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Edgeplay in Mayhill

HISTORICAL NOTE

Abridged

Dusk Peterson

A similar statement could be made concerning portraits of gay leather life. Writings about leather groups in the 1970s and 1980s leave one with the impression that leather was at that time such a pervasive subculture within the gay community that it was difficult, if not impossible, to keep from stumbling over it.

No doubt this was true in the big cities (though even there it was difficult to enter into the inner world of leathermen until the eighties). To learn how different life has been for some leathermen living in smaller communities, one need only listen to Mack, a university professor living in a small town in the Midwest, who was interviewed for Jack Ricardo's 1993 book, Leathermen Speak Out, Volume 2. When asked how often he had sex with any other leatherman, Mack replied, "At best, once a year."

Small American communities – especially small, conservative, geographically isolated communities – can be time machines, preserving values and practices that have been abandoned for decades in the big cities. Obviously, this has both good and bad aspects to it. At any rate, the impression given by histories of sexuality – that information on gay sadomasochism was readily available by the beginning of the 1980s – does not match my own experience of growing up during that era in a community about the size of Mayhill (though my hometown was considerably less isolated and more liberal than Mayhill). Edgeplay in Mayhill is therefore my attempt to write a novel about the other leathermen: the men who had to make their own rules, based on the scraps of information they were able to gather.

This novel is also my attempt to penetrate past the conventions about leather life that have been established by leather literature. As one full-time leatherman commented caustically in Joseph W. Bean's Leathersex, concerning the couples in such stories, "The whole relationship takes place in a land of make-believe. Everybody has lots of money. Nobody has to do anything sordid like go out and work." It's a fantasy that can be played out when the encounter is nothing more than a three-hour game. When the encounter becomes something more, reality hits in a painful manner.

A few technical notes:

* In 1985, a variety of terms were in use to describe leather practices and relationships. S&M (as sadomasochism was usually called at that time) was the umbrella under which all leather practices were usually thought to fall. The idea that such practices as dominance and submission or mastery and slavery might be considered separate categories from sadomasochism had not yet fully developed. The participants in S&M were called by a number of terms; in this novel, the characters – who are a bit behind the times – use the older terminology of S and M. The terms are spelled out in this novel, as a way to get around the problem – never resolved by early leather authors – of plurals and possessives.

* It should be noted that the heterosexual BDSM community and the gay leather community had different customs during this period. Since those two communities interact in this story, the results are likely to look somewhat odd to anyone who took part in only one community during the eighties. Similarly, the viewpoints held by the characters in this story should be regarded as their own, not necessarily representing the predominant viewpoints held during that era of leather. (None of the viewpoints, I trust, are entirely anachronistic.) I have, however, dropped in occasional period terms and perspectives, such as the phrases "signal words" – now better known as safewords – and "safe and sane," an American slogan usually appearing in the phrase "safe and sane Fourth of July," in reference to a national movement for Independence Day safety that dates all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The S&M phrase "safe, sane, and consensual" was coined in 1983 – too close to the time of this novel for the characters in the story to have heard of it – but was probably inspired by that same slogan, according to its creator, david stein.

* Readers with a special interest in the history of leather terminology will notice that my protagonist is a little ahead of the game in his use of the phrase "playing on the edge," which eventually came to refer to engaging in particularly risky leather activities. In correspondence with me, leather author Joseph W. Bean had this to say on that subject:

By '88-'89 I began to hear people speaking of "edge" in various ways and coming to settle on the word "edgeplay." When I wrote Leathersex: A Guide for the Curious Outsider and the Serious Player, it was first a series of essays in the San Francisco Sentinel. The edgeplay essay, using that word, would have been first published in 1987, and at that time I had never heard it used (without convoluted explanation) by anyone else . . . People sometimes said it, that is, but they had no expectation that they would be understood. By the time the book came out [in 1994], collecting the essays from the 1980s, the word was in common use, but I still felt the need for a defining section.

* Finally, and most importantly: If, by some strange chance, you have read this novel in hopes of receiving guidance on common leather customs and sensible dating activities, I trust that you will keep in mind that much of this novel is written from the perspective of an edgeplaying sadist living in the boonies in 1985.
 

QUOTATION CREDITS

Epigraph 1: The quotation from Plato's Phaedrus is from R. Hackforth's 1952 translation.

Epigraph 2: The passage from Thom Magister describes his own training as an apprentice master and sadist. It appears in his essay, "One Among Many: The Seduction of a Leatherman," which is printed in the anthology Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson (1991).

Part One, Chapter Five: The tale of Phaethon is slightly adapted from Rolfe Humphries's 1995 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Part Two, Chapter Two: The wording of the old joke is adapted from a post that appeared on the newsgroup net.jokes in September 1985.

Part Three, Chapter One: The passages about Prometheus are slightly adapted from David Grene's translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, which appeared in Three Greek Tragedies in Translation (1942).
 

FURTHER READING

A full bibliography for Loren's Lashes is available at the Website for the series:

http://duskpeterson.com/lorenslashes/#resources

Leather History

Very few records survive of gay sadomasochism in the forties. One window into that decade – as well as later decades – is provided by author Samuel M. Steward, who led a remarkable life. He befriended Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, slept with Lord Alfred Douglas, was filmed by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey during the forties while performing sadomasochism, quit his university job in the fifties in order to become a tattoo artist, and finally wrote a number of pornography novels . . . before producing a couple of semi-academic books. His novel $tud (1966, published under the name of Phil Andros) was the first in a long series of novels about a gay prostitute; the series often includes leather scenes. The novel also contains disturbing portrayals of black leathermen. Stewart's lively memoir, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks 1950-1965, discusses leathermen's interest in an early form of body modification, while his life story, Chapters from an Autobiography (1981), flits from anecdote to anecdote.

The chapter about Steward's Kinsey experience is reprinted in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice (1991, 2001), a collection edited by Mark Thompson that includes several other historical essays. In that book, a glimpse of leather life in the fifties can be found in Thom Magister's memoir "One Among Many: The Seduction and Training of a Leatherman," which I quote in the epigraph to this novel.

Moving forward to the next decade, William Carney's mainstream literary novel, The Real Thing (1968), is a series of letters between a leather master and his nephew apprentice. The book bears an uncanny resemblance to The Screwtape Letters. Carney also offers glimpses of one leather group's rules back in the sixties; some of the rules are quite amusing. ("Motorcycles. If and when you get a bike [and I hope you do], be careful what you let ride on it with you. A woman on one defiles the thing.") Leatherman Larry Townsend commented on the novel, "I would recommend the work for its literary merit; I would not suggest that a novice take it to heart."

The oldest and most famous nonfiction book about the leather world is Larry Townsend's The Leatherman's Handbook (1972). It spawned many editions as well as a sequel, The Leatherman's Handbook II (1983). The books provide a great deal of information on leather life from the early seventies onward.

In States of Desire (1980), Edmund White's guide to gay America, brief portrayals are given of S&M venues in San Francisco and New York City. In addition, White's chapter on the Midwest shows the old-fashioned nature of gay life in the conservative heartland of the U.S. His portraits range from the survival of dominant-masculine/submissive-effeminate pairings in Kansas City to the tale of a lonely masochist in Cincinnati who couldn't find anyone who shared his sexual tastes.

The beginning of the eighties also marked the release of William Friedkin's controversial thriller Cruising (1980). The movie portrays leather as a dangerous but seductive lifestyle and was filmed in actual New York leather bars, using real leathermen as extras. The first outside shot of a leather bar shows the entrance to the Mineshaft, a bar so popular that it inspired entire novels.

The Mineshaft also features in John Preston's Mr. Benson (1983, but originally serialized in 1979). This erotic master/slave romance became a cult classic, much to the astonishment of its author, who later claimed that he never intended it as a serious portrayal of a leather relationship. Five years later, Preston published a different sort of leather work: I Once Had a Master (1984), a short story collection of "erotic expressions of love" that he based on actual incidents in his life.

By the mid-eighties, few nonfiction books on leather had been published. Geoff Mains's Urban Aboriginals (1984) is aptly described by david stein as "very '70s' in its uncritical enthusiasm." Nonetheless, the book gives a comprehensive overview of various gay sadomasochistic activities as they were practiced on the eve of the AIDS era.

Mains accurately predicted in that book that AIDS would transform leather culture. In his essay "The View from a Sling," which appeared in Leatherfolk before his death from AIDS in 1989, he expressed the sentiment shared by a number of leathermen of his time: "I knew what I was doing, what I did. I understood there were dangers, even death, in the fire. I faced those dangers in statements of love and intensity and I stand by them."

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This text, or a variation on it, was originally published at duskpeterson.com as part of the series Loren's Lashes. Copyright © 2010 Dusk Peterson. Some rights reserved. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0). You may freely print, post, e-mail, share, or otherwise distribute the text for noncommercial purposes, provided that you include this paragraph. The author's policies on derivative works and fan works are available online (duskpeterson.com/copyright.htm).