Big Tent

There have been questions about terms like: fetish, kink, BDSM, and leather, and whether the Next Guard wants to exclude people from the discussion if they're not into Leather or BDSM. Next Guard is about BDSM which is an imprecise term that ironically has extremely precise connotations to multitudes of people. BDSM is sort of like LGBT in that it's an acronym that is trying to cover a minority category. I always thought it meant "Bondage Discipline Sadism Masochism" but those 4 letters can also mean all kinds of different things, a few being - boys, bois, Daddys, Daddies, discipline, domination, slaves, submission, Master, Mistress, et cetera. So what's the commonality between all these terms? I guess it would have to be a Difference. There has to be a Power. There's Someone who has Power and there's a Different someone who doesn't have as much power or any power.

That's what the Next Guard cares about most - the Difference, the Power, the Someones, the someones. BDSM is sometimes called Powerplay - also the title of defunct gay Leather kink magazine, (for which incidentally, I once appeared on the cover) and that's a good term. People like novelty, young people like to invent their own language, and so what's BDSM to me might to others be Powerplay, X-treme Sex, Hardcore, Hardsex, Hard Scene, Femdom, Alphasex, Futuresex, Pervsex, Kinksex, Pigsex, Dogplay.....I could go on and on. We might all be speaking a different language, but there's a fundamental grammar between all of these - when I pick up My flogger, I'll bet you're going get my gist.

Kink is a huge category, and a vastly imprecise, subjective, and vague term that means everything that isn't "normal" or run of the mill. Whatever. I've never met a "normal" person in my whole life. I think "normality" is a bogus political concept that power elites use to enforce docile behavior among less powerful. [Fuck that shit.] So basically Kink to me just means whatever people do sexually, because whatever you personally do sexually, someone else, somewhere else, will think that you're being kinky.

My point being about Kink is that whether it's Leather, Rubber, feather dusters, or diapers, or Klingon masks, or bourgeois-missionary-position-in-the-dark-along-to-easy-listening-music, it's all Kink, and it's all copacetic, but unless there's the Difference, the Power, the Someones, and the someones, then it ain't BDSM to me.

"Leather" [uppercase L] to me, as a gay man, means a cultural continuity and a set of rituals that always imply Difference and Power, and almost always imply the Difference between individuals that signifies a Someone and a someone. Leather is the symbol for this Difference, and it's a cultural symbol that goes back to the time human beings first clothed themselves in animal hides. In my mind, Leather is the most succint symbolic representation of BDSM.

But leather [note the lower case L] is also a fetish for many people. What is Fetish? Fetish is the obsessive fascination or even worship of inanimate objects, materials, styles, people, sexual practices, et cetera. Fetish is a word like Kink that is such a hugely subjective and imprecise category that it's often more obfuscating than clarifying.

So all these terms: BDSM, Leather, Kink, Fetish are imprecise and subjective, and there will never be a "Council of Nicea for Sex" to set all these terms into stone to form a dogma or catechism. You'll never get a crystal clear definition of any of these terms.

So Next Guard is going to keep Leather and BDSM as a prime focus, but that doesn't mean we exclude people with a different Fetish or Kink outlook, because if you're interested in the Difference, the Power, the Someones, and the someones - then come on into the Tent for the Big Show.



Circus Tent photo from Photochiel on Flickr.