Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn from the Bay, my dear Bambi came to visit. We went to a sexy movie festival at Anthology Film Archives, where their work was being featured. One of the other features was The Artist and the Pervert, a documentary following writer and sex educator Mollena Williams-Haas and world-famous microtonalist composer Georg Friedrich Haas. The two have an M/s relationship, based on both a legally binding marriage license and a Master-slave contract that designates Haas as the “owner” and Williams-Haas as his simultaneous “equal,” slave, and muse.
The documentary explores not only the couple’s controversial relationship, but the shifting boundaries between their creative endeavors and kink practices; the origins of their desires (a treasured deviant pastime); and the politics of race and anti-blackness in their respective countries, scenes, and family histories (Williams-Haas is a black American woman; Haas is a white Austrian man whose elderly mother appears in the film to defend the Nazi sympathies with which she raised her son). Williams-Haas has been on my radar since I entered the scene myself—a decade ago 😱—and as the most prominent recreational race player that I can think of, she’s always been a fascinating figure.
While I think The Artist and the Pervert is successful in providing a nuanced and intimate look at a partnership that unsettles both vanilla and kinky senses of what is normal, acceptable, and easy (“To say I can’t play my personal psychodrama out just because I’m black, that’s racist,” Williams-Haas said in an interview), I left the theater that night thinking that it didn’t resolve the question of race play for me. Is race play good or is it bad? Can people, you know, do it? If so, in what contexts and ways? If someone walked up to me to ask if I thought race play was okay, what should I say? It’s one thing to dissect the problematically racialized dynamics of white players, and another to make sweeping claims about modes of play altogether, especially when those playing aren’t white! It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that perhaps answering these questions was neither the goal of the documentary, nor a realistic expectation for me, as a white player, to have.
Recognizing that part of my interest in Williams-Haas, as an authority in the scene, rested in the potential she presents for a definitive answer regarding one of the most controversial activities in a controversial milieu made me realize I have an investment in race play—even though I don’t do it1. Why is this? Well, I can come up with a few reasons, not all of which are flattering to me.
First of all, my nominal non-participation in race play is besides the point. I can’t exempt myself from engaging with issues affecting players of color just because I do not explicitly name or center racialization in my play dynamics. If so-called race play threatens the safety or mental health of players of color in my communities, it’s a problem I can’t responsibly ignore (and it’s highly likely that it’s a problem of which I am a part). As Ariane Cruz writes in The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, “interraciality is a necessary optic considering kink”; even in scenes with exclusively black players, “whiteness haunts the scene.” I can enact whichever fantasies I want within the imaginary of the scene, but this doesn’t change the reality of white supremacy for all involved, both within the scene and beyond it. The “question” of race play is a component of white supremacy, which cannot be compartmentalized. Refusing to have an opinion on a specific fetish or an activity simply because I do not partake is to exercise a luxury (one that is, in this case, grounded in my whiteness); going around saying you fuck with power while refusing to name the more challenging power differentials is like throwing the rock but disowning the ripples.
Then there’s virtue-signaling, something that’s a lot easier to do when you know the party line. Whether I praise, condemn, or excuse race play takes place in the larger conversation around it, and I am impacted depending on if and how I depart from the majority opinion. Sometimes that opinion is righteous; sometimes it is not; sometimes, as in this case, it is ambiguous—which is highly inconvenient for me! My stance on race play, such as it is, communicates my values as a player and as a person in a community (or movement, if you will), and these values are not uninflected by concerns of desirability and capital2. While the dynamic that Williams-Haas has chosen is one for which she won’t apologize, the unconscious requirement that this mean something for me, personally, is reductive of her identity, not to mention the expertise she brings to the scene: by asking her to answer this “question” for me, I am deflecting and delegating moral authority to an individual, who whether or not she wants it, cannot own it.
My unthinking entitlement to a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of race play is the bite-size version of a similar instinct for all controversial issues, in the scene and beyond. Incest rp is universally bad for all players and should be banned! is much more satisfying—and easy—than, As consenting adults with this fetish, we have to be careful about how and when we play with it so that we avoid harming those who have not consented to participate, or even harming ourselves3. There’s a difference between trying to police that most unpoliceable of things—desire—and trying to navigate the intricacies of community, and it’s unsurprising to me when those who are not embedded in my leather communities—nor in intersecting communities of people marginalized by race, gender, class, ability, and criminality—choose the former over the latter.
Ultimately, my mistake regarding The Artist and the Pervert reflects the limitations of self/white-centeredness and of having a binarist and punitive approach to desire. Race play exists. To dispute this is not only inaccurate but ineffectual. It exists. Now what? There are more interesting questions than whether it shouldn’t, many of them obscured by this line of thinking.
I’ll close this series with an excerpt from an interview with Cruz, whose insistence on going deeper than superficial questions of good or bad, harmful or empowering, has been a fascinating and challenging addition to my conception of leather.
I am wary of presenting the politics of perversion as liberatory or as some kind of path toward some kind of freedom because I think that liberation is unrealized and at the very least uncertain. With the politics of perversion, it’s less a matter of liberation and more a matter of transformation. That is, I am invested in the ways that the politics of perversion can change our both our thinking (about the relationships between sex, race, bodies, pleasure, and power) but also our doing (everything from our scholarship, to our relationships, to our labor, to our fucking etc.). I see perversion as useful in illuminating sexuality’s vast deployment as a technique of power.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
For free. For the purposes of this post, we’re only writing about recreational play, but race play in transactional BDSM—explicit and otherwise, consenting and otherwise—is a whole other ball game. Will probably write more about it someday, though I did start fleshing it out a little here.
I urge you to read this Black Scholar interview with Cruz, in which she problematizes our already problematized understandings of consent within BDSM. “Like consent the fantasy/reality divide is critical but complex. This separation has, of course, long been challenged by opponents of BDSM. I am interested in the ways that blackness further complicates this split and the dynamics of consent itself.”
David Stein, Part 3