New York trip

Posted by Tanos on Sat 27 Aug 11, 2:48 AM

Tags: events

Earlier this month mia and I had a trip to the US, with a week in New York followed by the GLLA weekend conference event in Indianapolis. I'm going to post later about GLLA so I can do the New York part first. We did a mixture of sight seeing, shopping (including BDSM shopping) and one BDSM event.

First the BDSM shops. I went to New York back in 2005 and blogged about it at the time. I didn't manage to find any new shops, and two (Noose and DeMask) have closed.

This time, the best of the bunch felt like The Leather Man at 111 Christopher Street, although London at number 84 felt quite similar. Both have a good assortment of leather and metal restraints, floggers, canes etc, plus rubber and leather clothing for guys (and a rail or two for women.) I bought a rather heavy rubber strap with a wooden handle from The Leather Man, that looks rather like a razor strop. I didn't rate "New York Fetish" at number 74 that highly, although some of the locals love it and it does sell label (eg Stormy Leather) corsets, rubber etc.

Christopher Street itself is full of gay-run businesses and starts as Sheridan Square where the Stonewall Riots took place. That morning we also had a walk through Greenwich Village and a pizza in the ever-shrinking Little Italy area.

Purple Passion seems to be the largest (only?) shop aimed at the pansexual scene. It felt more like a sex shop this time, with less books, restraints, floggers etc and more sex toys and PVC. They do workshops and classes in a downstairs room (which had sale items last time) which might be worth looking out for if you're visiting. I did manage to pick up a couple of old Skin Two magazines that I didn't already have yet.

For sight seeing, we did a lot of the usual things: going up the Empire State Building; visiting Ground Zero, Battery Park and Wall Street; seeing the New York Public Library, Grand Central Terminal, Times Square, the UN Headquarters, and the Chrysler Building; having that Little Italy pizza and drinking a Manhattan in our 1930s hotel's bar.

I also visited the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier museum (keeping the Ark Royal for another year would have so helped in Libya, wouldn't it?) and its impressive collection of planes. I've never had a look round an aircraft carrier before, and Intrepid is both huge (compared to a person) and tiny (compared to a runway!)

We had a walk through Central Park and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has several Geromes on display at the moment, including "Arabs Crossing the Desert". Gerome is someone I've kept coming back to since I was 16, not least for the hints of what we now call BDSM that he offers the viewer (including the cloaked figure in red, who I interpret as a wife or slave obediently following her master's horse, head bowed.)

In the middle of the week we went to a TES meeting of their releationshops SIG. TES is the oldest BDSM society in the world and meets in a run-down dance rehearsal studio, with a room full of ballet dancing girls practicing their positions next door this time. The advertised topic of the TES meeting was Lady Velvet and thrash talking about the up and downs of their long term (14 years?) D/s relationship. In some ways it was a lot like an O&P Open in tone despite the slightly different format. After the half-time break, the chairs were arranged in the TES Circle and the dozen or so of us there had a roundtable discussion about the first half or topics we wanted to bring up. I'd been to a general TES meeting during my 2005 visit and it was quite similar, with a strong focus on sharing ideas both between attendees and from whoever had volunteered to talk at greater length that time.

In my next holiday post, I'll write a bit about GLLA in Indianapolis - a whole weekend conference and contest event with a Leather rather than a more mainstream BDSM style.

Edited Tue 20 Sep 11, 6:28 PM by Tanos

There's a copy of this post on my blog on Informed Consent too, and you can reply there as an IC member.