Gloria Glickstein Brame
Newly Revised on June 3, 1997
Newly Revised on June 3, 1997
If you've been here before, you may nimbly glide to a new chapter of my life: "How A Nice Jewish Girl Like Me Became an Unrepentent Pervert. Or bound gracefuly ahead to an update on my publications.
The obligatory Web-confessional has made the Net the ultimate vanity press where each of us with pages may shamelessly rut in our biographical mud. But don't you just hate it when people recount the tedious details of their lives? I do. It is one thing to linger in bed, listening to one's lover confide his torrid adventures or his childhood mishaps; quite another to become the uneasy confidante of a stranger who, in all optimism and unselfconscious exuberance, describes the time his mother spit on a tissue and wiped his face, instilling in him a lasting phobia for Kleenex.
The true history of a life never resides in its factual details but in the individual's inner reality, which no document can fully reveal. Though scholars and fans may comb literary work in search of elusive details about the author's life, writing is not a mirror of the author's soul but a Chinese puzzle which she has crafted, and filled with truths which she has manipulated to best effect.
In matters literary and artistic, I always feel it is best to grapple with the work itself and to set aside the life which created it. Lives are messy things, crammed with inexplicable events and irrational behaviors, and directionless to the human eye. Careful work, by contrast, is neat, logical, clean. It comes to you already organized, so you may enjoy it. Unlike a life, which is a trash-heap of irrelevancies.
Put another way, work is clean and life is dirty.
Yet people are oddly curious about my dirty life. Perhaps this is because there are not very many formalist poets who are also mainstream journalists who also admit publicly to being sadomasochists.
So, for those who feel a visit to this page would be incomplete without a glimpse into the people, places, and peculiarities which shaped my literary imagination, below is a deliberately incomple listing of some particulars.
I am born. It is August 20 ,1955 in New York. The city has been struck by a heat wave. The temperature is 96 degrees. The hospital is not air-conditioned. Already I am causing my parents some trouble. To add injury to insult, I arrive feet- first, like Alexander. The similarities end here. (Except for the Amazonian chin.)
There is another honor that history bestowed upon me: I am the child of Holocaust survivors. Six years before I arrived at Beth Israel Hospital, my parents arrived at Boston Harbor, direct from a deportation camp in Germany where they had waited three years for their visas. (Oddly enough, the DP camp was Bergen-Belsen--which, after the War, had been transformed from a concentration camp to a harbor for displaced Jews.)
So there I was: a breech baby, Survivors' child, delivered into an inferno. An auspicious beginning, wouldn't you say?
Ballet School, Brooklyn, circa 1959:
first evidence that I would never dance on command.
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey?"--dance instructor.
P.S. 169, Brooklyn, NY (1960-67):
first lessons in sex education.
LESSON 1:
"When a girl becomes a woman,
her blood gets poisonous, so she has
to get rid of it every month."--fifth-grade teacher, earnestly
explaining
the biology of menstruation to your toxic author.
LESSON 2:
"Sex is when a man puts his thing in the woman's thing."--sixth-
grade girlfriend, whom I took for a disgusting liar, secure in
the knowledge that my father could never do something so
vile to my mother.
HOMEWORK:
"But how are babies
actually made?"--toxic child.
"I don't know!"--embarrassed mother.
Brooklyn Conservatory of Music (1966-69):
first case of stage fright.
"You won't forget to play the grace notes I added like you did
during practice?"--helpful music teacher.
John J. Pershing J.H.S., Brooklyn (1967-69):
I've tried to block these years from memory.
Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn (1969-70):
first anti-war rally, in which our heroine
sustained a fractured
pinky in the name of World Peace.
"Get the fuck out of here, hippie freak!"--helpful Tactical
Police Officer.
Third Street Music Settlement Manhattan (1969-72):
first evidence I would never be a virtuoso pianist.
"You vould make a wery goot accompanist!"--another helpful music
teacher.
A Nameless Catskills Resort, circa 1970
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey?"--entertainment
director.
Sheepshead Bay High School, Brooklyn (1970-72):
first affair with a teacher.
"Are you sure no one saw you?"--Mr. X.
Alliance Francaise, Paris, France (1974-75, Diplome de langue,
Teaching Certificate):
first case of ennui, inspired by last
affair with a Pole.
"The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read
all the books.
To escape! To escape far away!"--Stephen
Mallarme
York College/City University of New York, Jamaica, NY.
(B.A., '77: Regents Scholar, Dean's List each year in
attendance, President, French Club, summa cum laude
with Honors in English):
first existential crisis, the inevitable result
of a double-whammy: reading Nausea and having an affair
with a philosophy professor who insisted on reading aloud from
The Phaedrus in bed. His love, however, was not
Platonic.
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey?"--philosophy
professor
"I know perfectly well that I don't want to do
anything;
to do something is to create existence--and there's
quite enough existence as it is."--Jean-Paul Sartre
Columbia University/Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New
York, NY. (M.A. '78, Thesis, "Metaphor and Metonymy in the Works
of T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire"):
proof that hypocrisy is always rampant where you least expect
it.
I studied with Carolyn Heilbrun, reknowned feminist, who
was also reknowned among female students for distinctly favoring
the men in our class.
I wanted to study with the brilliant critic and eminent
Palestinian apologist Edward Said. Alas, he made all potential
students complete a questionnaire, and then selected them
according to their political preparedness for his class.
The only thing I've ever been politically prepared for is an
anarchist commune. Needless to say, I didn't make the cut.
Not like I'm bitter or anything.
OWEN DODSON: My first poetry teacher was African-American poet Owen Dodson, who rose to prominence young, then faded into obscurity as illnesses (among them Sickle Cell Anemia) ruined his body and undermined his artistic powers. Owen was the first true poet I knew--generous, loving, kind, and more than a little quirky.
Owen lived in a vast apartment on the Upper West Side with his maiden sister, Edith, who tended to her brother's domestic needs. The apartment was a tribute to Owen's travels, his achievements, and his fantastically eclectic imagination. In one corner, he had a large puppet box, with Thai figures limned by pale white lights. Throughout the house were figures of horses: small statues and carvings and dolls, and even an ornate rocking horse.
Owen told me, "Whenever I get a royalty check, I reward myself by buying a horse. That's the first thing I do."
The bathroom was a writer's paradise: the walls were covered with postcards received from his many friends, most of them now legends in poetry, jazz, and the arts. In a prominent spot were countless cards from W.H. Auden, whose villa in Greece Owen had visited many times.
"Heaven to me was sitting in a lounge chair by Auden's pool with a cold drink in my hand," Owen said.
After college, I lost touch with him. His eagerness to help me had perplexed me. I was too young then to understand what his friendship meant. Also, I felt I had betrayed his hopes for me by abandoning poetry and taking a conventional job. But by 1984, I wanted more than anything to reclaim the poet's life, and I needed to talk to him again.
I couldn't find him. He was not at his old address; when I dialed his old phone number, it rang and rang and rang. Finally I learned that he was dead.
Just at this time, a strange chance came my way. I was restless and unhappy with life on Wall Street: the work was spiritually meaningless. I wanted to do something good. An ad in a neighborhood paper said that a blind person sought a reader. The address listed was Owen's last address. I knew he had died and yet, when I called, I wildly hoped that he would answer the phone. Instead, it was a nice old lady who needed help sorting through her belongings.
It seemed fated. I went to her apartment and was charmed when a plump, tiny lady in winged, rhinestone-bobbed glasses and a day-glo housedress met me at the door.
She led me in to a dark and claustrophobic space. The 70 plus years of this eccentric life had been converted to stuff. Stuff overflowed from shelves, lined floors, leaned against walls, fell out of drawers. There was good stuff, like a superb collection of Depression Glass stacked on a towering breakfront; there was kitsch stuff, like souvenirs of cheap holidays to popular resorts of the 40s and 50s. But mostly there was personal stuff, the sort which means everything to its collector and nothing to anyone else. My job was to read through the boxes of papers she had collected: her landlord had threatened her with eviction if she did not pare down. Her apartment was a fire hazard.
So, hour after hour, during lunchtime or after work, I would pore through her boxes, finding receipts for meals at restaurants that went out of business in the 1960s, and playbills for shows that closed decades ago. "This can be thrown out," I would say, coming upon a mysterious set of ticket stubs from a theater since burnt down. "Oh....no," she would say, taking them from me and peering at them, sadly, "I remember I went there with Martha, my brother's girlfriend, when he was away with the Navy. That was during the War. I can't give them up."
"What about this?" I'd try a few minutes later, holding up a shred of wrinkled paper with a theater's address scrawled in faded ink. "Oh!" she would squint at me disapprovingly, "I worked there once! I was a dancer. I was in their chorus line. Oh, we danced down the aisles in that theater. I could never throw that away!"
After several weeks of this, I simply gave up. She did not want to be parted from her stuff. She could not live without her stuff. Her stuff was her history. I could not come between her and her history.
In the course of our conversations, I found out that she remembered Owen--remembered seeing him struggling through the halls, his sister by his side. And she remembered when he died. Meeting someone who had seen him at the end of his life somehow gave me closure. But I miss him.
JOSEPH BRODSKY: By far, the teacher who made the most lasting impression on me was Joseph Brodsky, whom I was blessed to know for ten years. At the seminar I took with him at PSA, he introduced me to the work of C.P. Cavafy: it was perhaps the happiest introduction of my life. To listen to Joseph brilliantly spin his stories and funny anecdotes, to see him grow warm with emotion as he spoke of literature and considered its meanings, to hear him recite, in heavily-accented cadences, the verses of English poets--it was all the heaven that this poet could ever want.
When we met, Joseph was preparing for open-heart surgery. He was only 45 but his body was paying for an extraordinarily difficult life. I remember once, months after the operation, sitting on the sofa in his tiny apartment on Morton Street-- which, incidentally, was Auden's old place. Joseph had invited me to visit and to bring work for him to read. He sat in a chair across from me, perusing the manuscript slowly. I was afraid: I knew he would tell me the truth. If he said I had no talent, I would give up my dream. Luckily, he was very kind to me, and became a friend to my work from then on. Later, over coffee, we talked about his own work. He was oppressed by mortality. He felt he might die any time. "But you have achieved great work," I feebly said, "Your work will still be read in the 21st Century." "Perhaps," he said curtly, then he smirked,"But I would like to be there to see the readers doing it!"
In the intervening years, Joseph won all the honors and awards of his profession. His death on January 28, 1996 reminded me of that conversation we had in 1986. He was right: only his words will live into the next century. Still, it is comforting to remember that his genius was rewarded in his lifetime.
I have a couple of cards Joseph sent me and I treasure them, but my proudest possession is an autographed copy of A Part of Speech, which he signed that day in 1986. He wrote out my name and drew the "o" in Gloria as a sun, then signed it, "from her humble teacher." Joseph had an excellent sense of humor.
For more anecdotes about Joseph, check out my poem, Kokoschka's Doll.
As for the other teachers on my list, I feel grateful to each, for different lessons learned.
John Hollander, Sewanee Writers' Conference (1991)
Joseph Brodsky, Poetry Society of America (1985)
Alfred Corn, The 63d Street Y (1985)
David Shapiro, Columbia (1978)
Colette Inez, New School for Social Research (1974)
Owen Dodson, York College (1974)
For reasons of poverty, and after spending months being told I was over-qualified for every job I needed and under-qualified for every job I wanted, I took the first position offered to me after graduate school. I once described my seven years in business in a poem as "seven years of slavery in the dirt, to win the wrong bride" (which makes sense only if you're familiar with the Bible story, and I hope you are).
1978: Secretary, McKinsey & Co.
"Don't you want to do the Hokey-Pokey?"--several senior partners,
including one who tried to get me fired when I declined to
dance.
1979-81: Administrative Assistant, Corporate Finance,
Drexel Burnham Lambert
Where our heroine sustained an eye-opening education
by working for (and, on one memorable occasion, doing the Hokey-
Pokey with) men later indicted in the Mike Milken scandal.
1981-83: Assistant Manager, Institutional Sales, Drexel Burnham Lambert. (Registered Representative/Series 7 License.)
1983: Financial Analyst (Chemicals industry),
Oppenheimer & Co.
First fateful encounter with a PC!
1983-86: Financial Analyst (Chemicals), Morgan Stanley, Inc.
1986-87: Consulting Research Director and Editor, Recruitment Research Institute.
1987-88: Consulting Editorial Director, Capital Campaign, The Cooper Union for Arts and Sciences.
1988-91: Adjunct associate professor/lecturer in English and Creative Writing (New College at Hofstra University, NYU, York College/CUNY).
1986-present: writer and editor, gardener, siren and serene bohemian, slave to none and Mistress of Her Own Destiny. With occasional time-out for the Hokey-Pokey.
Since I've been at this for ten years, my publications list is almost as complicated as my biography. Here, then, is a snapshot of recent and future projects.
Where the Boys Are: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Mr.
Right
(Avon/Cosmo Books, June 1997). Author.
Excerpts and ordering info.
Different
Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission
(Villard/Random House, 1993 and 1996).
Lead author, with William D. Brame and Jon Jacobs.
Listed among Amazon Books'
500 Bestsellers, and now in its fifth printing in the U.S.,
Different Loving will be published in the United Kingdom
and in Italy in 1997.
Domina: Short Stories
(Daedalus Publishing, tentatively scheduled for their 1998 list).
Author. Some of the high-intensity erotica from this collection
is already on the Web in the Different Loving Erotica Library.
The Cosmo Guide to Sex
(in negotations with Avon Books). Author.
IN PROGRESS
Amazon Hammer: novel nearing completion.
Siren of the Net: novel in circulation.
Slim Chances: poetry in hiding.
AS CONTRIBUTOR
Between the Cracks: The Daedalus Anthology of Kinky Verse, editor Gavin Geoffrey Dillard (Daedalus Publishing, 1997). Contributing poet.
Consensual SM by William Henkin and Sybil Holiday
(Daedalus Publishing, 1996).
Introduction.
American Woman
"How To Marry Rich": excerpt from Where the Boys Are (June
1997). You may also read this chapter on the
Avon
Books website.
Complete Woman
"Where the Boys Are": excerpts from book. (October 1997)
Cosmopolitan
"On-Line Men Talk About Sex" (1996)
"Great Dates: Round-Up" (1996)
"Great Kisses: Round-Up (1996)
Note: Reprints available on Compuserve/Ziff-Davis
database.
Working Woman
"Seismic Shifts: How technology will change the way you work."
(1996)
"Net Profits: Some companies actually are making
money on-line. Here's how and why." (1996)
ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum
Interview with poet/essayist, Rachel Hadas (Spring '97).
Interview with SF writer, Vonda N. McIntyre (Winter '97).
(Reprint scheduled to appear in the next edition of SIRS:
Renaissance Inter-Disciplinarian Database, available on CD-
ROM at university and public libraries.
Interview with poet Allen Ginsberg, Summer '96.
(Selected by CNN Interactive as
a background biographical link on Mr. Ginsberg. Translation
scheduled to appear in Americana (Italy) in '97).
Reprint of interview with poet/critic Dana Gioia:
(scheduled to appear in
Agenda (UK) in '97).
Sparrow
"The Lion's Paw" ('96)
First time listing in The World Who's Who of Women: 14th
Edition
First time listing in the Marquis Who's Who of American Women,
1997
The World Who's Who of Poets
The Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers
Advisory Editor, ELF magazine, 1991 - .
Associate Poetry Editor, Boulevard magazine,
1987-91.
Literary Agent
Sterling Lord Literistic
65 Bleecker Street
New York, NY 10012
They really deserve a special chapter. Or perhaps an encyclopedia. Let's just say that I'll be gathering research materials for the rest of my life.
Now that you've endured the torments of wading through my autobiography you may wish to endure even more torment. Thus it seems only appropriate at this point to raise that delicate question: "how did a nice Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn grow up to be a notorious pervert (while still maintaining her sunny disposition)?"
So, to start at the beginning. I've known all my life that I was sexually odd. By age five, I was already enchanted by movies featuring heroes in loin cloths and fetishistic outfits: Spartacus, Tarzan, and tacky 50s B-movies about Roman Centurions enraptured me. Movie scenes of bondage and captivity continuously replayed in my prepubescent brain. I watched The Man from U.N.C.L.E. faithfully (if not feverishly) each week, anxious to see whether Napolean Solo or Ilya Kuryakin would once again be tied up and humiliated by a beautiful, cold-hearted bitch: the kind of woman who was comfortable taking complete control of a man! A powerful woman--and a powerful role model for a girl growing up amid the Victorian sexual mores of the early 1960s.
In addition to fixating on such scenes in movies and books, I can point to innumerable foreshadowings in my own life of what was to come. At family get-togethers, the kids would slink off to a back bedroom to "play house." I was inevitably picked to be the Mommy who punished everyone with spankings. In sixth grade, a fourth-grade boy attached himself to me with masochistic fervor. We had our own peculiar dynamic: he would pester me until I couldn't stand it anymore and then I would punch him hard. He'd fall to the floor at my feet, groaning, then gaze up hopefully, as if to say, "Aren't you going to kick me too?"
But, unlike some of the fanciful creatures on UseNet who, at age 25, claim they've been doing D&S for 22 years, I date my real life as a sadomasochist from age 30. This is because, when I talk about D&S, what I mean is mutually consensual D&S. And in order for there to be true mutual consent, a person has to be aware that what she's doing IS D&S. Otherwise, the one year olds who bite each other at Daycare or the thirteen year olds who snap their classmates' brassieres in the schoolyard would all qualify as Masters and slaves.
And, unfortunately, on the Internet many of them do. (Sorry, I just had to get that in.)
So, while I had a couple of boyfriends in my teens and 20s with whom I did some kinky things, I wasn't a D&Ser then because I was in complete denial about it. Had you told me then that I was a sadomasochist, I would have laughed in disbelief. Yes, I did a little bondage and spanking...but SM, I thought, was something very different.
My reasoning was simplistic: all the classic SM novels, which I naively took to be the gospel on SM sex, turned me off. The violence in DeSade's Justine, which I read for a women's study course in college, repulsed me. (However, for the sake of truth, I'll admit that there was one passage which I re-read so many times that, ten years later, the page it was on fell right out of the book and into plain view when a man I'd hired to move some furniture upset a box. Seeing that little section of prose that I'd been using as a masturbatory aid since my teens lying on the pavement, its words seemingly magnified so that not only the moving man but every passerby (and possibly people as far away as China) could read it...was...well...it was a moment.)
I read Story of O in college too. But I couldn't identify either with O, her co-slaves, or her masters. The heroine struck me as a self-destructive neurotic who was not so much submissive as hell-bent on using men to achieve her ultimate goal: self-annihilation. The men themselves were about as emotionally complex as flocked wallpaper.
Okay, so I'm opinionated.
Even in my mid twenties I remained unaware of my true sexual nature. What's strange about this is that more and more men were approaching me, specifically looking for D&S relationships. When a Wall Street friend handed me a copy of 9 1/2 Weeks, urging me to read it, I was greatly puzzled. He said, "I was hoping you'd read it and take me on an erotic adventure." This sounded interesting so I read it. And, yes, the first chapters were hot. But then I got to the end...where the heroine ends up in a psycho ward.
Hmmmm. I think not.
Another Wall Street friend tried a different approach. He would invite me into his office to show me the SM toy catalogues he perused during company time. He would exhort me to select something a whip or paddle, in hopes I'd then use it on him. Never one to mince words, I believe my usual reply was, "You have lost your damn mind."
On one occasion, a managing director at Morgan Stanley dropped my desk to confess--in earshot of some female colleagues--that he had dreamed of me the night before, "dressed in fishnets and high heels, and standing over me with a whip." I still remember the director padding away sheepishly as my girlfriends began giggling uncontrollably. Meanwhile, I remained standing there, wondering in idiotic stupefaction, "Why do men always say things like this to me?"
It took a woman to open my eyes. She was another nice Jewish girl, educated and successful, very attractive and funny, and very mainstream, except for her sexual obsessions. She was extremely honest about being a sadomasochist and while I was often shocked by her stories, I greatly admired her nerve. Back then ('85-'86), there was no Internet, and you just didn't meet people who talked about these things. Her candor impressed me.
Within a few weeks, she confided that the reason she had pursued a friendship with me was because she could tell I too was a sadomasochist. Now, I knew more about sex by age fifteen than many women do at age fifty. I'd hung out with self-avowed queers since my early teens; lots of my hippie friends were bisexual; some were polyamorous. So I always felt that gay or bi sex was acceptable, even normal.
(Another sidenote: one of the advantages of being raised by parents who were too repressed to tell me anything about sex is that I decided, on my own, that either EVERYTHING was disgusting or NONE of it was. Not even the most outrageous perversions have ever induced in me one tenth the disgust I experienced when I learned, at age 11, that a man actually puts his, um, you know, into a woman's, er, well....YUCK! It was really all downhill after that.)
Still sadomasochists were complete unknowns and their rituals seemed morbid: : I envisioned them as the pathetic victims or brutal criminals represented in the fiction of DeSade and Genet, or the laughable characters in Mel Brooks movies, or the sad cases who occasionally showed up on the nightly news: people whose bizarre lusts inevitably led them down the road to perdition. (Whereas, now, I see those who repress their bizarre lusts as the ones who are most likely to self-destruct...but perhaps I'll talk about that another time....)
I rejected my girlfriend's theories based uniquely on my prejudices and fears. I couldn't see how or where a basically gentle, non-violent, romantic person such as myself fit in with a world of whip-wielding bitches. The few times I'd seen SM depicted in movies (such as Maitresse, Barbet Schroeder's classic mainstream film about a professional dominatrix), everyone looked so UNHAPPY. But, just as many fans have written me to say that Different Loving helped them to put a human face on SM and fetishism, my girlfriend--through her candor--helped me to see that the fiction was just that: sensationalized accounts of a sexuality that was far more common, and shared by far more well-adjusted, loving people, than anyone would guess.
She showed me her library of SM pornography and there, in the better magazines, I found the Tarzans and Ilya Kuryakins of my youth: only these men were naked in their bonds and obviously aroused. That was exciting. She also showed me her impressive collection of fetish clothes, from leather wear of every type to a Cleopatra-style headdress. She encouraged me to try on some of the theatrical outfits and, when I did, I simply loved the way they looked and felt.
She did me another big favor: she turned me on to cyberspace. I had purchased a PC in 1983, soon after marrying husband number two (Will is husband number three). Though I used it mainly for wordprocessing, I had insisted on getting a modem (still fairly rare in those days) because of an article I'd read in the Village Voice, chronicling one man's addiction to interactive chat on The Source. The idea that strangers from around the nation could talk, 24 hours a day, didn't just amaze me: it gave me a vision of what the future might be...and a keen desire to be a part of it.
When my girlfriend joined a local adult BBS (electronic bulletin board) which featured a B&D board, she nagged me to join too. To say that I was dubious about doing this is an understatement. Despite dabbling in D&S porn and costumes at her house, I still could not believe I was "one of them." But my marriage was already falling apart, and I was staying up nights at the PC to avoid sleeping beside my husband. Caught between intense sexual frustration (my least favorite kind of frustration) and voluntary insomnia, and intrigued by the new technology, I decided to give the world of on-line perversion a whirl.
So, I logged onto the BBS and began reading messages which shocked me. I'm not sure now if part of that shock wasn't simply the shock of recognition. At the time, I was mildly horrified and overwhelmed by half-embarrassed, half-titillated giggles. All the things that, normally, are shamefully hidden were, in this forum, publicly and matter-of-factly flaunted. People talked about bizarre sex acts and extreme experiences the way my parents talked about going to Dunkin' Donuts--with good cheer and eager anticipation. Again, it was the candor among this band of perverts which charmed me. Straightforward discussion of topics that most people considered taboo? Confessions of sexual quirks that most people (including myself) didn't have the balls to admit having, even to ourselves?
There was something else: I had by then already made my commitment to art. The life of the artist, I knew from the first, was all about a commitment to living in truth. In their own way, these kinky adventurers were sexual artists. In short, I loved it!
According to the explanatory sheet that came with my BBS registration information, new members were expected to leave introductory messages about themselves. So, buoyed by my reading, I set to the task of describing some of my own weird fantasies. Though I was operating under a handle, I was terrified the first time I posted a fantasy on-line. Predictably, I was afraid someone would find out it was really me--Gloria Glickstein aka nice Jewish girl-- behind the monicker and that my career and reputation would be ruined.
But I think what frightened me most of all was to give voice to the dark fantasies I'd hidden all my life-- and thus to stand naked not just before the world but, more significantly, to stand naked before myself. That was, for me, the most difficult step I've ever taken. And it was at that moment, I think, that I truly became a sadomasochist.
To my surprise (and frenzied arousal) fan mail began pouring in the next day. My greatest fear had been that people would read my introductory note and be horrified or puzzled or, much worse, amused. (In other words, that they would judge me as I had judged them.) Also, the fantasies I uploaded were not the stuff of SM fiction: whips and chains didn't interest me half as much as pyschological domination and some of the more sensual fetishes. So the enthusiastic response astonished me. They wanted to meet me! They wanted to serve me! They wanted to enslave me! A few wanted to BE me...or at least to wear my lingerie.
This too was an awakening.
Imagine revealing that one secret within yourself about which you feel most ashamed, least reconciled, and deathly afraid to reveal to others because you are certain they will reject you for it. Then imagine receiving immediate and overwhelmingly positive feedback. Instead of rejecting you, people think your secret is WONDERFUL....they understand your secret...they SHARE your secret and feel a special bond with you because of it. Suddenly, you are not alone.
For me, there was simply no turning back after that. Within a few months, I had formed a few SM relationships (one of which still continues), and visited all the SM clubs in New York that welcomed heterosexuals. I threw myself into the life with gusto; my unleashed libido made me feel more alive than I had ever felt before.
But the transition was not painless. I'd lived in denial about my sexual interests until the age of 30--it wasn't so easy to let go of a lifetime of sexual repression. I had political problems with the inequality in a power exchange relationship. I also had deep anxieties about what SM psychodrama said about me and, more particularly, about my childhood. Until then, I hadn't looked very clearly at my childhood: now that I saw it clearly, I wasn't happy with what I saw. This worried me: was SM the consequence of trauma? If so, wasn't I only aggravating the wound by doing SM?
I was very lucky, then, to bump into Jon Jacobs on that same BBS. Jon's ten years older than me and had, by then, been heavily involved in lifestyle SM for 20 years. He helped me to find sane answers to many of these questions and basically held my hand through that revolutionary period in my life. He helped me to see how SM could and should, ideally, fit into a loving and constructive relationship. As Jon explained it, a D&S relationship was a kind of conspiracy between lovers who set their own code of moral behavior and defined sexual pleasure on their own terms. This kind of philosophy--part anarchist, part civil libertarian, and purely humanistic--made sense to me. I still see the paradigmatic D&S relationship as living up to that ideal. Jon told me something else which was very helpful, especially for someone coming to terms with a history of abuse: in a nutshell, that however one is born or shaped by circumstances, you can't not be who you are; so the important thing is to embrace yourself, as you are, and to seek positive ways to fulfill your needs.
So that is the story of how I first entered the SM Scene in 1986-1987. By the end of 1987, I had founded the first on-line SM support group (on Compuserve); in 1988, Will logged on to my group and caught my attention in a big way; in 1989, we were married; and in 1990, Will, Jon and I began working on Different Loving in hopes of creating a book which would tell the truth about SM sexuality as it is lived and not as it distorted by repressed imaginations. And, now in 1997, I'm fortunate enough to live in a society where I can tell this story about my own coming out.
I'll close with a poem by one of my literary models, the early 20th century (gay) poet, Constantin P. Cavafy.
HIDDEN THINGS
From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there distorting
the actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I'd begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing--
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn't worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.
From: C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Kelley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1980.
Copyright © 1996 & 1997
Gloria Glickstein
Brame
