When Someone You Love Is Kinky by Dossie Easton

Author:Dossie Easton [LISZT, DOSSIE EASTON AND CATHERINE A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781890159849
Publisher: Greenery Press
Published: 2011-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Our point here is that kinky people live in an underground community that is rich and productive, generating art and discourse of its own and exerting a major influence on art and philosophy outside of the boundaries of the sexual minority’s ghetto: our voices carry very far “beyond the pale.” The three largest public events in California, where we live, are the Rose Bowl, the San Francisco Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/ Transgendered Freedom Day Pride Parade, and the Folsom Street Fair. This last, which attracts a couple of hundred thousand attendees every year, takes place in San Francisco’s South of Market “Miracle Mile,” home of leather bars, sex clubs, art galleries and performance spaces serving the sexual underground. (The mainstream newspapers here in San Francisco usually give the Fair a couple of column inches of space.)

Indeed, so complete a community and culture exists within our pale that many of us have very little contact with the mainstream world. Those of us who live in the sexual underground have entire social and extended family networks ready to take care of all of our needs; businesses, places of employment, neighborhoods where nobody stares when we walk by no matter what we are wearing. One publisher in our community maintains a list of Kink Aware Professionals, listing therapists, doctors and dentists who are “S/M friendly” in many cities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the Far East.

We even have our own museum: Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum now houses valuable historical documents and displays from our community’s past and present.

Why we feel safer in a ghetto. Because nobody will offer us a hard time. Many kinky people feel safer within the boundaries of our subculture, and more free to expand and refine our understanding and expression of our sexuality and our selves. There is very little space for our exploration in the mainstream culture.

This can be hard to understand, so let’s look at an example. Dossie writes and performs poetry with intense erotic and philosophical themes, and she has no desire to perform in the larger culture, even though she might make more money. The difference is about being understood. Audiences in the underground understand what she is saying, and are able to listen and respond with enthusiasm. A mainstream audience would be (and, on occasion, has been) so shocked by her content that they wouldn’t really hear her, and certainly would not be able to respond with enthusiasm. So inside the ghetto, she can develop her art and get feedback from those who read and hear her. Outside, she is regarded as an embarrassing freak.

The more we live in our community, the less we know about what is mainstream. We become a strange kind of foreigner, ostracized from the larger culture in which we live, encapsulated. Dossie has never lived in the mainstream as an adult, which is one reason why she seems old-fashioned when she tries: the “straight” culture she remembers living in was in the fifties. Some of us become

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