There is no "safe," part 6

my guide for vetting sadists, dominants, and tops

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 5 ½.

The party was almost over. I was gathering our things in the locker room when someone approached me from behind. As if he and I were elsewhere, fully clothed and totally sober, Nes politely introduced himself and complimented my book. A perfect gentleman, but unintimidated—I liked that. After a brief and friendly chat, we went our separate ways.

Though Nes and I reconnected on Grindr, our mutual narrative began at that party: the Bawdy locker room, usually the site of hazing-themed gangbangs, was our meetcute. It was only months later, when we were properly dating, that he revealed that he had watched me for hours that night, describing my movements with the detail I now recognize as a function of his impressive recall¹. I had been caught red-handed in the act of living, and although everything he relayed—where I stood, what I did, who I spoke to—was doubtlessly true, I could remember almost none of it.

Our meetcute became a shared experience for which I wasn’t fully present, a rearview depersonalization. Had I even been there, at Bawdy, if so little of the night had returned home with me? I was reminded of dreams I had when I was a child: my eyes wouldn’t open all the way, forcing me to crane my head like a parrot in order to see what was happening around me. What I wore, when I sat in the hot tub with Jade, how I glanced at him without knowing we would soon know each other—to witness my own absence through Nes was embarrassing, destabilizing, and very hot.

If you attend a sex party, you do so with the intention of being observed by strangers. This is not a bug of (semi)public sex, but a feature, which you must admit to yourself if you’re going to have a good time. As a Bawdy volunteer², I was recently called to explain this to a nervous newcomer. “What do I do if someone is looking at me and I don’t like it?” they asked, scanning the dim over my shoulder.

Dykes have been throwing sex parties for far longer than I’ve been alive, but most that I’ve encountered have not done what Jade and Daemonumx are doing with Bawdy, their queer bathhouse party, and Bruise, their public leatherqueer party, which is establish as a social baseline an integration of dyke and fag approaches to consent, cruising, and safety. For many dykes, there is a learning curve for public sex because of the restrictions—as well as the protections—of so-called “female socialization”³. To boldly reconfigure one’s understanding of safety in order to attend a sex party organized by people who refuse to entertain gender policies, requirements for government names, and STI monitoring is no mean feat⁴. But to cruise necessarily means exposure to unexpected people, unreciprocated desires, complicated feelings and conflicts, activating situations and environments, and, enmeshed with all these, breathtaking possibility. To cruise is to be more free, and freedom is always undertaken as risk.

What Nes did only became “stalking,” as he and I call it, after I learned about it, when my awareness transformed his attention into a shared fantasy between people who straddle straight, dyke, and fag worlds, as we transsexuals often do. But even if he had never told me what he did, the act would have remained a neutral one. Being the subject of someone else’s interest or desire, even if the content of those desires is violent—and with him, it definitely is—does me no harm whatsoever.

As I told Bawdy’s nervous newcomer, the responsibility of the party itself is to intervene when someone in attendance is threatening or hurting someone else. “If anyone fucks with you,” I reassured them, “come get me and we’ll take care of it.” But I reminded them that they had come to enjoy public sex with and among other queer people; that discomfort is not the same thing as harm; and that to be known in ways that aren’t always under our control is, in fact, why we were all there in the first place!

In Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, Avgi Saketopoulou writes:

…we do not know what our unconscious will produce or, thus, what we will encounter. Therein lies also the difficulty with which one must contend: even as the unconscious is never “ours,” in that its force is not under our “command,” it is also of us, which means that we are responsible for its effects in the world.

As screen, cipher, and/or obstacle to the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, the fantasy is one thing and its expression is another (kinda sorta). Which is to say that I don’t believe that I need to have been threatened with a knife in order for my arousal at the notion of knifeplay to be ethical. In fact, I don’t believe I need to impose an ethics on my arousal at all, which appears spontaneous and unreasonable to my conscious mind (unlike my behavior, over which I do have control, and for which I must be accountable in any community worth its salt).

This doesn’t mean the distinctions between fantasy and reality don’t matter to me, or that I can’t sympathize with someone, like Bawdy’s nervous newcomer, whose past experiences and socializations have made them wary of being perceived in stigmatized erotic contexts⁵. As someone who has been sexually assaulted in spaces designated for queer public sex, I understand the instinct to clamp down, draw lines, and exercise a fantasy of control because it feels safe, even if it actually isn’t. Gone uninterrogated and untreated, PTSD manifests as theater: it feels terrible, and it doesn’t even work.

Nes knows, as I do, that our way of relating to each other is right because it comes naturally to both of us. And here, of course, is yet another opportunity to unpack natural and what it means: one reason why Nes’ gaze is so exciting to me is because I have been stalked by men I once knew and trusted, men for whom my humanity vanished when they got angry. It was their terrifying behavior, not their fantasies, that obliterated the consent I had once extended them, and, in a few instances, made me feel as if pleasures like public sex, S&M, and community were no longer available to me. It’s only be resisting fantasies of my own control that I could begin regaining that sense of safety.

I’m sorry to announce another two-parter in this series, but I needed this preamble in place before digging into why safer sadists, dominants, and tops know the difference between fantasy and reality. More on that next time.

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1. Sorry, I’m a pothead! is the expression I picked up from Bambi to explain my relative lack of memory. Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to people who abstain (Jade, like Nes, remembers everything).

2. Between COVID and malaise, I’ve pretty much only been going to parties thrown by my friends, so naturally I get roped into helping.

3. This is one reason why the “male/female socialization” binary fails: birth assignment cannot account for our gendered experiences (not to mention all of the other kinds). Jade and I were both assigned female at birth, and yet for reasons of race, ethnicity, class, family dynamic and configuration, and much more, we have sharply divergent experiences of our genders. We’re not gay together because of our birth certificates. We’re gay together because we live gay lives. “We who are socialized like this experience that”—girl, who the fuck is we?

4. Because these practices are, for various yet interlocking reasons, transphobic, homophobic, racist, whorephobic, ableist—you name it.

5. When I am surrounded by straight people, their gratuitous flaunting of their state-sanctioned sexuality collides with my weird body to generate what I experience as an intense and uncomfortable sexual pressure. Why is it that I must abide that discomfort, while those who feel it in contexts where eye feel safer can claim harm or abuse—often while having opted into those rarified contexts in the first place?