Promises, Promises -- #bdsm #promises #soulmate

By Lisabet Sarai
 
I was sure he was the One. But then I’ve felt the same about so many others—my serial soul mates.

Let me back up. I’ve written many times here about my initiation into BDSM, about how profoundly it changed my view of myself and the world. I may have given you the impression that my relationship with my Master was all about sex. That’s not at all true. What made the experience so thrilling was not the physical pleasure (or the pain), but rather the sense of connection and utter trust. G taught me the exquisite joy of total surrender. He coaxed me to open myself to him, mind and body. When I did, I reaped exquisite rewards.

My love for him was profound, though at the time I believed he saw me only as his plaything. I didn’t know him nearly as well as he seemed to know me. I see now that he loved me, too, in his own way, though he never told explicitly used the words. Now I understand him much better, almost forty years after that first incandescent fuck that demonstrated his power. He’s sentimental, vulnerable, an incurable romantic, despite his sometimes rude or mocking ways. I was just blind.

So I thought it was arrogant possessiveness, not love, when he asked for my promise. He wanted me to guarantee that if I thought I’d found someone else, I’d come to see him first so he could win me back. I willingly gave my word. I didn’t want anyone else anyway. Though he and I lived four hundred miles apart, me in southern California, he in the north, we visited as often as we could. He was my Master. The relationship wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t imagine wanting to sever our ties.

Then I met M. I was susceptible, alone in the city, working at my challenging first job as a professional, trying to adjust to living in a culture radically different from my New England upbringing. M was sitting on the steps of his building a few blocks from my apartment. He gave me a crooked grin, invited me out to dinner, gave me a ride in his sports car, got me high, fucked me with a single-minded intensity in which I should have recognized echoes of my Master, but didn’t. I was dazzled, suddenly in love. M took me over, both physically and emotionally. We fit, physically, and we seemed to share a kind of telepathic communication, especially when we were in bed together.

For more than a month we spent every night and every weekend together. He told me he loved me. I was head over heels, sure he was the One, thinking (bizarre as it sounds now) about marriage.

Still, there was that promise I’d made to G. If I was about to become monogamous with M, I owed it to my Master to tell him personally. I flew up to San Francisco, as I had so many times before, though instead of the usual excitement I felt dread. What would G say? What would he do?

I imagined him grabbing me, throwing me on the bed, screwing me as hard as he could—reminding me that he owned me. Those images reawakened my excitement. He was my Master. He would reclaim me. I was his. Away from M, the influence of my new lover faded. Nervous, conflicted, I hoped that G would help me make up my mind.

Instead, he cried.

Have I told this story before? How helpless I felt in the face of his abdicating his authority over me? How silly I felt for keeping that promise? Not to mention disappointed, even betrayed? He was my Master. He was supposed to be strong.

That was one of the worst weekends in my life. G was sullen, nasty, self-pitying. I can’t remember if we had sex, but if we did, it didn’t fix things.

I returned to my new home, my job, my new lover.

Three weeks later M disappeared for the weekend. Unable to contact him, I was frantic. Remember, we’d been spending almost all our free time together. I worried that he’d been in an accident, that he was ill somewhere, even that he’d been kidnapped. I didn’t know what to do.

Monday morning I found out he’d been in Las Vegas, marrying his former girlfriend. I grieved. At the same time, I cursed myself for being such a fool.

That wasn’t the end of my relationship with my Master, of course. Even now, we still call one another “lover”. We communicate by email, talk by phone occasionally, meet every half decade or so if we can. Still, I think my reckless decision to tell him I’d found someone else damaged us in some fundamental way. Or perhaps the sight of him in tears at the thought of losing me undermined his authority as my Master.

I sometimes wonder—fantasize, actually—what would have happened if he’d been more forceful. If he’d claimed me as he’d hinted he would, when I showed up at his door. Would we still be together? Would I have been able to give him the devotion he needed, over the long term? Would we still be playing kinky games, even though we’re both senior citizens?

I’ll never know. I kept my promise. What would have happened if he’d kept his?

Glimpses of Truth

by Jean Roberta

I have all sorts of qualms about following the traditional advice to “write what I know” in the most literal sense. To start with, when Sacchi’s call-for-submissions came out for Wild Girls, Wild Nights, I had already written three lesbian stories that I thought of as unvarnished truth, in which only the names were changed.

One of these stories, “Family Gathering,” was about my first ever woman-to-woman sex, and it was published in Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and Stacy Bias (Alyson Books, 2004). The second, “Gabrielle’s Fountain,” was about a first event (“squirting” or female ejaculation) in a doomed, long-distance affair I had with a woman who wanted me to move in with her in another town (with my grade-school-aged child), but her life alarmed me, and I didn’t really want to share it. This story was also published in an anthology from Alyson, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel: First-timers: True Stories of Lesbian Awakening (2006). For awhile, it seemed as if Cleis and Alyson were competing for the biggest share of the “true queer sex stories” market.

My third (or first, really) autobiographical lesbian story was/is not sexually explicit because we didn’t have sex. It is about my flirtation or one-sided crush with a charismatic local singer-songwriter who was an avid reader, and therein lay the problem. Unlike the women in my published stories, this person was likely to find and read any publicly-available material I might write about her. I only sent this story to one place: the Storytime list of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association, in 1999.

This story felt dangerous for various reasons: the character was recognizable, and if I spiced it up by making it an actual sex story, and it got published, what kind of fallout could I expect? The risks didn’t seem worth it, especially since I had no problem making up stories which didn’t seem libellous.

When Sacchi’s call came out, I asked if she would accept reprints. She said no, the publisher wanted original stories. I had promised my spouse when she was still only my new girlfriend (in 1989) that I would never embarrass her by describing her naked body on a page for all to see. That seemed fair to me.

Of course, most of what I write (including fantasy stories) is rooted somewhere in my life, but I prefer to avoid gossip and accusations, if possible. So when a call for “true,” original lesbian stories comes out, I just have to pass.

Even when I’m writing about a general scene or situation (e.g. the sex trade) which is real, there is the question of how to present it, as Annabeth brought up. Even though the fierce feuds over “political correctness” which characterized the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s seem to be over, I think they left me with traces of post-traumatic stress.

When I read Michelle Tea’s latest more-or-less autobiographical, meta-fictional, surrealistic novel, Black Wave (so I could review it for The Gay and Lesbian Review), I was amazed, once again, that Ms. Tea is currently described as the voice of young, working-class queer women who dare to tell it like it is. Considering that her narrator, named Michelle, is constantly high and usually drunk, and that she breaks promises and hearts, including her own (as people in altered states of consciousness tend to do), I suspect that the same book, written in, say, 1982 (when Audre Lorde’s autobiographical Zami came out), would not have found a publisher. Or if it did, the author would have been barred from every conference and publication with “feminist” in its title.

In 2007, I dared to write a story for an anthology about (and largely by) “women of colour,” edited by Jolie du Pre for Alyson: Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica. This was not a “true stories” anthology, thank the Goddess. My narrator looks white but has a dash of native blood, which actually describes me, so I hoped I would not be trashed for writing it. (I wasn’t.)

The story, “For All My Relations,” is about two sex-workers (based loosely on my experience in the early 1980s), and it starts with an anti-erotic scene. (Things heat up later.) I argued with myself about this opening, but I decided to leave it in. The fate of “Lynette” in the following passage shook me up at the time, and still does:

“Lynette had been missing for a week when she was found behind the Royal Arts Centre, naked and tied up. She had been left in the bushes in the surrounding park, on a January day when the temperature hovered at forty below zero in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius. She was found too late.

‘Jesus,’ I said to Amanda. We were watching the image of a covered shape on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance by paramedics on the TV news. Police were looking for the last man who was known to have seen her.

‘Did you know her?’ I asked.

‘A bit, yeah. She worked for Crystal and Sapphire when I was there. She took on too many guys on the side, though, just to collect the agency fee. That’s not safe.’

Crystal and Sapphire were legendary, and their fame went a long way toward convincing most of our johns that all whores were dykes and vice versa. The two madams (Mesdames? I had taken some French in high school), one black and one white, had arrived in our simple town from a more worldly city five years before, and opened the first escort agency here.

A woman who could cheat on Crystal and Sapphire would have to be shortsighted, to say the least. It didn’t follow that she deserved a slow, painful death.”

“Crystal and Sapphire” were a lesbian couple from Winnipeg (capital city of the province of Manitoba, said to be in the exact centre of Canada) who started the first escort agency in the town where I live, which was formerly known mostly as the national headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Making a profit by renting out call girls here in the late 1970s took a certain vision, or business savvy, or cynical, woman-hating gall, depending on your perspective. If they saw a niche that needed to be filled, however, they were on the right track. They were so successful that their multiple agencies produced spinoffs. As far as I know, all the surviving local agencies can be traced back to the founding mothers.

I realized that this whole story could be read as a cautionary tale about the wages of sin, which is certainly not how I intended it. As other writers have said, however, once a story goes public, in some sense it no longer belongs to the writer. Readers interpret it through the lens of their own experience, their own biases, and whatever is generally deemed to be “true” in the cultural climate of the time. “Truth” is never a stable thing.
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Every Word is True (#fiction #imagination #autobiography)

By Lisabet Sarai

“Is it a true story?”

When a reader asks an author this question, she usually means, “Is this autobiographical? Did this really happen to you?”

When it comes to my tales, I can answer yes in a surprising (or possibly shocking) number of cases. Yes, I did drive topless in a sports car along Mulholland Drive, as Ruby does in Nasty Business. Yes, I was fucked with the wooden finial unscrewed from a bedpost, like Kate in Raw Silk. Yes, I got up on stage to dance with the go-go girls in 1980’s Bangkok, though my costume was somewhat less revealing than my heroine’s. Gregory’s emails to Kate quote word for word from the letters my master sent me during his long-distance seduction. The sex clubs and orgies I describe in Incognito borrow heavily from my experiences in New York and Amsterdam.

The settings of my stories, especially, are true. My characters walk the streets I’ve walked myself. They live in apartments I rented. They shop where I shopped. When they travel, they visit the same attractions and eat the same food.

However, even when I create stories that deviate from my personal experience, I work to make them “true”, in the sense of “genuine”. As I’ve matured as an author, I have moved further away from autobiography. At the same time, I’ve learned to create more complex, nuanced and plausible characters. Ironically, these characters are more true than my early heroines, who tended to be somewhat shallow fantasy versions of myself.

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten better at allowing characters to speak for themselves. Rather than consciously “designing” them beforehand, I set my protagonists (and my villains) free to act and react as the book unfolds. If I am successful, these characters acquire a sort of organic quality, a consistency and depth. If I told you these characters were based on actual people in my past life, you’d probably believe me.

There’s another kind of truth in some of the stories that are closest to my heart—the truth of what might have been. Quite a few of my shorter tales are set in an alternative reality in which I did not split up with my master, but instead made a life with him. I’ve imagined, again and again, the trials and joys of living in a committed D/s relationship. In these stories, I can express the emotions I’ve mostly had to stifle in real life. I can also consider the difficulties involved in such a relationship, as it is tested by time, external circumstances and the inevitability of imperfectly aligned desires.

In fact, I’ve spent so much time in this parallel universe that sometimes I forget it doesn’t exist. I smile when I think about that long-ago kinky trip to Rocky’s Ace Hardware. I remember the time I came from just a spanking, without any sexual stimulation. I recall, with queasy excitement, the night my master cut his initials into my flesh. These incidents are as real to me as yesterday’s news—more so, really, because I care more about them than about politicians and movie stars.

I’ve shared some of these visions here at the Grip, so I think you’ll recognize what I am talking about. My post from the last topic cycle is a perfect example.

This vignette, like much of the BDSM I write, is fueled by fantasy and wishful thinking. Still, it bowls me over whenever I re-read it. Maybe I am flattering myself, but I suspect most readers will sense the depth and power of the feelings in that piece. It’s totally fictional. Yet every word is true.

Against the Odds

by Jean Roberta

Please excuse the lateness of this post. I hope it doesn’t look like a lame conclusion to the current topic.

I can’t remember having any cliff-hanging (literal or metaphorical) close calls, so I will discuss a few events which might have turned out much worse.

Sixty-five years ago, birth was generally more dangerous to mothers and babies than it is now.

As far as I know, ob/gyns didn’t know in advance what position the little creature was in when the mother went into labor, and after that point, surgery would be dangerous at best and fatal at worst. So whether the baby was trying to come out feet-first, bum-first or sideways, efforts were made to get him or her out through the usual opening without major damage to the mother.

Dr. Abraham Feinstein of Redwood City, California (possibly related to a future Mayor of San Francisco) preferred to err on the side of caution. When he found that his patient’s baby was in the breech position, he was concerned about the length of time the baby would be without oxygen. So he arranged for an oxygen tent to be in the delivery room, and he rushed the baby into it as soon as she had emerged, curled up in a ball like a hedgehog. The normal procedure of that time was for the doctor to dangle the baby upside down by his/her ankles and swat the little bottom to start the breathing process.

Dr. Feinstein advised his patient to gently pull the baby’s legs down as a regular exercise. Laying her on her back usually resulted in a curled-up baby in the “fetal” position. When the baby was about a year old, her parents were advised to put her in corrective baby shoes so she wouldn’t be bow-legged. Baby legs tend to be pliable, and within a few months, the baby had straight legs.

As far as anyone could tell, the baby didn’t suffer any damage to the brain due to lack of oxygen, or much damage to the body due to her unusual position in the womb. (As an adult, she was found to have slight curvature of the spine, but it hasn’t inconvenienced her.)

Dr. Feinstein, like everyone else in the Jewish diaspora of the 1940s, was devastated by the “war in Europe” (not yet called the Holocaust), followed by the “McCarthy Era” in the U.S., which disproportionately targeted leftist Jews.

His patient, Jane, might have chosen him because she saw him as a kindred soul. Although Jane was not Jewish herself, she had come of age in New York City in a close-knit group of artsy-intellectual Jewish high-school friends who proudly considered themselves “bohemian.” Had her family stayed in Scranton, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression instead of moving to the big city to find work, so many things would probably have turned out differently.

If Jane had not been introduced to radical thought, she probably would not have earned a degree from Hunter College on scholarships, or traveled all the way to Oregon to do graduate work in English at the University of Oregon, where she met two male friends who were both interested in her. She chose Arthur rather than Dean. She and Arthur (Art) were engaged when Art joined the U.S. Navy after the Japanese Air Force bombed Pearl Harbor late in 1941. (Art had a sensitive stomach, and could get seasick on Ferris wheels, but he felt it was his patriotic duty to join the armed forces, and to a West Coast boy, the Navy seemed like the obvious choice.)

Art was stationed in New York City in 1944, and given a promotion, which gave him the right to marry. He and Jane were married, and apparently they enjoyed each other’s company so much that for the first few years, they didn’t want to spoil things by having children.

What Jane’s Jewish friends had done for her was done for Art by the G.I. Bill, which provided free college tuition for men who had served in the armed forces. In 1950, Jane and Art were back on the West Coast, this time in California, where Art was earning a Master’s degree in Economics at Stanford University.

The U.S. economy was booming, and the media encouraged everyone to “start a family.” Jane and Art jumped on the bandwagon. (As they later explained, their baby was conceived on Thanksgiving, when they were drinking more than usual.) In summer 1951, Dr. Feinstein delivered their first baby girl. Jane, Art and their family (which eventually included three daughters) survived surprisingly well.

If you haven’t already guessed, I was the breech-born baby who took her first breath in an oxygen tent. So many things could have gone wrong: deprivation of oxygen during a difficult birth could have turned me into a vegetable.

Before that, my parents might never have met. (And since they grew up on opposite sides of the continent, chances were against it.) At the University of Oregon, Jane might have chosen Dean instead of Art – if she hadn’t already chosen a nice Jewish boy in New York City and decided to stay there instead of venturing into the Wild West.

Or Jane could have chosen to remain a very discreet lesbian (discretion being the only option at the time) after her early affair with a young woman she met in church.

And of course, Art could have been killed in the war. Or – if he had openly expressed left-of-center political views in the 1950s, he could have been blacklisted from every intellectual/professional job, which happened to several of Jane’s friends from high school. Or he and Jane might have decided to stay childless.

As the U.S. enters the Era of Trump, and Britain has entered the Era of Brexit, and the whole world seems to be going to hell, we need to remember that things weren’t necessarily better in the past. Every little happy event seems to be the result of a close call or a bubble of oxygen in an ocean which has drowned so many.
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