Play, Surrender, and Discourse

More than six months ago I enjoyed a very intense whip scene with one of my boys during a Seattle Men in Leather social at The Cuff. After half an hour, I stood with signal whip in hand, pushing my bulging crotch against the back of the boy's thigh and examined my work.

“Want more?” I taunted, watching the welts blossom into bleeding wounds. To my surprise I saw a smile appear on the boy's lips. I turned his head slightly and kissed him. “the boy likes the game, eh?” I asked.

“YES, SIR!” he adamantly replied.

Ten months before this boy had presented me with a lengthy list of SM activities that he liked and didn't like. Single tails was one of those activities that did not rate high on his list. I whispered “I guess the boy is playing off his list. My how this boy has changed!”

We both laughed.

I reflect back on a scene more than fifteen years ago when I lay under the knife in a public dungeon while a trusted mentor cut an extensive cutting into my back. And I thought of another moment years before that, sitting next to my friend, Wes Randall, as he drove me back from a Leather event.

Wes would later do a spread Drummer Magazine in 1991 with knife in hand. He was also the only Gay man I knew at that time that openly played with the women in our Community, play that included bloodsports. The knife was his ritual object of choice, always at his side. Wes even wore the studded outline of his knife on his belt, harness, and arm bands thanks to Lee Willis of Studwerks.

“you'd love to be cut,” Wes said to me. “It's incredible!”

“That's on my list of definite NO's,” I responded quickly. “That is something that I never want to do.”

Months later I would receive my first cutting, surprising both myself and those who knew me. The list that I had written the year before had metaphorically been lost. No longer about specific activities, my Leather focused on developing trust with specific people. No longer about a scheduled release of endorphins circumscribed by my personal fears.

The surrender of the individual is an essential characteristic of all fraternal rituals, a movement by degrees from fear to a higher understanding of self. Perusing contemporary Gay Leather history in North America exposes this same theme, especially if we focus on the apocrypha immediately following World War II. This segment of our history revolves around the rise of motorcycle clubs and fraternal groups.

Of course the anxious and the curious are often not comfortable with the idea of surrender, with the disposal of the list of fears that almost always exists at the onset of one's journey into Leather. Surrender and the development of trust takes time, especially if we focus on its public demonstration. A notion that seems to fly in the face of the argument of inclusivity and the immediacy of contemporary life.

(Patience is a virtue that we seldom discuss in our present Community.)

Returning to my role as a SIR, I have literally received hundreds of offers from men who want to be my boy throughout the years. What attracts me to a boy is his desire to question his own prescription through play as he builds trust in his SIR. After months, often years, the boy says, “I'm yours. Do with me what you will.”

At this juncture, I then test the boy to determine the veracity of his statement using my preferred implements of play: whips, boots, fists, piss. The trial of the ritual begins in earnest, the boy offering his body to be marked, changed, by the SIR. No simple act of submission, the boy often fights back, struggling not against me but against the notion of himself. As he wanders outside of his prescribed list of dos and don't s, his body no longer belongs solely to himself.

The logical next phase of this ritual is its public display. Play in a public dungeon space becomes essential in the acknowledgment of the SIR/boy dynamic. I am reminded of Michel Foucault's observation in his seminal work, “Discipline and Punish.” The public performance of torture doled out by the hands of justice in an earlier age is directly related to the discourse of the power of the sovereign. The body of the accused, a canvas of this discourse, the lexus of power.

To fully appreciate this paradigm one must understand Foucault's philosophy of how power works. It does not flow from the top down. Rather, the discourse is formed by the exchange between the parties. Applying this to the idea of Sir and boy, this means that one is defined as Sir relative to the boy and relative to the Community. A public discourse. More specifically, the power of the Sir does not come flow from some inner conviction, from an intangible soul, but rather from the phenomenal exchange of energy realized in play and protocols. Ritual, the signifier of this discourse.

I ask every Sir contestant that I judge, “What makes you a 'Sir?'” After six months I still wait for the obvious answer.

I usually hear the Sir candidate respond that he just “feels” the power inside; a self-identified role. Historically and philosophically speaking, such a response has little significance.

The large, International LeatherSIR sash does not make me a Sir. Nor does the fervor that I feel when I pick up the implements of my play. I am a Sir because my boys recognize me as such. I am a Sir in the Community because my peers acknowledge this role relative to my boys. Very simple.

Conversely, if I were to abuse my boys physically or emotionally, they would soon stop calling me “Sir.” The Community would regard me as a man who did not understand the responsibility of being a Sir. In short, the title “Sir” would no longer be applied to me. To repeat, “Sir” is directly tied to the phenomenon of play and protocols. It is not a personal expression of belief uttered as a proclamation of faith.

The power of play comes from the exchange between a Sir and His boy, and the subsequent exchange with the Community. The recognition of this exchange is basic to the formation of the discourse of Gay Men's Leather culture over the last sixty years. It is the foundation of my Leather.

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!