How I Spent My Summer Vacation

“i feel so comfortable, so relaxed, so at ease. Just to be able to be completely who and what i am, and not have to worry about being judged or criticized or misunderstood. It's like being on vacation.”

A member of my Leather Family wrote me these words following a weekend spent together. When I read his words, I realized that this was also how I felt as his Sir. After the three days playing together, I felt rejuvenated, relaxed, ready to face the world again.

Leathermen commonly use the word “honesty” in conjunction with other admirable traits during contest speeches and Internet forums. It is used so often that many of us have started to make jokes about what seems to be a generic application of the word. We draw parallels between the codified description of Leather and the oath pronounced by Boy Scouts at every troop meeting. The word seems to point to an abstract idea devoid of the actual operation of the word relative to our play.

Playing on the edge requires both Dominant and submissive to strip away their social masks. The Dominant pushes the submissive to the point where the combined physical and emotional distress overcomes his ability to continue to wear his daily mask. The submissive no longer finds the energy necessary to maintain his disguise. he is stripped bare. Inhibitions are dropped. Fantastic desires surface. A fist up the ass to the elbow. A staged rape scene by multiple tops. A body reduced to piss, cum, blood, and tears. A state of abandon and fulfillment that many describe as psychologically therapeutic.

The Dominant can also be affected by hard play in a corresponding manner. Teetering on what feels like the precipice of control, the Dominant must decide whether to stick to a preconceived script or surrender to the moment. To take full advantage of the scene, He must also His relinquish will, abandoning the illusion of His dominance over the situation. He recognizes that all He can do is guide both Himself and the bottom through the miasma brought about by their play. In this way the Dominant meets the submissive half-way, dropping His mask and leaving Himself raw to the emotional intensity of the scene.

More a mechanism of exposure than protection, this is the honesty of Leather. It has little to do with the abstracted notion used in club oaths and modern religious credos. Rather, it is the direct byproduct of play, a souvenir of the scene that players share outside of the dungeon.

With no where to hide, the final result of such honesty is an intimacy where both Dominant and submissive vanquish all inhibitions, where both enjoy a bond beyond the maintenance of masks. A “comfortableness” that affords both a chance to breathe air clear of bullshit. No judgment. No criticism. No effort. Total acceptance.

Quite simply, a “vacation” from the drone of daily life.

The Mask's Balance

I am often asked why Leather masks have become such a primary focus of my Leather. The answer, each mask is a microcosm of the human experience, a dialogue between form and emptiness, the seen and the unseen. The exterior, a protrusion into space, the form. And the internal , the void into which the wearer must enter, the emptiness. The presentational surface invites the viewer to enter into dialogue with the masked. And the masked vivifies the surface that is presented. Together, both give life to the mask object.

The mask both disguises and exposes the wearer. As a disguise, it hides the literal skin in order to construct an other. But the mask also forces its wearer into action, forcing him to expose his phenomenal aspect. The mask constricts the senses so that extraneous movement is minimalized. Action is reduced to the essential, the critical.

The tools of Leatherplay operate in much the same way as the mask. No longer able to operate outside of the context established by the Dominant, the submissive is forced to express himself relative to the play object. The limitation of physical and emotional response in the Dominant's hand provokes the submissive to focus all his reactive energy on a single point. The point where a single tail strikes the skin. The constricting point of a rope that defines the limitation of the bound submissive.

Returning to masking, the mask object has no true back. Rather, the mask posits itself as a hollow relative to the wearer. A vacuum. An invitation to intimacy. Complementary to the public side, the side facing the wearer becomes private, experienced by one person.

The astute Dominant understands the intimate position of the submissive. He understands that the mask or play object is a portal to the senses, that its operation forces the submissive into a solitary space. As a result, experienced Dominants encourage kinesthetic responses from the submissive, vocalizations or gestures with the hands or limbs. And the experienced submissive understands that succumbing to the trance of privacy is selfish and denies the power exchange that defines Leatherplay. Because of its negligence in facilitating an exchange of power, surrender to privacy behind the mask object is nothing less than dysfunctional in the context of Gay Leather. In fact, the surrender to self in Leatherplay characterizes the biggest trap of Leatherplay.

In his essay “What Happened?” the author John Preston made this observation in the early nineties relative to sub-centric play:

If you want an anti-sexual experience, take a man, tie him up, whip his ass, and then listen to him lecture to you afterwards that you paid more attention to his right buttock than his left. He wasn't after an anarchistic S/M experience, he didn't want someone to show him his own shadows, he wanted an act executed as he directed it. Forgetting the experience, the how-to S/Mer falls back on the rule book. “And where did you get your training? What workshops have you gone to?” he asks, with all the social-status consciousness of a Boston banker asking where you went to college.

Preston, John. (1991). What Happened? In Mark Thompson (Ed.), Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice. (pp. 210-220). Boston: Allyson.

As a Dominant, I do not want to make my submissive comfortable when I play. Nor do I solely want to facilitate a state of ecstasy in the submissive brought about by endorphin release. Rather, I want to illicit an exchange between my self and my submissive. This creates a unique bond between us. Some men call this bond “trust” for lack of a better term. Private states of ecstasy are best left to religious rites and extreme masturbation. This is not the Leather that I practice.

Play objects operate like masks in my hands. My single tail connects my public position with the intimacy of the man on the receiving end. The bite of the cracker draws his sharp cry of pain and a rush of blood to the immediate area. I encourage both by striking that same spot again and again until I am satisfied with the submissive's response. This is the exchange of power that characterizes my Leatherplay. And it is the operation that characterizes the mask, my ultimate fetish.