Jonathan C. David in Philadelphia – © 2024 Lloyd Wolf / lloydwolf.com
…At another gathering in the same apartment, I found myself secured naked on all fours on a footstool, each extremity cuffed to an eyebolt in each corner of the stool. Someone slipped a blindfold over my eyes and looped a leather collar around my neck. Someone else rotated the stool until I did not know what direction I faced.
Somewhere behind me, a drawer slid open. Hands shuffled through a collection of objects. Something pliable brushed against the side of the shelf. Something wooden knocked on the edge as it was pulled out. The drawer closed with a thud. A man stood behind me and steadied himself there like someone readying to hit a golf ball off a tee. With what I sensed to be a firm handle in his hands, that person paddled me with what I thought to be a leather paddle with a wood handle. Fifteen hard blows.
I began to slip into the role of a bottom or submissive or masochist in reality, not fantasy, and to feel that identity take shape within me, even as I also wanted to be a topman in regular sex. That top role eluded me. Talk about pulling my punches. And it seemed I could only have sex while tied down and with a collar around my neck. And talk about power struggles. Dominance and submission is all about power, or lack of it, I thought. Bound and naked and collared, I was guaranteed not to overwhelm anyone, though I thought of myself as a danger to everyone.
On the trolley home, I thought of the way children are taught the ways of sexuality even before puberty. It is something I always thought about in those days. Straight kids emulate their parents and play house and later fall into puppy love and go through teenage dating dramas. Gay men, in those days, came of age without any such practice. Straight people rejected even the thought of homosexuality or sometimes pretended that gay people did not exist. Rejection was all we had known. Parents, father figures, male friends, schoolmates: all were rejecting. Many gay men assumed without even a conscious thought that the rejection of other men is intrinsic to masculinity. There was some truth to that assumption, I thought. After all, virility includes within it a rejection of dependence on others. Even casual affection one male friend expresses for another is often framed as a teasing put-down. You must, it seems, break through your friend’s autonomy to make him vulnerable enough to accept your affection. We gay men had all witnessed this mix of emotions in the hazing rituals of all-male societies, in the competition and play in sports, in the bonding and brutality among soldiers at war. It is little wonder that some of us took the energy of this masculine play as our own and let it define our sexual excitement. The erotic rage and outrage that had existed only in fantasy now became part of my interpersonal life.
I had fashioned a sexual personality that included feelings of anger and violence. There had to be a power struggle between partners, and only through those emotions was love possible. Yet years earlier when I had fallen in love in the basement of a dormitory, these feelings of bonding and brutality had seemed to me to be terrible obstacles to ordinary intimacy. I had no words for any of this nexus of emotion then. All I could do was grow more confused, more lost. Only now was I beginning to try to find a path that allowed me to examine it all, and perhaps get beyond it.
The officers of the bondage club rented a loft space on the second floor of an old building with bay windows sagging with age that jutted out over the street, and they moved their equipment there. Through a side door of this building and up one flight of stairs was the door. Inside was a large room with bare brick walls and black-painted windows covered inside with a layer of black plastic. There was no furniture there save for the equipment the club members had brought—a bank of lockers for clothes and wallets and keys, a chest full of leather and rubber and metal sex toys, the Saint Andrew’s cross from the previous space, a dog cage, a bondage table, and a spider web bondage station where a submissive could be tied in sundry positions like a fly in a web.
There, I mainly watched. I saw bondage submissives be stripped down and tied down or tied up and saw one or another of them have his nipples clamped or the hair on his crotch or his chest shaved or a rope cinched tightly around his genitals and five- or ten-pound weights hung from his testicles, or all of the above. Clothespins might be clipped by the score to his scrotum or inner thighs. Drops of hot wax from a burning candle could be scattered over his body like bread cast upon the waters while he was blindfolded and straining passionately against his bonds, the fear of the searing pain from the heat magnified by the apprehension of not knowing where on his body the next drops would land. All of his senses alive to the threat, he would feel his pain subside and become merely heightened sensation as brain cells secreted endorphins. His day-in-and-day-out experiences might recede from his consciousness. I had heard experiences described in this way. The submissive partner’s awareness would drift on the sea of the immediate, and he would be aroused and he would shed tears at the pain and beauty of his life. And when he had gathered, in the form of beautiful tears, this bread scattered on the water of life, he would thank God while in his presence—many, like brave young men on a vision quest, do feel they see God this way—for the opportunity to have had his body and soul so united.
None of us had grown up with words for this kind of sexuality. No words for the pain and the beauty of our lives. Gay society at the time offered little wisdom with which to deal with it. American society at large offered nothing. We were pioneers charting new territory with no maps. We had no choice but to explore. I, for one, did so with trepidation. I remembered a cartoon from my youth in which a magician with a waxed handlebar mustache and a black cape attempted to pull a rabbit out of his hat. He groped around inside the hat until he felt some fur and pulled by the scruff of its neck the head of a roaring lion out of the hat instead of a gentle rabbit. He pushed the beast back into the hat, turned to the audience and smiled that awkward smile of a performer whose performance has gone wrong. Oops. He let the lion stay put. Out of sight, out of mind. It was very funny. Yet I could not stuff this monster down a hat and out of my awareness. It demanded my attention, by both living it and, along with Dr. Ganapathy, examining it.
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This excerpt was taken from Jonathan’s memoir The Flower from a Poisoned Seed. Purchase the full memoir HERE.