Edge Play Under Attack!

A friend, the August Founder of several groups that are household names to people with floggers hanging in their bedrooms and clothespins which have never seen a clothesline, is going to be the keynote speaker at an upcoming leather event. He sent to me, and to several other worthies, the text of his talk, and asked for feedback. It is, of course, excellent. I found crafting a response to be thought provoking. And I wanted to share my thoughts with all of you here on the humble SingleTails. Given the byzantine rules of anonymity that I apply to myself when writing here, editing my email to August Founder is something of a challenge, but I'll give it a whirl. I'll try my best to provide a cushion of deniability for the folks mentioned ("I have no idea what he was talking about on his silly weblog and that sure wasn't me!"), but in some cases, I have to admit there isn't a lot of stuffing in that cushion. But here goes...

You're going to come under fire for this speech (surprise!), but not, perhaps, for reasons that have occurred to you.

A couple of years ago, I got into a tiff with a noted Barber, late of New York City, now of San Francisco. Through the wonders of the internet, we've never actually spoken to each other, although once when I was visiting San Francisco, Mr. Barber crossed the street to avoid me. Or maybe not.

It all started when I read in Bob and Austin's online publication, All-American Kink or whatever, an interview with Mr. Barber. In it, he was condemning of Inferno, an event I love deeply. Something along the lines of "too many rules! you can't push the envelope!" This, of course, is claptrap. If Diabolique's whipping at the hands of the Man from Munich, or any of several scenes I've seen contrived by the deceptively amiable Mind Bender are the stuff of schoolroom shenanigans, than I quiver at the prospect of entering that schoolroom. (All of us are candyasses when it comes to something. For me it's the sight of my own blood, and items other than food I like and the occasional stream of piss from the tap in my mouth. Cigar ashes are beyond the pale.)

Mr. Barber stated that to prove his point, he had organized his own event at Fort Troff in Atlanta. At which there would be No Rules (!). By way of example, he sited a scene in which he smoked a cigar while a boy gave him a blow job. The boy was gagging on Mr. Barber's cock, and at one point, turned aside and vomited, but then continued the blow job. (Eeewwwwww!)

Okay. This all struck me as silly. In my humble weblog, I crafted what I thought was an amusing and not-too-meanspirited response, which I titled 'Wayne's Dungeon.' I used the characters created by Mike Myers and Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live, where a couple of heavy metal enthusiasts sit around in somebody's finished basement being awed by mediocrity. In Wayne's Dungeon, two renegade leathermen congratulated each other and their guest for being truly Hard Core.

Well. Word reached me that Mr. Barber was really upset by that. I wondered if I had gone too far, insulting a fellow leatherman's idiosyncratic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Reflecting on it, I came to the conclusion that to the extent that I had let my baser self get the better of me, it was about high school. In high school, and therefore for the rest of my life, I was not cool. I aspired to be cool, but in every attempt I made to emulate the kids who were cool, it seemed they changed the rules on me as soon as I was able to limn and follow them. I was always two steps behind cool. The girl in the yellow dress that Virginia Wolf wrote about in a short story.

Here's my point. (I do have one!) Edge Play is the current flavor of cool. Those among us who consider themselves to be cool aren't getting the same charge out of being kinky as they once did, because now you've got tons and tons of people who are kinky. (I wonder if there's an age element in all of this? I think the TNG phenomenon is really interesting. We now live in a world where 24 year olds are accomplished whipsmen and whipswomen--No really! Some of these kids are really good!--and that's lowered the value of being an elder considerably. So, maybe we who are getting on in years just want something to set ourselves above the masses, especially the fresh-faced masses.) Now that kink is in every living room in America, and pervasive on the internet, it's natural that some among us would yawn behind fanned fingers at the mention of rope bondage and flogging, because they're into something that's really Out There.

And here comes poor August Founder, delivering an excellent keynote address at... uh... A Big Leather Event In The Reddest Of All Red States. And in it, he seems to be doing for Edge Play what he did for SM when he founded GMSMA: making something dark, mysterious, and forbidding into something accessible and understandable. And, dare I say, fun for everyone!

Oh man. Are you in for it.

Now what are you going to force the Noted Barbers of the world to resort to? Scenes involving live panthers and heavy duty farming equipment demanding a venue the size of Shea Stadium?

Prepare yourself for the backlash.

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