New York Part III: TES meeting

Posted by Tanos on Wed 10 Aug 05, 12:29 AM

I've already written two posts about going to New York: first about Gloria Brame's talk at Paddles and then about New York shops and the Leather Pride weekend. This is the last of the three topics I'd planned to write about, and has taken the longest because of the knotty subject matter - Soulhuntre's "Punishment as a Science" talk - so it's ended up in two halves itself.

On the Tuesday after the Leather Pride weekend, lili and I went to a meeting of The Eulenspiegel Society (TES), which is the oldest BDSM society in the world - older even than the Society of Janus in San Francisco. The main subject for the meeting was Soulhuntre's talk, but I'll get on to that in a separate post.

It was a warm, fine evening, so we ended up walking down to the place where TES meets: in one of New York's office/appartment buildings, and it turned out to be a hired room in a small dance studio. So one wall all mirrors, theatre lighting from the ceiling, temperamental air conditioning units near the windows and stackable chairs arranged in rows facing the front.

The meeting got started properly at half seven and Soulhuntre spoke for a bit more than an hour, including a couple of questions during the talk and a good 20 minutes of them at the end. I must admit I found it fascinating to watch the dynamics of the meeting, since Soulhuntre at the front and his friend Flagg, sat in the back row, were pretty much able to present their highly controversial position without much challenge from the local TES members at least.

After the main talk there was a break, and then we reassembled for "The TES Circle", in which the chairs were arranged in a big circle and everyone got to introduce themselves, AA style, and say why they were there. First timers who lived in/near New York got a round of applause, but I mentioned I was here on "vacation" with lili and so didn't use the magic "this is my first time at TES" phrase and missed out

Quite a lot of the discussion followed on from Soulhuntre's talk, but people also raised other things that were on their mind in quite a natural and fluid way. (We should do more of this in the UK.) This was the point at which people did start to disagree with each other, but it took the form of talking past each other rather than going as far as saying "I disagree" or something so direct. I don't know whether this is something that has built up over time as a survival strategy for TES, or whether it's just part of the "have a nice day!" temperament, but I must admit, there was also a marked reluctance to disagree with Soulhuntre or Flagg.

The meeting was officially wound up at about 10:30, so we stacked some of the chairs and then drifted off into the night, talking about the things that had been discussed all the way back to our hotel. I'm saving that for another post though, since the full implications of my "but if you look at the way the brain actually works ..." question are quite involved

Edited Thu 17 Aug 06, 12:26 AM by Tanos

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