Ritual and the Mid-Atantic Leather Weekend: Washington, D.C.

Early Friday morning I sat on the flight to Washington, D.C. and reflected on the last time that I found myself in the nation's capitol. The days no longer sunny and warm, I prepared myself for the brutal onslaught of the East Coast winter. I would be spending the next three days with the same handsome boy that I met in August. I anticipated a great weekend. Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend did not disappoint.The Centaurs know how to put on a run, with events spaced out to allow for plenty of play. In fact, play was the locus of my three days in DC, with the official events providing needed respite between rounds.

This weekend I once again realized that the SIR/boy paradigm is the root of my Leather. Specifically, that style of play that begins when a boy surrenders both his body and his will to his SIR. Reaching this point usually requires prolonged time spent together, play that exists outside of negotiation, where heart becomes the ruling factor beyond “RACK” and “Safe, Sane, and Consensual.” While vitally important in play as guidelines, these principles are but fingers pointing at he moon, as we say in Zen.

In the late 80s and 90s, many of us recognized ritual in our play. Some of us embraced it as an essential part of our spirituality, privatizing the sacred aspect of our Leather. We celebrated that part of our sexuality distinct from our more public SM. Geoffrey Mains openly discussed the ritual nature of Leather in his seminal work, “Urban Aboriginals.” It was one of the first books that I was encouraged to read when I was a Leatherboy. Shortly after, I became obsessed with the works of Mercea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. In tandem with my early study, I met the man who would make the most profound impact on my Leather, Al “D” Sowers.

Al's dungeon area in his home mirrored the present structure of my Leather. Friends had carved the dungeon out of the crawl space over a period of many months in 1992. The greater part of the space was for public play, with the requisite hardware and slings. Then there was the more intimate area, the ritual room. Al reserved this space for himself. It was filled with furs, bones, and First People's artifacts, that part of his heritage that he treasured most. And, at the end of his life, it was also where he slept. The public and the private.

More than ten years ago I bottomed for the last time in this ritual space. A double, nipple piercing scene. My partner stood next to me as I lay face up on the table. The final in a string of scenes over the years where I would be pierced or cut by Al. I had built total faith in him over the years. Al explained the importance of piercing “away from the heart” to reinforce an open energy and encouraged me to enter a meditative state. I felt my breath go in and out and heard him alter his breathing to match the tempo of my own. Suddenly a long breath in and, suspended between breaths, I felt both nipples skewered simultaneously. An exquisite pain that seemed to radiate throughout my entire body and to settle in my navel.

“Your body literally rose off the table,” my partner remarked immediately after the scene. “Different than I thought it would be,” he added. Indeed, we spoke later about the fact that private ritual scens are very different from Leather scenes in Gay porn.

Al's ritual tools were knives, scalpels, and piercing instruments. Mine are boots, masks, and whips. Each SIR has his method of marking the initiate's body. Unlike the feigned acts of most Western fraternal and religious orders, we inflict marks on our boys to encourage them to remember the scene. Every boy I know wears his marks with pride and feels a pang of regret as they fade with time.

Not all scenes are ritual in nature and not all boys open to offering themselves totally to a SIR. Sometimes play is simply fun, hot, sexy, painful, difficult, even ridiculous. But it is the surrendering act that qualifies a boy for my collar. His rite of passage. An entrance into the core of my Leather.

Leather runs can facilitate the essential juxtaposition of the private and the public. On Sunday as I sat next to the boy, I watched a very public ritual, the installation of new officers of a Leather club, the Centaurs. Candles were extinguished and relit as a large audience watched with approval. The public ritual opened the contest, the highlight of the run and another integral part of the Leather Community.

I suggest that public and private rituals both have an equal importance in the Gay Men's Leather Community. They have helped define it over the last quarter century.

Again, thanks to the Centaurs for all their hard work over the MAL weekend. A great run and one that I will attend again in the years ahead sans sash. And a special congratulations to the new Mid-Atlantic Mr. Leather, Doug Pamplin. Have a great year of service!