The Wild and the Tame

Mistress Tiffany wrote a comprehensive article on "Protocol positions", and to Her post: "A protocol analogy" someone asked if Her protocols were Leather or BDSM protocols.

What's so Next Guard about Mistress Tiffany's article about protocol positions is the synthesis between the ancient BDSM, the historically recent Old Guard, and the remotely ancient and contemporarily fashionable Yoga. Yoga, especially it's emphasis on breathing and on the experience of the present moment, is an excellent discipline for all Next Guard Leather and BDSM people, and especially those who identify as submissives.

Let's look though in more depth about the historical bases of protocol positions.

Big "L" Leather is different than little "L" leather. Big "L" Leather is a culture: a set of rituals and customs and attitude. Little "L" leather is a fetsh for the actual leather object: whip, shoes, boots, hat. Whereas leather has been a fetish for human beings since we lived in caves, Leather originates from the nascent gay American culture in the years after World War II. BDSM though is something that we can trace throughout human history. We can find postures and attitudes and language that reflect BDSM eroticism in sculpture, and pottery, and painting, and literature that goes back thousands of years. And in every culture that makes artifacts - Egyptian, Chinese, Mayan, Persian, Celtic, Greek, Roman... Historians often hesitate or refuse to attribute a sexual, consensual BDSM framework to ancient art, but artists make art, not historians. The natural tension and dramatic oppostion inherent in BDSM Powerplay often make it an irresistible subject for artists, even if historians choose to look the downplay, ignore, or obfuscate it.

All the way back to the Story of Gilgamesh, erotic and epic poetry celebrates the heros and heroines that struggle for love, who suffer, aquiesce, surmount, and triumph, in love if not in life. Sometimes the language about Powerplay is direct, and compares lovers to masters, mistresses, and slaves. Sometimes the imagery is indirect, but it speaks to our deepest erotic sense, and we know there was sexual dimension to the power differential between lovers, or between celebrants in a ritual, as in the famous frescos in the Pompeiian Villa of the Mysteries. [the artist David Dashiell, 1952-1993, referenced these frescos in his monumental Queer Mysteries.]

In those frescoes, we can see different people whose postures reveal their status in the ritual. There are some submissive postures that would fit right along side those that Mistress Tiffany described. These dominant and submissive postures are ancient, and not even necessarily exclusively human. The language of the body expresses power states for all vertebrate animals. Indeed many yoga positions take the name of animals - besides Downward Facing Dog, there are countless others; Crow Pose, Eagle Pose, Monkey Pose, Cobra Pose...

But Leather Culture is fairly recent. When Old Guard traditions began, in the years after World War II, the memory of military protocol was still fresh, and there was a continuace of military bearing and carriage in Leather Play. Tops often acted like Drill Instructors and bottoms acted like fresh recruits. Whereas I think dominant and submissive postures are not only eternal with human beings, but with most animals, the then recent memories of Standing at Attention, Parade Rest, Avoidance of Eye Contact, along with all the typical Boot Camp humiliations (push ups, holding a rifle above the head, using a toothbrush to clean a toilet or floor, etc) all became Play rituals for the early Leathermen.

Conversely though, for many Old Guard members of the early motorcycle centered clubs, and also for the men dishonorably discharged out of the military, and further, those men that scorned the military and the blind acceptance of authority, there was a whole new outlook and set of postures and language. These men, and also women and transpeople, were performing a set of postures, and using language that wasn't merely negligent or lazy, instead it was intended to be socially and politically provocative. They were surly, smart-ass, wise cracking, slouching, shuffling, sexy. It's the way detectives and heros in Film Noir movies act, or the way Marlon Brando and his gang acted in "The Wild Ones". It was a rebellion of the individual against societal norms. Sticking it to the squares. Flipping off the Man.

-"What are you rebelling against?"

- "Whaddya got?"

I enjoy seeing men perform both sets of Old Guard Postures. Respect is a turn on, and sometimes insolence that I can dominate and reform is a turn on as well. I've found that gradually formalizing My own posture often results in a subsequent formalization of a sub's posture, even without recourse to words or a physical response. Then with subtle actions, like the ministrations of a dressage horseman, I can refine the posture to My liking.

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.