Hope Chest

I did ultimately finish the audio project.  I had limited time to record, so I got some bad takes and just edited them as much as I could.

Then I recorded a quick foreword, telling my Gospodzha that I didn't want anything from her but a genuine interest in learning about me.

She didn't make it through the foreword without bursting into tears, waking me up and making me feel terrible.  I offered her episode 1, but she never listened.

So that's all there was.  I am glad I made it, and I listen to it myself from time to time.  It's not the best production, but the music is so integral to it that I can't imagine presenting the information any other way.

I just wish I had a better recording of the scene where Edward Scissorhands says he can't hold her.

While digging around for audio to build up my little series, I finally typed "necrotons" into the youtube search box.  I don't know why I hadn't tried that before!  I immediately found video from my early memories!

The whole episode is a string of kink jokes delivered with a Sunday-evening family-friendly goofball smile.  The real "startle" material kicks off around 25:20 or so!

I hadn't remembered that Mindy's cousin tries to gaslight her by claiming she's under too much stress because of feminism.  The "NOW Generation" indeed!

I haven't written in a while here, but that's partly because I have a long audio project in mind.  It's something I've been considering for years.  I call it Sympathy for the Werewolf:

There's more than a little allegory in the Harry Potter series.  Rowling herself has stated on record that lycanthropy was developed as an allegory for the AIDS crisis and the stigma surrounding that.  It certainly took on a direct parallel during a scene in a later book where Mr. Weasley sticks his foot in his mouth while reassuring a patient who'd just been diagnosed.

But early on in the series, it was less about disease and more about a persecuted inner nature.  Remus Lupin tips his hand in the Prisoner of Azkaban when teaching students to dispel a boggart, a creature that takes the shape of its victim's greatest fear. 

He demonstrates on it himself, and the monster emerges briefly to take the form of a full moon. He casts the proscribed spell, "ridiculus", and it turns to a deflating balloon, which the spell banishes back into the closet. 

He feared exposure for what he truly was, both for the public shame and for the danger he might pose to his loved ones.  His only chance at life was to live with that part of him in the closet, and he maintained this partition by ridiculing it in public.

Later on we find that his true friends altered their own lives to be with him during his wolven hours in a special house.  They met in secret, and formed an underground group to stay together.  I see a lot of this in the way BDSM groups protect their members through vetting and private gatherings, and envy it more than a little.

I have been waiting for years for my Gospodhza to stop fearing this side of me long enough to actually engage with him and learn who I really am.  I don't need her to alter her life to be with me in my wolven hours, but I can't stand keeping that full moon rattling away in the closet for the rest of my days.

I have considered making a series of audio recordings to illustrate my situation, and tell the story of who I am with my own voice.  This is perhaps not the best format as she's better with printed text than spoken word, but I don't actually expect she'll ever listen.  I will address her in the audios, but I don't know that she is necessarily the audience in the end.  As with all of these things, I suspect the production of the thing will be the real benefit.  But perhaps if I include the script it could work.

It's a large project, and one I don't expect to even get started on for a long time.  I've had it haunting my idle thoughts for years, and recently a few pieces of music have bothered me enough to start collecting them.  In doing so, I found this 

It manages to capture the beginning and end states of the arc I hope to complete some day.  I grew up thinking myself a devil, but perhaps I'm on the right track.

There are quite a few tropes around sexuality that we often take for granted.  One of them is the notion of the loud homophobe being a closeted homosexual.  Many in the LGBTQIA+ community resent this as a weaponisation of their identities, and others I know tell me it's true often enough to be useful. I can't speak to that, although I will say that listening to how preachers describe various things as "temptation" could be illustrative of their own desires.

Growing up kinky, my exposure to the more vanilla sexual content was kind of unmotivating.  I found myself uninterested in looking at genitals, especially when they were rubbing together.  I was already working out that the kinky stuff was my version of this, and I ended up becoming a kind of prude that I suspect a lot of us were.  I took a misguided pride in the fact that I wasn't interested in the "porn" my peers were making fools of themselves over, while being utterly ashamed at the stuff that did interest me.

I still do this.  I've tried to stop doing some of the more obvious "tells", though.  Ever since Jillian Keenan wrote about how she used the term "S&M" instead of "BDSM" to mask herself as an outsider, I realise I have done exactly this.  But I remain rather sexless in person.

I was reminded of this phenomenon by the latest draft of the Shiniez series of BDSM relationship comics.  If you have not picked this up yet, it is a must-read!  The drafts are often posted to DeviantArt, and yesterday's installment contained these panels, which flash back to two long-standing characters revealing their kinky sides to each other at university:

That is my one regret: I never made a friend around whom I could be myself in a way I can't be around others.

I'm currently catching up on all of the podcasts surrounding Off The Cuffs (which, incidentally, is how I found this place).  The question they always ask guests on OTC is, "What was your Radioactive Spider-Bite into kink?"  It's a good question that encourages guests to introduce themselves and how they fit into the kink world by telling a story about their earliest involvement.  The metaphor comes from Spiderman:

Once they've asked one guest that, they'll turn and ask any other guests about their "Gamma-Ray exposure", which I believe is a reference to The Incredible Hulk.  But I was more of a Spidey fan during this era, so that's the one that gets the image.

The thing is, the metaphor breaks down for many guests, because not all of us have these kinds of transformational stories.  Not all of us had a singular moment that turned us from mild-mannered bookish nobodies into fantastical creatures who can do freakish things.

Perhaps another comic book origin story works best for this:

Often a guest will say "Well I was always kinky, even as a child."  That's how my origin story goes, so instead of a radioactive spider bite, I have a Refugee From Krypton tale.

As a tot, I had quite a few "startles" in television film and books.  The earliest ones that captivated me all seemed to be about cages.

The images above are the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (I always misremembered that scene as being from Mary Poppins because the children and Dick van Dyke were in both, and kept re-watching it to find the scene), Doctor Shrinker (who seemed to want to shrink the three "shrinkees" just to keep them in cages for no reason), Mister Rogers's Neighbourhood (Bob Dog had a cage on his head as penance for something), The Smurfs (Gargamel was always pictured holding a Smurf in a cage), and that last one if you can believe it was an episode of Mork and Mindy featuring Raquel Welch as one of the alien Necrotons.  

Jim Henson had a thing for bondage chairs, possibly because they simplified the puppetry during a perilous scene:

The top row is from the original Muppet Movie, and the last image is from The Dark Crystal.  

Finally, I managed to miss the famous Gamesters of Triskelion episode of Star Trek, but I do remember being captivated by this scene from The Cloudminders when I was over at a friend's house. I know it wasn't at our place, because the colours struck me and we only had a black-and-white set at the time.

There's more, but I wanted to stick to the kind of stuff I was exposed to at a very young age.  The Dark Crystal didn't come out until I was a bit older, but the rest is about the right vintage that I'm confident I encountered it all by age five.

Yes, that's right: five.  This is an important point in my development, because it was around this age that I found myself leafing through the liner notes to a Christian children's record:

In particular, I found the  String Song oddly fascinating:

My dad was in the room, so I showed him this bit and said "That looks like fun!":

He looked at me with panicked horror on his face.  I immediately worked out that this was not an appropriate way to have fun.  In retrospect I think he was probably kinky in various ways, himself.  I have only speculations to go on, as he's no longer among the living, but I don't think his reaction would have been so strong if he had been Vanilla, himself.  

In the end, though, it doesn't matter much, because this was the lesson I took away from it all:

And so, after many images and perhaps not enough words, that is my Refugee From Krypton origin story in Kink.

My avatar is an image I made myself, as a variation on Tony DeBlase's Leather Pride flag.  The image was one that stuck in my head for a long time, and I spent a while working out how to generate it.

The design is built around a "broken heart" motif.  The top of the flag has the rounded bumps of the top of the heart, against a field of the Pantone colour "Vanilla".  A white horizontal stripe takes a jagged path through the heart, forming what looks like a more angular smaller heart below it.  The jagged heart-piece is then surrounded by four black-and-blue stripes.

The heart, the white stripe, and the black-and-blue stripes were all borrowed from the Leather Pride flag, which has become a symbol for the latex and BDSM community as well.  My addition was the replacement of the top four stripes with the field of "Vanilla", the resizing and repositioning of the heart, and the fracturing of the heart by redirecting the white stripe into a jagged path for part of it.

I hope that after explaining the elements so pedanically here, the reasoning behind them becomes clear.  The top represents a loving relationship with a Vanilla partner.  The surface of the heart presents the round and safe parts, and rests up top where the viewer spots it first.  The white stripe could represent any number of forces, but it cracks the heart in two.  The lower piece resembles a complete heart, but without any soft curves.  The bottom half represents a BDSM or Kink identity kept "inside the closet", or at least kept entirely separate from the Vanilla relationship.

Sometimes when hearts break, both pieces continue beating independently.  I will not stop loving my Gospodzha, but she will never approach that white stripe to meet who I am below.  In addition, I dare not let my Kinky identity ever stray up into my Vanilla world, for fear of everything I could lose up there.  And so for me that white band across the middle is a closet door, shut tight and locked.  For others it could simply be the veil between a Vanilla partner and the BDSM play-partners this person permits but never wants to hear about.

I hope this symbol speaks to others, and that they find it helpful to illustrate their own situations.  I intended it in the tradition of the Pride Flags, but this doesn't really fit because it is inherently about staying closeted.  

If anyone would like the vector (SVG) file for this, I'd be happy to pass it on.  

Over a decade ago, after I catastrophically “came out” to my Gospodzha, I started buying a few entry-level bits of paraphernalia. What it was doesn’t really matter, but it was my first time actually holding physical manifestations of my kink in my own two hands. As I think back to the promise of that period before things came crashing down, I recall a few moments of just sitting alone and practising with rope.

Those moments are crucial memories for me, and they give me a painful sense of nostalgia. It seemed like Tyler Durden and Jack were finally on speaking terms and about to know peace, and the collapse of that détente was the shock that created Gospodin.

Gospodin slowly collected and accumulated small items to add to this collection. He began to write, and won a story contest that included a gift certificate for a fetish boutique. The little bag of tricks went with him from home to home, through our wedding and several moves.

At one point Gospodzha asked why it had followed like that. I don’t remember how I responded, but I think I just avoided answering. It hurt too much, and I didn’t have the words to tell her why. It was only much later that I realised that the reason I couldn’t get rid of it was that it is a part of who I am.

Recent circumstances made the privacy afforded by a simple bag insufficient, and I knew I needed to get something more secure. And so when I saw a set of metal locking suitcases on sale, in just the right size, I knew I had to buy one. I needed to be sure that I control who has access to this stuff, precisely because of how much it means to me.

But I couldn’t bring myself to buy one for weeks, because it felt like I was buying Gospodin a coffin. Here I was, a grown and married man, and Gospodin is still just the frightened adolescent he never got the chance to grow out of–it felt like burying a child. But eventually I did it, and fortunately the feeling of that key on my keyring is more reassuring than I’d expected

But now I have that new name: hope chest. It’s a much better way of thinking of the whole thing. It’s still a little tragic in some ways, highlighting how one part of my identity is still stuck back in its youth waiting to be rescued, but it also captures how therapeutic planning for that fairy-tale future can feel. It helps keep me from thinking of it as this horrible vice I keep returning to in the closet, or a terrible secret I’m keeping from my loved ones.

No, it’s just a chest of hope, however futile.

Years ago I was struggling to work through my disastrous interactions with my wife, whom I shall refer to from now on as Gospodzha.  I cut up a number of old Peanuts comics to make illustrations of my interactions with her, and I found them rather satisfying (in no small part because we actually kind of look like Charlie and Lucy).

I came out to Gospodzha before we got married, and at first she seemed receptive.

Now, to be clear, I don't believe she did any of this out of malice or a desire to see me hurt.  She thought she could handle it, and that turned out not to be the case.  I have some ideas as to why, but they're part of her story and not mine and I can't go and tell someone else's story like that without consent.

But her frustration at how badly it went built more quietly.  I couldn't bring the topic up without seeming to hurt her, and she could tell my confidence was shattered.  She then gave me the worst possible advice for the situation.

I will never take anyone seriously when they tell me to "just be spontaneous" ever again.  

Years later, after marriage and a child and some harsh words at my reluctance for vanilla sex, I thought I'd try again.  After all, I'd probably gone too far too quickly, hadn't I?  What if we could just start with some of what I like to call "French Vanilla": things that are sexy in a mainstream way.

It really didn't matter.  I couldn't tell you where things begin and end any more, but it's clear that if there's anything that arouses me in the slightest it makes her uncomfortable.  I don't know if it's associated in her mind with the weirder stuff, or if it's just that turning the lights on is too much and anything I suggest will by definition be past her limit.  Either way, it ground everything to a halt.

I spent a long time thinking and writing and exploring my feelings and my identity.  I decided I was going to have to face celibacy, but I still need to be understood and loved by my partner.  I don't need participation, just acceptance.

It's been years again, now, and in 2016 I finally told her that since she seemed unable to love the part of me that is my sexual identity, I didn't think we could have sex any more.  It was hard, and she still tells me she wishes I'd "change my mind" when she thinks I'm asleep.  But that's where we are, now.  We love each other, and are tender and supportive and kind and I would even say intimate in some ways.  It just never goes past a certain point.

All I want at this point is for her to just want to get to know me, to understand me, and to hear my story instead of presuming.  I think it hurts her too much as well, or she would ask.  I can't keep pushing on this, when every time I have done in the past it has hurt her.  Withholding sex also hurts her, I know, but everything I see makes it appear that it is less painful than the alternatives have been.

And that's where the comic falls down.  It felt like she set me up to fail each time she told me to try, but I think the failures were just as much a shock and surprise to her as they were to me.  She wasn't trying to trick me, and I don't think she took any delight in how things ended up.  The images helped me work through my frustrations at one point, though, and I go back to them occasionally to help me remember that time.