BDSM Erotica

This morning I remembered that I’d promised to write a review of an online friend’s commercial erotica site. But I never got around to it. And that was two years ago.

You see I’d have to actually read some of the erotic stories. Just as I don’t really enjoy watching porn I don’t much care for reading erotica.

I tend to prefer these old grainy photographs to the slick and pretty stuff. Perhaps there is an element of believability.

When I decided that I was gay and became sexually conscious I bought a few books. Two were anthologies of sexually themed fiction. Titles forgotten. One was historical. Reading an 18th century play in which everybody was talking about penises was exotic … for about three pages. The other was a fat Olympia Press collection, mostly twentieth century. An extract from Teleny got my attention because it was (falsely) attributed to Oscar Wilde. But I couldn’t finish any of it.

Not much later working in a bookstore in downtown Atlanta I did sample some gay prose porn. (It was a mainstream bookshop but being owned by the Mafia had a porn section in the center. That was where I learned of the heterosexual male fixation on lesbians.) It was something to do when I had - though my employers surely disagreed - better to do. Same sex lovemaking was new to me so almost anything was a revelation. And these were surprisingly romantic pornographic novels about boys in love. But never would I have actually paid for one.

Fictional lusts have rarely engaged me.

S&M would prove a bit of an exception.

Still a young guy in Atlanta I bought a couple of sleazy gay tabloids. This was among my first inklings that people did these things to each other. On purpose! When a master pissed on the floor and ordered his slave to lick it up I swooned. But urban gay life in the days before HIV had too many real life distractions for me to want to waste time reading about other people’s sex lives.

Much later as the internet added the web I subscribed to a gay male erotic stories mailing list and discovered the Nifty Archive. I read only the BDSM stories. All these practices I’d never imagined! Testicle weights for instance. Once I’d gathered a fresh batch of fetishes my enthusiasm waned.

I still take an occasional peek at the Authoritarian section on Nifty. But never finish a story.

Mostly I don’t relish the same experience as the writers. There’s a massive amount about being humiliated by heterosexual males in high school and college that is wholly foreign to me. (Tales of taking down homophobic straight guys are a different matter.)

And - oddly - sometimes when the writer’s kink is my kink I feel disorienting clichéd.

So I just stick to telling myself my own stories.