New York Part I: Gloria Brame at Paddles

Posted by Tanos on Sat 25 Jun 05, 10:53 PM

My last weblog post mentioned some of the things lili and I went to while we were away last week. I'm now going to try to write something more detailed about the first of these, Gloria Brame's talk at the DomSubFriends group at Paddles.

DomSubFriends started in 1999 as a Onelist mailing list (which ultimately became part of Yahoo Groups) and has grown into one of the larger BDSM groups in the region centered on New York. Their website and Yahoo Group are very useful for finding shops and events etc in the area, and they run regular play parties at various venues, including Paddles. DSF feels more like a play party group that runs some educational / support meetings, whereas the other major group in the area, TES, seems to be the other way round - but more about TES in a later weblog.

Paddles itself is a dedicated dungeon venue, which is used by several groups and can also be hired. For comparison, it has slightly bigger floor area than Nemesis II over here, but the space is more subdivided, and is on several levels. Paddles has an even more obscure entrance than Nemesis, in a parking lot off an anonymous Manhatten street.

The area used for Gloria Brame's talk was quite small, with about 30 or 40 people packed in on an assortment of armchairs, meeting chairs, bar stools and some people looking down from the balcony area above. (I got the impression this was one of their bigger meetings, due to GB's, well, celebrity in BDSM circles )

She's probably best known for the 1996 book Different Loving that she co-edited with her husband Will, with some work on the interviews done by Jon Jacobs (who got equal credit.) But before that she had founded "Variations II" in 1987, the SM forum on Compuserve (a dial-in computer bulletin-board and messaging system similar to AOL.) She met her husband Will via these boards on Compuserve, and a lot of other people from that era found the scene the same way, before internet-based groups like alt.sex.bondage started, and before the Web existed.

GB's talk was advertised as "SM of the Mind", but she put her notes aside for most of the time and it was mostly questions and answers from the audience. So all sorts of topics were touched on, as you can imagine.

Some of it was about GB herself: she described how the publication of "Different Loving" - with her real name on the cover - largely ended her other career, led to vanilla magazines and journals rejecting the type of things she'd been publishing for a while, and even caused her to be hired and fired in one day by one magazine when they "found out."

This was part of a wider discussion about anonymity and the internet, and the way some people use anonymity as a way of maintaining multiple identities, or to recycle their identity each time they screw up. (IC's Networks and the prominence we give to how long people have been around with the same identity are one way of addressing that.) Despite her own experiences ten years ago, in GB's opinion, there's no real need to maintain this kind of anonymity unless you're in some kind of high-profile job, or working where vanilla prejudice might pick you out (working with children for instance.)

In some ways, it does feel like BDSM is more acceptable these days, and privacy isn't such an issue, but then the net raises its own set of problems, with the way the online world attracts cranks and stalkers, even for vanillas.

Another particularly interesting area was vanilla vs SM relationships. (GB used SM rather than BDSM throughout, which was also a constrast with "Different Loving", which was part of that generation of books which, like "The Loving Dominant", used DS as a synonym for the whole of BDSM.)

I wasn't suprised to hear her be very sceptical about the idea of converting vanillas or anything resembling pushing someone to do something which is unnatural for them (she is working as a counsellor, and has a PhD in Clinical Sexology from the IASHS, after all.) But she was also pretty blunt about a question about people drifting back towards being vanilla, and ways to prevent it: quite frankly, in her view, some people were vanilla all along and were just here for any kinky sex that was available.

However, I think the most interesting topic centered on her personal experience as a dominant, and it's evolution. In particular that she no longer stood (or hid) behind any kind of self-consciously dominant role, and had the confidence just to be her (rather dominant) self. For example, that she didn't feel a need to hide her dislike of flying, from the sub (Will's slave) who had travelled up from Atlanta with her.

Personally, I think that's part of a central theme to hold on to in any kind of D/s relationship: authenticity - being on the outside what you are on the inside, because if it's just a veneer, it will wear off sooner or later.

(You can read GB's own weblog post about the evening, on her website.)

Edited Sat 27 Aug 11, 1:19 AM by Tanos