The Path to Here

Last night I awoke feeling that I was in the presence of the purest hate and anger. Were I a Victorian writer I might say it radiated malignancy. …

… it did feel as if I’d recovered some part of my personal prehistory and encountered an almost archetypal perception of Daddy.

A deep fear of my male parent was a defining element of boyhood and youth. Surely it began shaping me no later than age four when he (literally) knocked out my Momma’s teeth. (The violence did not continue long. Later as he started to swing at her she fainted. He thought she’d died. My father never hurt her physically again.)

For a long time aggression or emotional violence would freeze me. Probably why I was long a pacifist. (A good thing: not being able to understand why my pacifist heroes – Gandhi and Einstein – should suffer eternal damnation in Hell rescued me from fundamentalist Christianity in my mid-teens.)

At age eight he gave me a switching – nothing particularly brutal – that I eroticized: for a long time my masochistic fantasies focused on recapturing that experience.

My father was a user with a violent temper. My mother had a full-time job and he would have her run errands that kept her from eating or relaxing during her lunch hour. And should he come home and find something other than what he expected had been prepared for supper he’d have a temper tantrum.

Momma, who forbear everything for my sake, was my oasis. Like many mothers she felt she’d let me down. Unknowingly she indued me with the capacity for coping. And, I think, the tolerance that finally saved me from staying the arrogant little shit I was in my early manhood.

There’s no doubt in my heart that I identified with my mother. In retrospect it surprises me that I didn’t grow up transgendered or at least a little feminine. My personae is indistinguishable from any heterosexual lout in Wal-Mart.

By age ten I was having fantasies of being bound, controlled and tormented. (And even let a boy tie me up in the woods once.) By fourteen being put to the rack and the like – images from movies – were among the many things about which I masturbated.

Though I’d often fantasized of girls just about the time I turned eighteen I decided that I was gay. A hugely liberating moment. I discovered sex.

I never connected anything that I masturbated about with the rest of my life. Full of lust I was oblivious to sex. This was another good thing. In high school I didn’t mope about the pretty girls who were beyond me. I passed through adolescence without (conscious) sexual frustration.

Deciding that an academic wasn’t something I really wanted to be at eighteen (I’d been admitted while in high school) I quite college and moved to the big city: Atlanta.

As a tall, reasonable looking young gay man sex with attractive partners was easily obtained. Though like a fool I’d waste time wanting to be in love.

And I still wanted to be tied up and whipped. There was a leather bar. The leather caps and chaps didn’t make the men I saw there (visited only because I distributed the gay newspaper that I helped produce) seem exactly dominant. And I was just too plain scared to let anybody tie me up. (In my vanilla gay sex life I was what is now called a top. I preferred the fey, silly boys who liked my chest hair.)

I did have my first BDSM experience: I ordered a skinny boy to lick the Army boots I wore back then and gave him a spanking. It was fun. Never repeated.

In San Francisco I made a couple of abortive attempts to meet a sadist. But I was still too paranoid. And the limp-wristed lads kept me quite content.

And I was mightily excited by the ads by professional dominatrices whose dungeons could be visited for a fee. Though I’d run an escort service and sold myself a couple of times it didn’t really occur to me to pay for an experience.

It was in San Francisco that I made love to a woman and fell in love with her.

Several years later we broke up. By then I was living in North Carolina.

And I made one of the biggest mistakes of my entire life. I retreated from sex and intimate human contact for many years. What a baby.

Finally basic yearnings reasserted themselves. It was time to find a lover and if nothing else a few people with whom to share pleasure.

It was then that I discovered a desire to worship – hopefully to be hurt – by a woman. My slavish and masochistic appetites had always been focused on men before. The idea of a woman being ‘cruel’ was foreign to me: Momma had always protected me and had an invincible – if foolish- faith in her first born.

I also came to define my sexuality as pansexual. On Yahoo, AOL, I forget where all else I established accounts for each aspect of my sexuality. (Eventually each had its own web site.)

On Yahoo there was a dominant woman who enjoyed what I posted to the local group. I do not drive. She came to my house and as a favor gave me my first taste of bondage, nipple clamping and flogging.

A radiant experience that left me with an afterglow for days.

But it would be with a raving little queen – who made Emmett from Queer as folk seem butch – to whom I’d give my heart. As an old pulp magazine might put it I Condemned Myself to Hell. A victim of his addictions he’s in the grave now. Financially I’ve yet to recover from being in love with someone who wasn’t able to overcome his craving for heroin and crack.

As my love for my nelly dope fiend died Alexandra and I started chatting. We’d actually known each other for years – from back in the days of Yahoo Clubs.

We hadn’t been in touch much over the years. Alexandra knew what I was going through and was deeply concerned about my emotional health.

We’d long since felt an affinity but figured the Atlantic Ocean a barrier with which we couldn’t cope. Not that either of us said anything outright.

At some point Alexandra said that my chivalrous nature – my tendency to put my beloved before myself – was also the mark of a submissive guy. I think I was bit nervous to blow my image as a butch man but I confessed my slavish needs.

Alexandra told me of her dominant side. Eventually – distance be damned – we felt we had to meet and Alexandra made her first trip to America.

Once she was here I drank too much and one night became one of those very pushy submissive men. She accepted it with good grace. My honest need was obvious and we were friends who knew lots about one another.

As many entries long since scrolled off into the archives will testify we’ve had some good times. There’ve been complications. But we love one another deeply and never fail to talk.

I’ve grown a bit beyond my overheated fantasies of nonstop torture. Learned how surrender can blend so sweetly with love. Not that I don’t hope she’ll make more of my devilish desires come true. I’m not going to tell lies about my hungers: they are fierce.

I like to be hurt. I enjoy being degraded.

And I can feel warm satisfaction in just being permitted to kneel in adoration.

(NB: my remarks about my Daddy may suggest to the ignorant that my confessions belong in a text of psychopathology. No. The origins of my needs are irrelevant. Illness would be in failing to find expression for them. Were you to meet me in the flesh I don’t think you’d see a man to be pitied.)