kink+culture

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Kink For All

I gave my first pervert related talk Sunday at the first ever Kink For All, held at the LGBT Community Center. Let me first say, it was fantastic and I left energized, excited, with pages of notes, some business cards and a whole lot of encouragement.

It was a rather spontaneous decision on my part to speak and I signed up without really knowing what I would talk about. I'm not particularly skilled in anything. I'm usually at the receiving end of other people's expertise. I thought about doing something related to my Kink + Culture site, but I didn't want to just do a show and tell. Then it came to me.

Half of my life is firmly planted in the vanilla world and half is pretty solid in the kink world and I like going back and forth across the border. I have a tendency to look at the vanilla world through a kinky filter and the kinky world through a vanilla filter and nothing pleases me more than when those two worlds collide.

I was dating a guy who was pretty vanilla. He wasn't completely green about kinky stuff, but it became really clear that he just wasn't into it. Or at least into anything I was into. So, I said to him, "This stuff isn't really your thing, is it?" And he said:

"Not really. I just like the way it looks."

At the time, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I got it immediately. But it wasn't until later that I stopped and thought, what does that mean? What does kink "look like"?

So, I did a presentation called Fishnets and Furry Handcuffs: The Perception of Kink in Popular Culture. It was an absolute blast putting it together, so much so that I can't stop working on it. It got a very good response and the discussion afterward could have gone on and on for the rest of the afternoon. Now I want to keep going. I think I have a nice little seed of an idea here. I'm gonna water it and see what happens.

On another note, I did my talk in the Keith Haring bathroom, which could not have been more perfect.