV/STI prevention realms since 1973. He is an author, widely published writer, active speaker, community organizer and project leader, and has received numerous national and local awards. Race is one of the authors and editors of a new book, Kink Is, highlighting kinksters from around the world set to be published by Unbound Edition Press in September 2024. He’s also a regular cast member of the online series, On Guard Cigar Salon.
the Hard Left News Resource Page: https://www.hardleftnews.com/resources
You can find links to Race’s writings, projects, and social media here:
Website: https://linktr.ee/bannonrace
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/racebannon.bsky.social
Mastodon: https://woof.group/@racebannon
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RaceBannonChannel
On Guard Cigar Salon: https://onguardsalon.com/
Kink Is, Divine Deviance, Foreword by Margaret Cho – An Anthology of Surprisingly Relatable True Stories About Sex, Power, and Joy:
Documentary film series: https://kinkismysuperpower.com/
Also Mentioned:
Should Kink Be More Insular? reflecting on an older post of Race’s titled “Are We Too Inclusive?”:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152932586
Race Bannon: Origin Story, Polyamory, and Affinity Groups:
An Interview with Tony DeBlase about the Leather Pride Flag – Leather Archives & Museum: https://youtu.be/G3pBD6fzCKQ?si=N52ll7JSGLs1Skte
Finding Me – Viola Davis:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58687126-finding-me
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez – A Review:
To Joyfully Exist & Resist w/ Race Bannon Transcript
But you alluded to something that’s really important, and most antifascist experts will say the most important thing you can do apart from that is build community and maintain as strong a community as you possibly can.
We have to remember too, though, that there are people with our own community that’s sided with that sentiment.
Me as a gay man, they really do not feel I have rights.
They do not feel a woman has a right to choose.
They really do want immigrants deported.
So even within our own community, we have that.
And so we have to wrestle with that.
And I’m not sure how to wrestle with that because I don’t know how to talk to somebody who’s kinky or queer, who might have voted against our interests and do so respectfully and politely.
So thus far, I have simply avoided those people as much as I can.
I’m Todd Zimmerman and this is Hard Left News.
That There was an excerpt from this week’s talk, which was recorded on January 10th with author, educator and activist, Race Bannon.
In this week’s episode, Calpi and I talk with Race about his most recent book, his history of activism, politics and direct action, fascism and what that means for the kink, queer, trans and non-binary communities, along with vetting and creating safer spaces for our communities.
It is February 16th, 2025 and this is.
Hard Left News.
A weekly recap of current events through the lens of BIPOC, queer, trans and leftist culture and history.
Through our talks with people from these communities, we will demonstrate that none of this is new.
Yet through community, we are strong.
Of course, history is being made, but if you ask people in BIPOC, queer and leftist spaces, we have been experiencing and warning people about these things for ages.
If you are anything like me, you have been completely overwhelmed over these last few weeks as Trump and Musk worked to dehumanize BIPOC, trans and leftist people while completely dismantling the United States government and preparing to devastate the economy.
They are bombarding us nonstop with their attacks on our rights, on democracy, demonstrating that this administration has seething contempt for all citizens.
This shock and awe strategy is deliberate.
It is meant to make us fearful.
It is meant to make sure we feel directly attacked from all sides, so we are unable to move.
We are in danger, but if we stay locked into a doom scroll, that will paralyze us.
We strongly recommend that you pick a handful of trustworthy, independent journalists, maybe a daily news podcast that doesn’t whip you into a state of panic and limit your media intake.
On our website, we will maintain a list of recommended journalists, educators and conversations to follow so you can stay informed and stay out of the frenzy.
Our lives are changing.
In order to stay safe, we need to focus on building communities that take care of each other.
Food, medicine, education and shelter are things our communities are going to have to learn how to provide.
Hard Left News will talk with folks from marginalized communities that already maintain mutual aid networks, which will demonstrate to all of us that it can be done.
It’s also important to acknowledge that our relationship with technology needs to change.
We will show folks how to take concerning technology we use every day, hack it, install open source software, and reduce the risk of surveillance for you and your community.
On our resources page, we have a ton of info on security culture and what to do about your phone, computers and online presence, depending on your risk profile.
Hard Left News is community supported.
Your support allows us to produce instructional and educational content and to be able to talk with BIPOC, queer, trans and leftist voices that need to be heard.
Next week, we will be talking with Sassafras Patterdale about their book, Kicked Out, that covers homeless queer youth and the importance of community on and off the streets.
Now let’s get back to our talk with Race Bannon.
I wanted to welcome you.
We’d hoped to get a chance to talk with you around the time of the Folsom Street Fair, but of course, that’s a very busy time for everyone.
And you had a bit going on with this new anthology that you helped with.
The actual name of it is Kink Is, an anthology of surprisingly relatable true stories about sex, power and joy.
And it’s from Unbound Edition Press.
There are six of us who are authors.
The origin of the book is that we had a team that’s been working on a documentary about Kink for a while.
There’s a core team.
Margaret Cho is also part of our team, which is also why she wrote the foreword for the book.
And along the way of the documentary process that we’ve been working on for quite a while, we got this book deal.
They said, you’ve interviewed two, 300 people, which we had, and there’s a book here.
Why don’t we think about that?
And lo and behold, this book happened.
It came out in September and debuted at Folsom Street Fair.
It came out September 17th and debuted there.
We had a whole bunch of book launch things.
And as of a few days ago, it has already gone into its third printing.
Oh my gosh, that’s awesome.
That’s very cool.
We’re very happy.
If people just look up Unbound Edition Press in their store, they can buy it directly.
We do recommend people buy from the publisher if possible, because the monies from that will feed into the documentary.
And we make a little bit more money if you buy from the publisher, than if you buy from other sources.
But buy it wherever you can.
Yeah, actually, Margaret Cho followed me on TikTok like two years ago.
And I actually wrote a song about it.
She’s an amazing human being on multiple levels.
We met many years ago.
She was performing here in San Francisco.
Somehow I knew her manager at the time, at least her tour manager.
And they said, oh, Margaret would like read your book.
She’d like to meet you.
And I went, I’d love to meet Margaret Cho.
And so I went backstage and that was, we’ve been friends ever since.
She did, and this is posted on her own wall.
She was just in line of the fires in Los Angeles.
And her home was threatened.
She evacuated one, she might have to evacuate again.
But it looks like her home is intact.
But she’s been scrambling last couple of days, as you can imagine.
That’s absolutely devastating.
I would also be worried.
She is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful human being on multiple levels.
I can’t say enough nice things about her.
You, for your day job, have worked in tech for quite a few years.
The general populace is becoming aware that those in tech, like if you go back and you were to read, say, Malcolm Harris’s book, Palo Alto, and you look at the origins of Silicon Valley, you see that it’s got a very dark history.
The origins more or less have been in the defense industry, and those that are now in the Trump admin, idolize people who are very much into eugenics, and I think a lot of people are not exactly sure what to do faced with a new breed of fascist or neo-fascist.
The folks that we’ve been talking to lately, their recommendation is kind of what it’s always been, which is to exist, seek joy, be authentic, and build community.
Because in the face of all of this, that is more or less all that we can do.
For your On Guard Cigar Salon, you folks have addressed some of this to some extent, and I was just wondering what words of wisdom, words of encouragement might you have for people that are stressed out right now?
Oh, they are rightfully stressed out.
I get it.
And I, much the way Dan Rather posted in one of his newsletter posts, we do have to resist cynicism.
There is no power in cynicism.
The powers that be want us to be cynics, and they want us to avoid doing anything.
And a lot of people want to crawl back into a hole and just wait out the four years.
Oh, that’d be great.
Cross the fingers.
That would be great.
Yeah.
I’d love that.
Especially if that hole was a playroom somewhere.
That would be really great.
But I don’t think we can.
I went through my own personal anger, outrage, shock, stunned few days.
And then I realized, okay, well, here we are.
We do have to do things.
And I am not a believer that we can just ignore this.
So you’ve probably read a lot about what I’ve written politically, but anti-fascist experts, academics, always their first rule is do not obey in advance.
Well, here we have Zuckerberg and Musk and all these other people obeying in advance.
And so shame on them.
On behalf of all of us.
Yeah, on behalf of all of us, since we are all interconnected.
But you alluded to something that’s really important.
And most anti-fascist experts will say the most important thing you can do apart from that sort of second in line is build a community and maintain as strong a community as you possibly can.
We have to remember too, though, that there are people with our own community that’s sided with that sentiment.
Me, as a gay man, they really do not feel I have rights.
They do not feel a woman has a right to choose.
They really do want immigrants deported.
I could go on this long list, I’m not going to go through all those.
So even within our own community, we have that.
And so we have to wrestle with that.
And I’m not sure how to wrestle with that because I don’t know how to talk to somebody who’s kinky or queer, who might have voted against our interests and do so respectfully and politely.
So thus far, I have simply avoided those people as much as I can.
I’m fully aware that at some point, I’m going to probably have to talk to them and try to reason with them, et cetera, but I’m not there yet.
But there are other things that we can do.
And my biggest thing is do something, engage directly with elected officials and local politics.
Stay informed about legislative attacks on trans people.
Trans people are the people that they are going to use first to whittle away at other people’s rights.
So that’s pretty much a given.
It’s classic fascist tactics.
They did it in Nazi Germany.
They’ve done it in other countries.
It happened.
Contact your elected officials.
This morning, I called my representative, Nancy Pelosi, saying, please vote against the SAVE Act, which is trying to suppress votes.
We have to do that.
Know our democracy’s founding principles.
I know it sounds silly, but read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, et cetera.
Go to the Indivisible Guide online and read that 40-page document.
I know it’s a long document, but it really does give you all the ins and outs about how to fight at a local level.
If you’re queer, run for office.
I mean, I’m a queer man, so I’m gay man, so that’s in my head.
But if you’re progressive, run for office.
There are things like the LGBTQ Plus Victory Institute that will help you run for office.
Support labor unions, join a union.
They tend to be progressive and liberal.
And just generally vote consistently, make sure everyone does vote, make sure you’re registered.
I could go through a whole bunch of other things and I’ve written about this, but I am not someone who believes we have to sit back and just let it happen.
I just don’t think that’s wise or useful and it’s going to hurt a lot of people if we do that.
Absolutely.
I will get off my political soapbox for a moment.
It’s fine.
I think a lot of folks in Kink and BDSM want to encourage others to not address the politics of some of our existence.
Some more than others are directly and immediately affected by these things.
But eventually, all of us are going to be affected by these things.
I mean, if there’s a hit list that was published over a year ago, this Project 2025 hit list, which is all of our rights.
Yes, trans, non-binary people are the canary in the coal mine.
They’re going to be hit first, but systematically, they’re going to wipe out any marginalized person’s rights.
And people are going to find, even the cis white people, the hetero people, are going to find their rights are severely limited.
You know, once those things play out.
In particular, women, women in particular, they absolutely want them barefoot and pregnant back in the kitchen.
I hate to be that harsh about it, but that faction, not saying all people that voted that way, but that faction that has power now, that’s what they really want.
They want women to be second class citizens, and I will not allow a society to do that.
I just won’t.
So, it’s not just the traditionally marginalized.
Women are the majority of this country.
There are more women in this country than men adults.
So, they literally want to suppress the rights of the majority of the country.
I, I, hi, I’m Calpi.
It’s good to meet you, Mr.
Bannon.
What you’re saying is very political, like getting, getting really involved politically.
And I appreciate that as a leftist and a little bit lefter than some leftists, I find that I am personally quite sick of basically like just being told to vote, you know?
And yes, it’s important, you know, if it works.
Yes, it’s important to call, you know, congresspeople and whatnot.
What would you have to say experientially about, like mutual aid and like individual direct support, like direct action?
And if you could highlight some of your experience with that, I would absolutely love it.
Well, I come from an era when an entire administration wasn’t ignoring the HIV crisis and my friends were dying all around me and the community had to rally and do bedside support and protest to get the medications they wanted and protest to get legislation passed that would, you know, not take away rights of HIV positive people.
I could go, the list is long.
The lesbian community came to the side of gay men and took care of those of us who are sick.
So that was a political moment for us.
And that is an example of what you’re alluding to is that how do you support other people?
Right now, I know a lot of people that are saying to trans people in other other states that might not feel comfortable.
I have a bed, I have a home, I have a, you know, couch, I have a something, you know, let’s get you here and see if we can protect you here.
I think that anyone who is struggling, hopefully other people within the community can step up if they have the resources, time, ability, etc.
Absolutely donate to any organization that you think is giving that aid.
There are groups that are right now, I’ll use trans people specifically because they are the, and I don’t like using this metaphor, the punching bag, but that’s what they are right now for the right.
A lot of funds and organizations are stepping up and doing what they can to offer that mutual aid to trans people who need to relocate, who can’t get gender affirming care, et cetera.
So that’s a single issue example of how I think the entire community can rally.
And since I know a lot of your audiences is the kinky community, staying really, really connected, anybody who’s marginalized within that community and reaching out as much as you can, and simply reaching out and saying, is there anything that I can do?
Do you want to talk?
I know that you’re a citizen, but you’re married to an immigrant.
Are you afraid now that your partner, your husband, your wife is going to be deported?
Because it could happen.
And so just being able to be there and figuring out any way you can possibly help is invaluable.
And so that’s not a specific suggestion so much as sort of a generalized one that reach out if you can, offer whatever help you can.
Those with a few bucks to give, there are funds and things that are helpful.
I am going to say, though, that I know that people get tired of hearing about, you know, please vote, who’s this?
But boy, if just the people who hadn’t voted had voted this time around, we would be having a very different conversation.
So I understand it’s annoying when the results don’t go our way or don’t go away, that seems right, but it’s still so important.
I hear a lot from my mother-in-law, she’s 72 and she gets really political around that one day a year.
And like a couple of weeks before, a couple of weeks after, and then it just kind of like falls off and we don’t hear about it for a while.
And so this year, I alluded to, yes, I’m voting, but I hate this entire process because it feels degrading almost to have to beg for scraps, basically.
And she misheard me and thought I wasn’t voting and like flipped her lid.
She like freaked out.
She’s like, okay, but you have to.
And I was like, no, I know I have to for several reasons.
But yeah, so I think direct action is surprisingly accessible if you know how to look, you know?
Yeah, and I think it’s and I’m misquoting Rebecca Solnit.
She’s a brilliant writer and an activist.
And she said something like, your vote is a is a direction, not a love letter or a vote.
No, your vote is for the best case scenario.
I’m misquoting her.
I usually use that quote all the time.
But the idea was that your vote is not a love letter.
I have not.
I am 70 years old.
I have never voted for anybody I was 100% in love with.
It’s never happened.
And I’ve loved some of the candidates quite a bit.
Never has anybody.
So it’s always weighing the options and going for it.
So that’s why it’s so frustrating because nobody ever elevates that.
Yeah, it’s all fits all of our, you know, ticks all of our boxes off.
It just feels like like like a terrible game of sorry, you know, like a really bad game.
But unfortunately, in the worldwide human experience, voting and democracies are still the best form of government we’ve ever seen.
And as imperfect as they are, I think we just got us.
But I hear your frustration.
I have it, too.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
And something that we need to really pay attention to is the fact that folks in organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Attorney General’s Association, they know that a lot of more moderate and leftist people aren’t very good at generally, I’m talking nationwide, aren’t great at focusing on local politics.
And that’s why they’re able to, like even down to local school boards, they’re able to inject these elements that compromise our local relatively leftist communities.
And now more than ever, we really need to focus on the people that are showing up in our local politics and the movers and the shakers and look at who they are and who’s funding them.
Here in the Eugene Springfield area, there’s a lot of outside money coming in and folks aren’t realizing it.
And so we’re launching a politics show and we’re going to be focusing on some of those elements here locally because surprisingly nobody’s paying attention and it’s very concerning.
All politics ultimately is local and I agree with you wholeheartedly.
And I think in many instances, the Democrats were doing well.
The problem is that it’s going to sound like I’m casting aspersions on an entire political party and faction and I’m not trying to do that.
I’m all for it.
Well, I am fully accepting of the fact that there probably are decent human beings on that side.
And so I’m trying to give them the grace of that, as angry as I am with them for what they’ve done.
But a certain faction, the sort of muvars and shakers on that side, are okay with playing dirty.
And the very ethos of the Democratic Party, and I’ll say even probably most independents and Democratic socialists, like it lifts a whole bunch, is that they don’t really want to play dirty.
They believe in being a decent human being and not playing dirty.
And maybe we need to play a little dirty now.
I don’t know.
So I think that that’s part of why they’ve won.
I mean, look at these book bands.
Nobody wants those book bands, if you ask the general public.
But this small little tiny group gets it done, like you said, at the school board level.
So that’s a long answer to, I agree with you wholeheartedly, all politics starts at local.
I had a friend who was a Green Party member, and don’t get me started on Jill Stein, but I said every year, the Green Party trots out a presidential, four years trots out a presidential candidate.
They’ve done nothing at the local level.
They’ve never built a party.
It’s all, okay, well, we’re a party, and now we’re going to put a presidential candidate.
That’s not how politics works.
You start at the school board level, the city level, the town level, the community meeting level.
So you’re absolutely correct.
It dissuades people that are perfectly qualified from actively participating in politics, like from signing up in the first place, or continuing on with escalating their work.
It’s so frustrating to see people just fall off this cause because they want to stay right and pure.
I think that was a huge problem with Bernie back in the day, is that he wasn’t taking donations from everywhere, and then he just fell off.
Yeah.
Perfectly good man.
I was not a Bernie Sanders supporter at the time, but he’s a perfectly decent good man.
And God knows we could have done far worse as a president.
We did.
We did.
So I’m going to give a real life example in my own thing.
We talk about people wanting to avoid politics, and I’m going to talk to the people that might run for local office or run for any level of office.
You do have to have a thick skin.
I have a state senator here who’s amazing.
His name is Scott Weiner.
He is a friend, but he’s also my local state senator.
He used to be my local supervisor.
Yeah, he’s pretty well known in even national politics.
Musk has attacked him directly, and he’s been called by many people the most effective state level legislator in the country.
So, one day, I was really pissed off, and I’m not proud of this moment.
I was screaming on the sidewalk about this piece of legislation that I didn’t agree with.
It was not my best moment.
I copped to that.
I was screaming at him in front of people on the street in the Castro in San Francisco.
Six months later, some friends said, but I saw you having breakfast with him.
I thought you hated him.
I said, number one, I hated that piece of legislation.
98% of what he does, I agree with.
But here’s to his credit, anybody who runs for politics or gets involved even at a local level needs to get this.
He said to me, Race, it’s okay.
Anybody who gets in this game, we are paid to get screamed at, which I thought tremendous maturity for a politician.
And he said, no, you’re supposed to be able to scream at me.
That’s part of being a politician.
So people need to have really thick skins to get in the game.
And if they adopt that early on, even at a school board level or a local community, group level or whatever, adopt that thick skin and not take everything so personally and just get the work done that needs to get done.
Wow.
What an experience.
Yeah, he’s amazing.
He is the most adroit legislative politician I’ve ever witnessed, certainly at the state level.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
He’s remarkable.
I celebrate Throw a Shoe at George HW.
Bush day every year with just, you know, online shopping for shoes.
That’s about as close as I get to screaming at a politician directly face to face.
And who would have thought we would be longing for the Bush days?
Oh, gosh, don’t even.
I can’t.
No, no, I am not longing.
Well, you’re not longing.
I do.
But, I mean, I’d take a business as usual Warhawk.
Yeah.
Buddied up to, you know.
Even some Christian conservatives.
Neocon.
I, yeah.
Over what we, you know, these neo-fascists, like, it’s a totally different game.
Yeah.
It really is.
I, yeah, I am not somebody who used to bash everyone on the Republican side.
I at least I tried not to because I remember the likes of the Bob Dole’s and the other people and the McCain’s who I probably disagreed with 75% of the time politically.
Liz Cheney, I disagree with her about 97% of the time.
If you go issue by issue, but I respected their integrity.
I respected they at least listen, they talked, they I think we probably wouldn’t agree, but it wasn’t this kind of evil, mean-spirited type of politics that seems to have ever risen.
I do long for the days of that sort of a Republican legislator.
The leather community has always kind of been at the forefront of Kink and BDSM culture.
I mean, it kind of was Kink and BDSM culture in the 70s when you got into it.
The language that we use to convey, to communicate, to negotiate is ever evolving.
I think most important in that language is our consent framework, which I think that’s a gift from the Kink and BDSM community to the rest of the world, is these ways to communicate and to parse out consent and failures to honor consent and to heal, to repair.
I’m worried that on the chopping block is going to be this kind of education.
Like the conversations around consent have come so far just in the last 10, 15 years.
Especially with like Me Too and all of that becoming very, very public-facing.
You talk about it potentially being on the chopping block.
And here’s one of the reasons I think it doesn’t necessarily need to be.
I think, let’s say things go south really badly in this country.
I still think it’s very difficult to suppress talking.
And the kind of education we’re talking about is not showing how to flog somebody or tie somebody up or whatever.
It’s talking about consent.
And that can be taught, discussed, you know, people can be educated on it without anything graphic whatsoever being talked about.
So I’m hoping that if there’s anything that’s not on the chopping block, it’s that.
I also think that it’s an interesting thing to discuss because as a gay man, I come from a different consent culture.
So can you describe that a little bit?
Sure.
I came from an era of I’m in a leather bar, a guy touches my butt, I don’t want to touch my butt.
I move his hand and say, thanks anyway.
That was, you know, please not.
Second time, I’ll do it one with a firmer voice.
Third time, I’ll ask the bouncer to let him to get him out.
That’s it.
That’s the sum total of the dealing with the consent violation.
When gay men go into an all gay male space, if it’s an erotic slash sex space or play space, there is a kind of tacit assumption that we have a gay male sensibility around consent, which means that we’ve always had a consent culture.
It’s just ours is deal with it unless it’s an egregious violation, then it’s a whole other ball of wax.
So, we don’t put all consent violations into the same bucket.
That’s actually really interesting.
That would lead to hanky culture, right?
Like hanky code.
Hanky code, yeah.
That makes so much more sense.
That was more of a signaling to get the kind of sex and play we wanted.
Yeah, but it’s a visual consent, like it leads to consent, you know?
Yeah.
Although, if I’m wearing a red hanky in my right pocket and I’m bare butt with just a jock on, don’t put your finger up my butt without asking me.
I mean, that would be a consent violation.
Yeah, but there’s a discussion, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s interesting you talk about the hanky code.
I just saw a presentation yet again by a historian talking about how the left and right hanky thing developed with the Gold Rush guys having to dance together and who led whatever.
That is still not corroborated definitively, but every historian seems to say that’s where that came from, was the San Francisco Gold Rush guys.
So I do think that consent is a big deal.
Here’s the thing is I am fully aware that in heterosexual slash pansexual kink culture, leather culture, it is different.
Misogyny is all over the place.
It still exists.
There’s still, you know, we want to say they’re equal, but we’re acculturated to be in a misogynistic culture.
And therefore, I think heterosexual and pansexual culture needs to have a different consent structure, because I think there are issues at play there that maybe two gay men and maybe two lesbians don’t necessarily have because there’s already a parody assumed culturally.
Yeah.
And I know that sounds nuanced, but I’ve really seen this play out.
So I am fully aware that we need a consent culture that adapts to the community to which it’s applied.
Yeah.
Everybody can be a misogynist.
It does not matter what your gender is.
Oh, God, that’s true.
Yeah.
I mean, look at women who support, violate, you know, suppressing their own rights.
It makes no sense.
It does not.
I think it’s important for us to admit that we live in a misogynistic culture, a homophobic culture, a transphobic culture, a racist culture.
We could go on.
We do.
And I think to deny that is just Pollyanna thinking.
It’s who we do.
Hopefully, we don’t act on it, but we have to admit that we live in that culture.
Yeah, you spoken a bit about, like, the earlier leather scene being kind of heavily romanticized.
Can you speak a bit to that?
Sure.
So for background, for anyone listening, I came out in the scene directly into gay male leather culture in like 72, 73, depending on what marker I decide that coming out into that culture is.
I was deep in it from the beginning.
So my gay coming out and my leather slash kink coming out, I was going to bars underage at the time.
So it was ingrained in me very, very, I’m not very underage, 17, but still I was underage.
I was actually bartending in a gay bar underage.
Oh my gosh.
Wow.
Wrong story.
They didn’t check your IDs.
What is often referred to as, I’m going to use a word I don’t use very often, old guard.
The reason I don’t use it is that it’s misused and overly romanticized to the point of non-recognition by anybody who was there.
So back in the day, gay men and most of this culture comes from gay male leather culture to some extent women’s culture, the leather part.
I’m talking about the leather culture, not kink generally.
That’s all you’ve been, everyone’s always kinky.
We were there to socialize, to fuck and to play.
That was it.
That’s what we were doing.
We had a community.
We did it.
There was no hierarchy of people saying, you’re going to come into the scene.
I’m going to mentor you.
Mentorship’s happened.
They were very casual usually and not very formal.
There were these little cadres of kind of organized leather family things going on.
They were not ubiquitous and they were not that common.
Most of us learned what we learned in the trenches.
Most of us simply abided by basic human decency and politeness and treating each other well.
Safety guidelines were always talked about from the very, very beginning.
But we didn’t have this highly organized, overly romanticized culture that you hear about all the time.
So when somebody says, I’m Old Guard, I really want to say, well, what does that mean?
Because my Old Guard was crawling on the floor of the mineshaft in New York City with my hand up somebody’s butt.
That was my culture.
What are you talking about?
I was there in that era, deep in it, in one of the preeminent leather bars in the country, deep in play, deep in that culture, bartending in one of those sleazy bars.
And I didn’t see that Old Guard.
It is this romanticization of a culture that kind of existed, but only in tiny little parts of the community, and probably not in the ways that are often…
And the worst part of it is that somebody now today comes up and says, I’m Old Guard.
I don’t know what that means, but that’s what they say.
But then, because they’ve declared that, they now become the ultimate authority.
They are able to tell everybody in the community, oh, this is how it should be done.
That’s where I call bullshit.
That’s so…
That reminds me so much of so many leftist faces that I’ve been a part of.
That’s hard to hear that it’s everywhere.
And I have to wonder if that might be a bit of that…
You know, the fact that AIDS wiped out a significant percentage of the population, that might be a more hetero-normative romanticization of that culture, like where they got to reign supreme and not be as decent as the culture and as considerate as the culture actually was.
That is an extremely astute observation because historical theorists have sort of talked about an entire generation of gay leathermen lost.
Therefore, it is easier to romanticize that era because you have a whole bunch of people not here to say, well, no, call me bullshit.
Yeah.
And so there’s that aspect of it.
Then there is, and I’m going to use a word that I’m trying not to use in a derogatory way, so please don’t take it that way.
Much of the heterosexual scene co-opted gay male leather culture.
Yeah.
And we co-opt things all the time.
That’s not a negative, it just happens.
But what happens in that co-opting is, oh, this is what I was told it was, this is what I believe it is, this is the mythology I believe, and I’m going to take that on, even though my people, I’m going to say heterosexuals, I don’t mean to pigeonhole people, but we didn’t go through that.
Yeah.
But I’m going to take that and call that old guard, when most of the gay men, there’s a few that will still buy into it, but most gay men are like, no, no, that’s really not how it was.
Yeah.
So, one of my closer friends no longer with us is Tony de Blas, creator of the Leather Pride Flag, Leather Archives, one of the first people that really pushed out BDSM education.
I could go through the list of his accomplishments.
He was a remarkable man.
If he were here today, he would say exactly the same thing, and he was in the trenches long before I was.
Sure, there was some sort of thing like that, but that old guard really wasn’t anything like what is romanticized today.
Far less structured, far less common, far less rigid, and much more playful, quite frankly.
We played.
That’s why we called it playing.
It was not supposed to be this big hierarchical thing that’s been turned into.
I find myself lecturing Todd a little bit about how, yes, it’s good to start preparing for the worst, but fostering joy within our community is just as important as being prepared for the future, because when we lose hope and when we lose that optimism, that’s when we stop trying.
And I can’t imagine how much of that you’ve seen.
I can’t imagine it has to have been difficult to see it change.
Yeah.
I mean, I go back to walking down the street with a friend of mine in drag and being pulled over by the police and saying, do you have three articles of men clothing on?
No, you’re going to jail.
I go back to police raid times in bars where they would just round gay men up and go, fuck you, we’re going to just go throw you in a paddy wagon and take you to jail.
I’ve seen some pretty awful shit.
And in the words of Harvey Milk, you got to give them hope.
And Obama echoed that many years later, right?
And it is true, it doesn’t mean it’s Pollyanna hope.
It doesn’t mean I’m going to hope and therefore everything’s going to be fine.
But unless you have hope, you have no action.
So whether it’s at a micro level of our community, the Leather King, whatever community we want to call it, I call it different things.
And I think in the larger scale of things, we have to give them hope.
Even though I am actively, visibly working.
Prepping.
I’m not a doomsday prepper exactly, but I’m not being foolish either.
No, you’re not.
Yeah.
Smart.
I’m working with my community to make sure folks are prepared as best they can be.
Learn new skills that we may take for granted because there’s it’s easy to just click a button and something shows up.
Yeah.
You know, those things may not always be there.
And frankly, it may not just be politics.
I have the benefit or the bane of being in a relationship with someone who’s a climate change expert.
And so I have been pretty deep in the guts of climate science for a very, very long time.
And it could be natural forces that disrupt us.
And so preparation is good anyway.
So, you know, whether it’s politically or through climate change or through economic disruption or through whatever, being prepared is always a good idea.
It doesn’t mean you lose hope.
It simply means I’m being practical.
I’m being pragmatic.
We should prepare.
I mean, why do people buy insurance for homes?
It’s the way they’re preparing.
I keep trying to convince all of my queer friends, we all just need to move to Montana and just take over.
And just take over just a little bit.
You know, kind of all of us at the same time flooding in.
But the Rajneesh Puram did the same thing with Antelope.
So I’m not trying to, you know, take over.
I am.
I am trying to take over.
And I like Montana.
I’ve been to Montana.
It’s a lovely place.
It’s going to be fantastic when things get very hot.
Of the areas of the country, it is one of those that’s going to survive climate change more than others.
We have got to make more Canadian friends.
Here’s the realist in me.
I mean, even their government is moving to the right.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
The conservative is probably going to win.
Now, their conservative is not like ours right now.
Still relatively sane.
But still, even their country is moving to the right.
So politics wax and wane.
And like you said, always be prepared no matter what.
Even in good times, be prepared.
You never know.
One of the things I wanted to talk about is some of the patterns that you’ve seen within activist spaces and with different types of activism, negative or positive, some of the patterns you see socially inside of those spaces, like insular communities.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
There’s a common activist approach amongst people that have done it for a long time and have seen it work and not work.
You usually have to have a very vocal outside presence and then a very quiet behind the scenes pulling the gears presence.
So back in the AIDS activism days, we had act up very loud, very vocal, lay down in the streets, protest, make sure in your face, protest, absolutely valuable.
However, there were also people meeting quietly with legislators, meeting quietly with public health officials, meeting quietly, making the actual guts of the changes happen.
You have to have both.
Just screaming at people doesn’t do it.
Sometimes screaming is important, but it isn’t the whole thing.
So and that is on a micro level too.
So like you have a community, let’s say it’s a kink community dealing with an issue.
You can have somebody being very public about that.
Then you have somebody on very quietly mediating with people, talking with people, getting the resolution happening if it can be resolved.
That’s classic activism.
Be very vocal and out, make a presence known, so that people can see that there’s an action happening.
But then have people quietly of sound mind and reason, willing to talk to the people and say, okay, how do we make this happen?
That is, I think, my favorite thing you have said today.
That is my favorite.
With everything going on, a lot of us are going to find ourselves a lot more active in community, helping to support others in our various communities.
How do we find balance to prevent overwhelm?
Because it can take a lot out of us, and we’re going to need burnout.
We’re going to need to prevent burnout as best we can.
Various people are going to have different tolerances for things.
One of the things I always bring up is I’m going to be very slow during the zombie apocalypse.
I’m not a runner.
It’s not my favorite activity.
Is there going to be room for me to listen to other people’s problems for our community?
Is that a role that I can actually take?
I can stay inside, not run, right?
And then still do therapy with everybody, do a group thing.
How have you historically dealt with burnout?
I take breaks.
I’m famous for taking a year break.
I mean, I’ve been doing this since the 70s.
So, you gotta take breaks and take care of yourself.
I’m very big on that.
I believe this is a time when we have to actually gather and commune more, not less.
You’ve always wanted to go to that con out there.
Go to that con.
Go be with your people.
You want to go to that bar, but you’re not quite sure tonight.
Nope, go to that bar.
Take a friend, bring a buddy.
Absolutely.
Now is the time for more community, not less.
Again, that’s the second rule of anti-fascism, build community, but that’s good anyway.
Community is where it’s at.
Absolutely.
Just whether it’s education, whether it’s taking care of each other.
You talked about consent culture.
You can’t have a consent culture without a community that buys into the culture.
I mean, everything is really about community ultimately.
Now is the time to be more involved, not less.
Be more out if you can.
I understand some people can’t be as out.
I’ve chosen to be extremely out, but I know that’s my choice and not everybody can make that, but to whatever extent you can.
As Harvey Milk used to say, come out, come out wherever you are.
There is tremendous power and visibility.
That said, I understand somebody sitting in a deep red state with four kids in a very small town that’s having a hard time, may not want to be as out, and I have to respect that.
That’s just for those of us that can, and even those that can’t be out, find your place where you can go community like a con.
You know, where you can be with your people, but not necessarily exposed to the outside world.
I think that I’ve seen a lot of burnout in my comrades in leftist spaces, and the ways in which we decided to get together are, it’s so serendipitous how it happens sometimes.
Like, a friend of a friend saw a tweet.
It was tremendous work.
It was some of the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done in my life, and it was just because somebody one day said something and said, hey, you want to come do a thing today in a park?
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you realize how proud of yourself you should be for that?
Oh, I am.
People actually stand out.
You should be.
That is a perfect example of somebody because I always say do something.
Yeah.
Can be small or big.
I think that was pretty big, actually.
But and in the middle of it, there was a lot of I won’t get too into detail about my stuff in the middle of it.
There was a lot of talk specifically with people with disabilities who said, I’m so glad that we’re able to meet and you’ve made this space accessible for us.
Because otherwise, I would be sitting at home just feeling like a failure for my movement.
I might get emotional.
So trying to make sure these people’s voices are heard, even in these very, very small activist spaces is there’s room when I was lucky because I’m white and loud.
So, you know, it’s easy for me to say, hey, wait a minute, like, is the space actually, you know, acceptable for this person who we know is, you know, has vision issues or whatever.
And it’s that whole thing.
Probably.
Yeah, definitely one of the best pieces of work I ever did.
But when it comes to organizing and coming together, as you say, like, it took me a while to actually dip my feet in.
And I feel like if I had started earlier, I could do, you know, could have showed a would have, right?
But I want to know what it was.
And I’m still kind of wondering what it was that kept me from going in there.
And then as soon as I did, I was like, oh, yeah, of course, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.
You know, and I what what do you think stops us from jumping into the actual work?
Yeah.
The very word activism spawns a whole bunch of emotions in some people that have never done it.
They think of activism as screaming at police police officers on a police line.
And that’s not what you can be.
But activism is also the person who is wheelchair bound, donating their computer skills to a nonprofit that helps support marginalized people.
It is like you said, people that are willing to be out and loud and front-facing, making sure that they’re speaking for the people that can’t.
Realize there’s a place for everybody.
There’s a lot of introverts out there that can do amazing work.
Absolutely.
I talked to some of you in the last election and she was wheelchair bound and felt kind of helpless.
And I said, well, have you ever thought about doing postcards to voters?
Yeah.
She said, no, I didn’t even know about that.
So I hooked her up and she got it.
And every day she wrote five postcards.
For months.
Yeah.
So here she was impacting the election and it’s been proven.
It’s about an 8% shift in people that get those postcards versus not and getting them to vote in the election.
So it actually does have power.
And here she was able to do something from a wheelchair that felt meaningful during the election.
When before that, she said, I can’t do I can’t go march.
I can’t be with Black Lives Matter.
I can’t do all that.
What am I going to do?
And so everybody can do something.
And we need to respect every little cog in the wheel.
Yeah, it’s like in kink organizations, you know, you have to respect the person who’s sitting there maintaining the membership spreadsheet as much as the president of the organization.
Somebody has to hold on to everybody’s waivers.
And it’s not always going to be who you think.
I absolutely appreciate your words on that.
That means a lot to me.
Now, what actually had prompted me to reach out again was, you posted something referring to an old piece of writing that you had done.
And I believe it was titled, Should We Be More Insular?
Oh, I think it was, Should We Be More Inclusive?
I think.
Or maybe it was insular.
I forget how it was titled.
But yeah, it was an old 2010 piece that an organization had a reading group and they found the blog somewhere.
It wasn’t a very active blog and said, Could we use this as our reading material for discussion?
And they did.
Now, could you speak to maybe what you originally meant and maybe how your perspective may have changed over the years?
Or stayed the same.
Or stayed the same?
Yeah, well, hopefully it’s changed a little.
My original impetus was that there are times when we might open the doors too wide.
And let people into an inner sanctum that maybe shouldn’t be.
I had a discussion at a dinner table once where we were talking just about kink education as an example.
There is a level of education the general public needs.
They do not need to see us, you know, doing knife scenes and single tails and things like that.
They don’t need to see that.
That’s none of their freaking business.
So that’s the level of education.
Then it kind of gets deep down until you finally get to the actual kinkster that needs the sort of deep dive education.
Yeah.
And yet, we often throw out all the education as though everyone should be part of that.
I don’t think that that’s true.
It’s much like spaces.
I don’t believe everyone belongs in every space.
I’ll give you an opposite example of what usually happens.
A heterosexual, quite clearly defined as a heterosexual BDSM play organization many years ago, came to me and said, we are being strongly, strongly pressured to allow gay men and lesbians into our play parties.
And we have nothing against gays and lesbians, but that’s not what we are.
We are a heterosexual play group.
And I said, stand your ground.
That’s that there’s not you’re not doing anything to hurt gays and lesbians by not bringing them to your play party.
You have defined your play party as an affinity space for heterosexuals who want to do that.
And so I think that there is a time and a place for inclusion and there’s a time and a place for not.
And I think sometimes in what I call our sometimes hyper inclusive rhetoric, we honestly believe, not we, some people believe every single person belongs in every single space and in every single community and at every single party and at every single, and that’s just not true.
There’s a time and a place for inclusion and there’s a time and a place for what I’ll call affinity spaces.
So I think sometimes heterosexual BDSM or Kink players should be with each other.
Lesbians should be with each other.
Gay men should be with each other.
People that are pan and want to have a pan party do that.
There’s nothing wrong with those affinity spaces.
And then other times we’re all together in one big thing.
And that’s good too.
I think there’s room for both.
And that’s the gist of that article is there is room for both.
And I think that it’s a mistake to always assume everyone should be included in every space.
That said, we do need to be much more aware.
It was just alluded to about people in wheelchairs, people with disabilities.
I do think it’s incumbent upon us to figure out how to accommodate people.
That is something we should be doing.
But that’s very different than an affinity space or a mixed space.
And I think that that’s where the gray line resides because that line moves.
And it’s kind of a judgment call sometimes.
But that’s the gist of the article.
It kind of resonated with me looking into what you had written and some of the other talks that you had had and touched on these ideas.
Because we’ve been speaking with some folks who had encountered some bad actors in some very, I would say, overly open spaces, which I think, like culturally, I mean, aside from the choices, the behavior of the bad actors, culturally, when we open these spaces up too broadly, we let in a bit too much of that outside status quo influences the community space.
And those that are more vulnerable in those spaces are the first to be harmed by shifts, by corruption of that culture.
While my instinct is usually to be very inclusive, there’s certainly a reason to make sure that spaces are very specific to the communities.
They are serving specific communities because especially those that are, you know, the BIPOC and the trans and the non-binary folks, they need safer spaces to be.
It’s an extremely high need.
Absolutely.
Especially in our region.
Like, I could get into it, but I feel very lucky to be a part of the even more private community that I’m in.
I know that those that are most often doing harm tend to look like me.
And so, I understand the value of having spaces where there’s not a me there, you know.
I do think that there’s something to be said for a little bit more vetting.
I’ll give you an example.
Everyone used to think that gay bath houses were always this, throw the doors wide open.
I remember going to a bath house in New York, talking the 70s now.
And they made me sit down in a room before they would give me a membership card and have a talk with me.
Nice.
Before they would give me a membership card to the bath house.
So smart.
Oh my god.
That’s very cool.
That’s so smart.
This is what’s going to happen here.
This is what the facility is like.
Here’s some photos of what’s inside.
And because I weren’t even allowed inside yet.
It was a little room.
And when you were done and they were satisfied that you were, you know, that you were part of it, they handed you your card.
Thank you very much.
And that was it.
That’s wonderful.
There’s a group here.
I believe before you can go to their play parts, you have to go to an orientation, which is about an hour.
That’s great.
And their their attitude is if you can’t spend an hour, to come to our play parties every month for the rest of your life, maybe we don’t want you there.
Yeah, for sure.
I want to know what that orientation looks like, because it’s very difficult to do purely online vetting.
It’s very, very difficult, and it’s not as thorough as it needs to be.
And, you know, people will show up on a Zoom.
No big deal and kind of hide behind it, if you will.
But are they going to go to the play space or the room that you’re going to meet in and have a one-hour discussion with a group of people?
Maybe not.
That might be a sort of self-filtering mechanism.
The private space that I am a part of has kind of a low-grade whisper network, almost, like a database of people and, you know, consent violations or like the circumstances in general.
Sex misdemeanors, for lack of a better term, I think I just invented that.
There’s sex pest rating.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I’ve talked about this before, but I just moved here in June and I came here not knowing anybody at all, and going into spaces here without having a database available to cross-reference anybody was terrifying, absolutely terrifying.
So I was on field just like any of these people could be predators.
Any of these people could hurt me, any of them can hurt my friends.
It’s terrifying.
So how do you feel about vetting with a system like that, like a database of information of sex pests or, in our space, we call it a NOPLIST, people who aren’t allowed in that particular dungeon.
But it’s also just very handy for me personally.
I’m all for it and that’s actually harkening back to the way it used to be.
I came out in an era of no social media, no internet.
Everything was phone and in-person.
So this is even pre-pagers.
So you had to have that whisper network in order to play safely.
Sometimes it was nothing more than I would, let’s say I’m bartending in a leather bar, which I did, and somebody would come up to me and they would say, I’m going home with that person.
Do you know the name?
I said, well, yeah, that’s Jack.
Because we all used our real names just about back then.
And so that’s Jack.
And he said, oh, do you know anything about him?
I said, yeah, no, he’s been around for a long time.
He’s no bad vibes.
He goes, okay, well, I’m going home with him.
And literally as bartenders, we would write the name down.
That was a common thing in leather bars back in the day where the bartender had a long list of who was going home with who.
That was kind of our casual way, the whisper network, if you will, of vetting.
But that was also when bars were the entire center of leather culture.
And that’s no longer the case anymore.
So I think you have to build those robust networks on your own.
So good on you for doing that.
I’ve gotten some flack from folks that are like, what do you mean you want my address?
It’s like, well, first of all, I don’t know where we’re going.
Second of all, like, of course, I want your address.
Like, my safety network is not unaware of you coming on to me and us talking.
Like, it’s just part of it, you know?
And then they like freak out.
Like, I’m not trying to rob you.
Whatever, dude.
Okay.
It’s no longer worth my time.
Anybody who balks at vetting to coin the phrase of an ex of mine, the red flags are not waving you in, somebody really resists vetting and just answering some basic questions and giving some information.
If I’m going to someone else’s place, you better damn well tell me your address that I can then give to…
I usually would text the address to a friend and say, this is where I’m going to be.
If you don’t hear me for me in the morning, come looking for me.
That, I think, is a really important thing that we should foster more than maybe we even do today, because I think we sort of default to the FetLifes and the Reconz and the online connectivity, and we assume that’s enough vetting.
And I’m not really sure it is.
So I’m all for it.
And I want to say that I think that the risks are going to be greater.
I’ve noticed what appears to be sketchy people, sketchy behavior, people not being who they represent themselves as on the apps lately.
Like there’s a…
Lately.
Well, an increased number, a significant jump in the amount of people, you know, misrepresenting themselves just over the…
since the election.
Risks are going to get greater.
So have your backups, have your communication, you know, with your friends.
And don’t forget to ask.
I think that’s a big one.
A lot of my friends in, you know, late 20s, early 30s, early mid 30s, we aren’t asking for like a chaperone.
We are asking for like, hey, like I’m going out to the woods to get drunk and get locked in a cage.
So that’s all I expect to happen.
Maybe a little bit of canoodling.
If you could just keep your phone ringer on, or like if I text like five smiley faces in a row, that’s bad or whatever.
You know what I mean?
And it’s like, we aren’t asking for safety precautions.
Why?
And is that because we’re above it or we don’t think it exists or we don’t want to be scared or whatever?
Like, is it fostering fear?
And I just don’t see the sense in not asking.
And so I tend to offer with a lot of my friends like, hey, next time you go to that space, like let me drive you.
Easy peasy.
It will not take long.
I am down to do it.
I’ve got audio books in the car, you know?
You asked what propelled people to behave this appropriate way.
And I really think it boils down to compassion for ourselves and for others.
I really, it sounds simplistic, but it’s nothing more than taking care of ourselves and taking care of other people.
And you just figure out how to do that.
And get used to doing it.
Yeah.
And I have not, at least in the gay male realm, I haven’t noticed any particular increase in the number of bad actors entering the scene.
I don’t, I can’t pretend to speak.
I mean, I hang out on Fet Life, but and I go to mixed play parties and I do see some of that.
But I also live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I live in this very kinky, kind of savvy bubble.
And even if I go to a Society of Janice party, of which I may be one of five gay men at the whole thing, they’ll get me and I’ll get them right away.
It doesn’t matter.
But if you live in smaller towns and you ask why people don’t do it, imagine you’re newly out and kinky and you really don’t have a kinky network yet.
There are a lot of people, unfortunately, willing to take that first risk and go, I’m just going to go do these wild things with this person because I’ve been fantasizing about it for years, but they have no one to talk to particularly.
And that’s the most dangerous situation there is.
Yeah.
Hormones, especially when I was younger, have led to me taking some wild risks.
Oh yeah.
Survival.
You know, these days, I’ve got a process.
I’m okay with waiting because I know it’s going to be good once we get there.
I’m not going to rush into it.
My younger self, oh my gosh.
My dad still has that deal on the table that like it doesn’t matter what it is, what time it is, anything like and he’s a couple of states away.
He’s not going to do much, but I can call him no ifs, ands or buts.
That’s what he says.
You know, if I need out of something, he is right there.
And to have that like support and even to be that support now as I’m 33 years old like, and I know my dad’s not going to be there forever, but I can be that support to now in an extremely similar way because I was shown that.
For my community and like the people around me.
I don’t care if we’re even friends at that point, you know, like if you ever need a ride out of a space because you’re in danger.
Like I’ve had people randomly ping me on Facebook saying, I’m new to the scene.
I don’t know anybody to tell that I’m going to this address.
So I’m telling you, literally, they did not know me out.
They never met me.
They just knew me by reputation and figured I wouldn’t be a jerk and say no.
And so I said, sure, text me.
Here’s my here’s my phone and, you know, text me when you’re when you’re done.
And that was it.
You talked about age.
And I think that’s important to say my 21 year old self.
I mean, I came out in the scene when I was 17, 18.
So I had raging late teen hormones.
I would fuck anything that moved.
It didn’t matter where, when it was.
It was just what a 18, 19 year old guy does typically.
And now I’m 70 and I go, Oh, well, everybody should have the same kind of caution or whatever.
But I have to remember myself when I was 21, 22.
I still think they should be cautious, which is why I think sometimes young people aren’t as cautious.
Yeah, it’s not excessive to have a safety plan.
It’s not excessive.
I agree.
I agree completely.
Well now, and I model that restraint in certain ways.
In my play, I teach my play partners.
I model the behavior that I wish I would have known back then.
The caution, just these extra steps to vet, to take these meds that weren’t available to me then, and I was just doing it.
I mean, that’s what I can offer.
I know that they’re still going to want to take part in this kind of play, but that self-love of just waiting a second, thinking it through, taking those extra steps to vet are very important.
I’m glad somebody’s there to guide them to be a little bit safer.
Modeling that way is the most important thing you could possibly do.
Back in the day, I would walk in to a leather bar, and everything was kind of built in.
I kind of knew everybody was kind of on the same page.
They were all gay men or men who had sex with men at least.
Probably all kinky, at least to some extent, so I was fishing in the right pond.
They all saw each other visually.
Everybody saw who came in and out of the bar, so it was a little harder to get away with things.
And most people knew everyone else, at least one removed.
So you could always ask about someone.
So it was kind of built in.
So we’ve had to create these new safety structures that are a little more elaborate.
We didn’t have cell phones and we couldn’t text somebody.
We didn’t have that option.
But like leaving messages on a bar or, you know, like that’s being very direct with, you know, who you came in with.
Even this is not, I don’t recommend this, but I remember many, many years ago, I was quite young, and I was going to meet a guy and I played for the first few decades, pretty much exclusively as a top and a dom, I’m a switch now, but I remember leaving the hotel room, I was in another city and I was pretty young, and I thought, oh shit, nobody, so I put this big piece of paper on the bed, that said, if this paper is still here in the morning, it means something’s bad has happened to me and blah, blah, and I gave information of who to call and everything, because it was like one in the morning, and I’m like, I’m not going to call anybody now, so again, I would recommend you call or leave a message or do something, but that was my little out even back then, because I had no other way to sort of back myself up, and that’s what I did.
That reminds me of leaving notes on my car, like when I’m parked in somebody’s spot.
That was pretty innovative.
It was like pre-texting texting.
It was, and it was interesting, because I didn’t feel like I was at any particular risk as the Dom.
That said, I think we need to get over this idea that it’s only the subs that are in danger.
I just recently, and he’s public about it, there was a well-known Dom here in San Francisco, gay man, who took someone home, the person was going to sub to them, whatever, and the guy completely freaked the fuck out, beat him over the head, bloody, had to get stitches, police reports, the whole thing, and he was the Dom.
We make an assumption that it’s always the subs and the bottoms that are in danger, but that’s not always true.
So vetting on both sides is a good idea.
That said, I don’t think he actually did anything wrong.
It was just really a fucked up situation.
Yeah, that sounds really fucked up.
He met them in a bar.
Everyone saw who he went home with.
I mean, it was not this irresponsible kind of connection.
It just really was a bad situation, unfortunately.
Luckily, the community gathered around him and immediately kind of sort of came to his aid when it was necessary.
But vetting is always good.
It was awful.
It was awful.
Here’s modeling.
We called a community meeting.
Well, they called a community meeting.
He got on stage at our local leather bar and told his story.
We had somebody from our safety patrol give everybody safety guidelines.
We made lemonade out of lemons.
And I think communities can do that.
I have a closing question, if that’s OK.
Sure.
What are you reading or listening to right now?
Oh, I’m reading a short story collection of four novellas by Corey Doctorow.
Pretty wonderful.
I’m reading a book on AI because that’s I’m a geek and reading a collection of Plato’s works because I’m a philosophy geek.
I read about a book a week.
I’m a pretty avid reader.
If it wasn’t for audiobooks, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
Oh, best audio.
So I’ve only listened to one audiobook.
My friend Pig, who’s on the On Cigar Cigar Salon with us, listens to tons of biographies.
That’s his favorite thing.
The audiobook by Viola Davis, her biography, it’s only nine and a half hours.
It is the most compelling, remarkable biography I have ever read or listened to.
That’s awesome.
It is remarkable.
It encapsulates marginalization, racism, classism, poverty, domestic violence.
I could go through.
It’s all in there.
It’s just amazing.
I highly recommend her biography.
In that regard, I will recommend Jesus and John Wayne, which is essentially a rundown deep dive of the rise of Christian nationalism, especially in our politics and how masculinity has changed over the decades.
Okay.
I’m going to look at that.
We will make sure to put all of your links in the show notes and as well as the Viola Davis and Jesus and John Wayne book.
Thank you so much.
You have a lovely weekend.
You too.
I’m honored you asked me.
Thank you so much.
You have a good weekend too.
