SCENEprofiles Interview with 
Chris M.
Writer, and Emeritus Board Member
of Black Rose, Washington, DC 

Chris M. with his Dominant

Art by Chris M. - More after interview

Crashdadscar@yahoo.com 

Chris is a Black Rose Emeritus Board Member, artist, writer, dominant (occasional switch) and SM educator, active with Black Rose since 1990. He has presented SM workshops and seminars across the country including all the Black Rose conferences, most of the Beat Me in St. Louis festivals, CAPEX, CUFF, ROPE, Leather Leadership and the late great New Orleans Power Exchange, to name only a few. With Andrew Harwin he gave a three weekend seminar on SM Spirituality at GMSMA and has guest lectured at both Tulane University in New Orleans and Pace University, NYC. His SM educational writings have been published in Prometheus, Petal and Thorn and innumerable websites where he provides his writings free of charge. His leather artworks have been exhibited at the legendary Playhouse Studios of Baltimore MD, and were recently featured in Joseph Bean’s book "Flogging" published by Greenery Press.

Sadie: You are known as a bit of a fixture in the Washington DC BDSM Scene, particularly with Black Rose, which is a pretty well known group. How long have you been involved?
 
Chris: "Twelve years. I came to my first Black Rose meeting as a comparative SM rookie late in 1989. I’ve been actively engaging in SM ever since."
 
Sadie: How long have you been interested in the spiritual aspects of BDSM?
 
Chris: "Almost as long as I’ve been doing SM. I tend to extract a kind of otherworldly enjoyment out of things I really like, whether it’s SM, Art, literature or writing. I’m still not crazy about the term ‘SM spirituality’ but it’s a hard thing to hang a name on. I had what I now regard as an out of body experience during a scene in my first few years with Heidi one of my first SM relationships. It was amazing, my first taste of topspace, but it freaked me out so much at the time I just kind of shouldered it out of my memory. Only years later when I started having ‘topspace’ experiences more regularly did I remember and realize what it was."
 
Sadie: There is quite the collection of your columns on your website, mostly about BDSM and spirituality. Why the pull to write about this, when so many others focus on safety, technique, and other practical things?
 
Chris: "I got very interested in the mystical states that arise from SM play stuff I was witnessing first hand in my own SM life, and in Black Rose play events. There was virtually nothing in print when I started. I’m a voracious reader so I always look for writings about anything that interest me. Fakir’s incredible interview in ‘Modern Primitives’ was the only thing I could find, and his play seemed so far out there at the time I didn’t even know if it counted as SM. But it was the beginning of a long hunt for me of a way to deepen the sexual, sado-erotic trance that really good SM can invoke. My first year in the scene, was life-changing for me. As a lover of art and literature I started noticing during that year in the scene how much of the world’s great art was about the interconnections of beauty, power, spirit, and suffering. I think in a way, SM as it’s practiced today is a kind of quest for the experience of worship and awe. It’s a kind of Paleolithic religion. It’s ironic because it’s seen as such a secular activity by its critics and practitioners alike. But I’m not sure it really is."
 
Sadie: You didn’t really start writing until you were about to turn thirty. Why then?
 
Chris: "I discovered SM. 1990, was a pivotal year in my life. My first year in the scene, the year my grandmother died, and the year I started writing. I was having my first scenes, my first contact with SM practitioners. Amazing colorful, off the wall people. There was so much to learn. I didn’t know any of the vocabulary, or culture. There was no web. I didn’t even know the terms top and bottom. So I began just taking notes. I attended every Black Rose lecture for like a year straight, and took notes like a maniac. Soon I was keeping a crude journal of things I had seen, things I had done. As I started my first SM relationship I started writing about it. I’d never really written anything but rock songs before so the discipline of writing was new to me also. SM became the subject matter for my writings, my artworks, poetry, and an art form in its own right."
 
Sadie: How did you start writing how-to pieces on SM technique?
 
Chris: "Well it wasn’t until later when I came to be a Black Rose board member and it was part of our job to present classes, and assist in the educational curriculum. One of the things I noticed then was how poorly documented some of our practices were in print. Even important practices. In 1997 someone asked me if I knew a good article about aftercare. After some digging I discovered a sobering fact. No one had ever written one. So it was the punk thing again. No one's done it? Cool. I organized a Black Rose discussion panel on the subject, the first we ever did, and began building an outline from the notes I took during the discussion. Anna from Behind the Scenes in Philly, and I gave the presentation at the next Black Rose conference and once again learned a lot from the discussion. A year later I wrote the first detailed study about aftercare that I’ve seen, and I've been adding to it ever since. Other people have used it as a teaching text which is really really cool. It’s strange. Anyone could have written it, but the SM art form is still so young that, a lot of it hasn’t really been systematically mapped out yet. It makes it fun to write about.

I wrote a piece called "Leather Ethics: Civility and Incivility in the Scene" that described the nasty behavior that gossips, drama-queens, scene scolds, and uber-doms use to ply their trade. I didn't name names but I laid out a whole taxonomy of the tactics they use, so people could recognize them. Oh they hated me for that.

Sadie: I want to talk about your SM Spirituality writings. You gave a talk on SM spirituality at the first Black Rose festival BR10 in 1997, right? What got you started?
 
Chris: "I got very curious about the states that emerged from SM, both mine and my partner’s. I just stumbled into SM spirituality as a presentation topic. We had a no show so I filled in. My signature presentation at the time was a sado erotic art slide show which included a lot of religious art, so I kind of faked my way through it. But the discussion was fascinating and really sparked my curiosity. I took a ton of notes. Later I worked it into the presentation I gave at the first Black Rose. Later I got to know the author Joseph Bean and I learned a lot from him."
 
Sadie: You write that, "During a scene, I try to maintain two separate but parallel levels of awareness: at one level, I am a character in a fantasy: a torturer, rapist, captor, wild beast. At the same time, I am my own dungeon monitor, with a vulnerable and precious loved one to protect." How do these two sides live simultaneously in you? How do you keep tabs on both without losing the other?

Chris: "It takes a little practice but it amounts to alternating between indulgence and reigning yourself in. Going deep and then resurfacing to make sure things are okay. With a little practice you can do both together. Most experienced tops do this or something like it."

Sadie: Are there people who never go deep?
 
Chris: "I think it’s different for everybody, but yes I think we have people in the scene who play but get very little out of it. For tops? Because they don’t know those elevated states exist, or don’t believe they are accessible to them. Or think they are morally wrong. Some see SM as an exercise in total self-control and that pleasure compromises that. Bottoms generally are used to going deep, but even there a lot can’t always get to where they want to go.
 
"Some people when they start to go deep, rear back and spend a lot of effort trying not to go there ever again. The first time I went deep it was exhilarating as all hell. But it did frighten me."
 
Sadie: You write that, "Often I lash my own back with a single tail to share the burden of pain, sometimes turning my partner around to watch, holding eye contact while I do (some bottoms get really turned on by this part). It puts me in the picture, shows I can take what I dish out, and subtly commands my partner to be brave and strong." I've heard plenty of times about Dominants who do this to test the toy, but never that they are trying to resonate spiritually with their submissive through this act. Why do you think so many Dominants are so afraid of things like switching, or even recognizing how very close Dom and Subspace are to each other, just as love and hate are not opposite sides of a coin, but just one degree away from each other on the continuum.

Chris: "It’s a way of deepening the experience for myself, which also deepens the experience for my partner as well. It puts me inside the power circle myself, with my partner, instead of it outside it me trying to build it from the outside in. It also kickstarts the endorphin rush, and when you’re soaring on the same plane as the person your working on it really changes the experience. Widens it. Deepens it."
 
Sadie: You conduct workshops in BDSM and spirituality. This is a pretty esoteric and challenging thing to "demonstrate." How do you do this?
 
Chris: "I do lectures on a whole slew of topics as do many of my fellow Black Rose alums. I do talks on the SM spirituality thing but when it’s a workshop (which means the attendees are actually doing things, not just listening) I usually combine it with impact play. It’s important for people to feel it, and for that their bodies have to be in the action. You can get a spiritual buzz started just by focusing on your breathing. Getting rhythm into it as well through massage or rhythmic flogging helps also. As a top it means learning to think bigger than just getting your rocks off, although that’s important too. The concept of top as shaman is already becoming something of a cliché but there’s a lot to that equivalence. What does it mean? That the tops job isn’t limited to using a singletail without wrapping, but opening up hidden worlds to the person they are playing with, and to themselves. Which worlds? What techniques? It’s impossible to know ahead of time. Exploration and improvisation play a big part of playing deep at least for me."

Sadie: You’ve said that SM is like music to you. Music was your first love, wasn’t it? Almost a religion?
 
Chris: "Music was definitely my first love, the only thing that mattered, which is pretty typical for a kid. When it comes to my interest in finding the spiritual core of a secular activity, music is where I started. It was my parent’s albums. Tommy, Quadrophenia, Jesus Christ Superstar... Good music. But I hadn’t figured out yet that I could be buying music of my own."
 
Sadie: Your parents weren’t religious at all were they?
 
Chris: "No. They’re very much intellectual atheists so I didn’t have any spiritual guidance to speak of. I had some reasonably deep religious yearnings but I wasn’t educated in any faith. I wish I had been now. I could have done it on my own suppose but I didn’t. The Christians I did know weren’t much help. My best friend’s family was Fundamentalist fanatics by any measure you could think of. Always prosthelitizing, always handing out those little religious tracts, always prophesizing the end of the world and going on about hell’s damnation. I remember on of those tracts predicted Armageddon in 1974. Even at six I could see there was something gravely wrong with that. I even attended church with them a couple times. But nothing happened other than I got very turned off to the whole idea of religion. For decades."
 
Sadie: I get the sense that music filled a bit of that void?
 
Chris: "Music proved to me that you don’t to go to church to meet the God experience. It was the purest spiritual experience I ever felt until I started doing SM. Goosebumps, shivers, floods of imagery, that sense of endless possibility, the sense of other worlds ripping open and this vast inner realm being revealed. I’d never felt anything like it. But it fit all the descriptions my neighbors up the street used to describe God’s grace, and that’s not even all that atypical. I think that’s why rock and pop are the most popular form of music in the world’s history. It’s something of a pantheistic religious order. The music is loud and hypnotic, its gets you high as a kite; it creates slavish devotional cults to the performers. You remember the graffiti from the sixties? Clapton….is….?"
 
Sadie: God?
 
Chris: "Yes. The rock star as the godhead. The concert hall is the temple, and the stage is the alter. What happens at really great concerts? People go insane. They scream, dance, jump around, foam at the mouth, everything but levitate and speak in tongues. It’s the Pentecostal snake handling thing, exactly the same thing. But a secular context. A deeply physical experience and a communal one that creates otherworldly states. John Lennon once got in shitloads of trouble for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus but he was right. The fact that rock doesn’t call itself a religion is what allows it to thrive as one. If anyone ever seriously claimed that Elvis or Britney Spears was God incarnate they would be laughed at. But that’s virtually how the most rabid fans behave. People build devotional shrines to pop stars in their homes; pay absurd amounts of money to just lay eyes on them from fifty yards away, collect reliquaries talismans and memorabilia."
 
Sadie: So what does that have to do with SM?
 
Chris: "You have this power hierarchy thing. They’re both about exploration of deep emotional experience. They’re both about the shattering of societal taboo. There’s a lot of similarity between going to a rock club as a teenager and entering an SM dungeon as an adult. They’re both dark subterranean underworlds where the rules are different. People who wear ceremonial black. Take on ritualized names. Do all this naughty stuff or watch. Get all uninhibited and get high. Both are about getting high. But in SM you aren’t worshipping at an alter with your God invisible, absent, off somewhere else. You’re not worshiping Mick Jagger from the two hundredth row. In SM the range is point blank. The top/shaman/ object of your devotion is right in front of you. You are part of the ritual, not just observing it from far away."
 
Sadie: It sounds a bit like transgressive sex is almost a religion with you now. And yet when I look at the music you listened to as a kid….Progressive rock, and singer songwriter stuff like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Who, Neil Young, Joni Mitchel - it doesn’t strike me as being the kind of music that’s particularly sexual in nature. What about something like funk, which some say is most sexually revolutionary music ever made. Having grown up in its golden age, why didn’t you groove on that?
 
Chris: "That one’s easy. I wasn’t getting laid. I used to think everyone and their dog was having sex but me. Oh and it hurt. It hurts just to remember it. Funk, soul and later disco just rubbed salt in the wound. ‘Boogie oogie oogie?’ ‘Ring my bell’ and all that shit? Nobody wanted me to ring their bell. It was easier to listen to this stuff about imaginary hobbit worlds, or music about loneliness, resentment and rage. I remember songs like ‘Whenever I call you friend’ would just ruin my day. It’s just a bland, stupid, slightly sleazy pop duet with Kenny Loggins and Stevie Nicks, but it made me miserable every time I heard it. I imagined that all over Santa Barbara Kenny Loggins-looking party boys were smoking real fine dope and fucking their Stevie Nicks look alike girlfriends in their California hot tubs. I hated it. Absolutely hated it."
 
Sadie: Your family moved back to Norway for a few years about then and it sounds like that was a turning point for you when pop became your liturgical music?
 
Chris: "Yes. I was glad to get away and it was eye opening. It was the first time I saw kids with their own record collections. For some reason none of my friends in California did just yet. It just blew me away. In Europe I discovered bands I’d never heard of in California: Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Status Quo, Suzi Quatro, all these cool British heavy rock bands that American junior high kids weren’t listening to yet. At least the ones I knew. You could say that rock stars become a sort of pantheon of saints. Progressive rock had really reached its peak a few years earlier, but the albums were there and they were amazingly popular in Europe, this amazing music so much more mysterious and powerful than the teeny bopper AM shit which was all I had been exposed to in America.
 
"Plus there was this whole glitter rock thing. Bowie, Lou Reed, Slade, The sweet. T Rex. They were so amazing looking. Like Angels. Men wearing makeup glitter and high heels and still oddly tough looking. They looked as amazing as progressive rock sounded. Especially Bowie. I loved how even young people were freaked out by how he looked. He was edgy and dangerous in a way that even bands that tried to look dangerous weren’t." It was my first exposure to fetish fashion."
 
Sadie: So you came back to the states a fire-breathing rock and roll fiend. What was it like in the States when you returned?
 
Chris: "Punk. The great British punk explosion of 76. Totally changed my life. The music was so forceful, so fearless, and so energetic and had so much swagger. It was out there in terms of persona. Today we are used to pink hair buzz cuts and safety pins through the cheek, but that was new and shocking in late 70's southern California. It was so immediate and the music is amazing. I still play it all the time. Wire, Pere Ubu, Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, the Jam, Gang of Four, the Raincoats. Patti Smith and Blondie were already past it. There were so many great bands a lot of them one hit wonders but, god did those hits hit hard. Ever heard ‘Beat her with a Rake’ by the Weasles? Suddenly there was this flood of extraordinary totally out there music. Completely out there music from groups that were really young.

"The age thing was key. In 1977, we weren’t used to the idea of rock stars with gray hair or wrinkles or bald heads like we are now. The Stones were all in their late thirties and man did that seem old. Charlie Watts looked like your best friend’s grand dad. It was a real shock to see twenty year olds on stage again and people singing in working class English accents! Elton John had never sung in his natural accent. Neither did the Who! Or Bad Company or Zep, or Mick Jagger! Mick had always sung like an old black man from Memphis. So to see bands that were young, that energetic, that had that fuck you courage not to sing with a fake American accent… Thrilling! That was another message of punk that I relearned when I joined the SM scene: ‘Be who you are.’"
 
Sadie: So you could say that the punk aesthetic became your working method?
 
Chris: "Yes The-do- it-yourself approach. Still is. Do it simple and do it now. Even as an architect of SM scenes, punk remains my greatest influence. Keep it primal and real. Don’t get too fancy. Make a vivid and passionate performance. Don’t fake anything.

"For a dreamy lazy guy like me it was quite a wakeup call. Like a bugle to the eardrum. Punk was enormously empowering. It led to my courage to draw and paint with very little self-consciousness or fear. Even though compared to my friends Tim and Erling I sucked, I was still able to produce some pretty good paintings and feel good about them. I was able to exhibit courage and the ability to make things happen. That’s an assessment about productivity. I never noticed that before. Punk rock is about productivity, getting things done whether you have the skills or not. I think of punk in how I approach a lot of things. Even cleaning."
 
Sadie: What does cleaning my house have to do with writing and rehearsing songs for a punk rock band?

Chris: "It says: The power is in your hands. You’re capable, you can do things, and you can change the world in your own small way. Even if you don’t think you can organize your life, you can."
 
Sadie: As an ex punk, you hardly seem like a hall monitor law and order type, but you led the team that developed the Black Rose Dungeon Monitors Guide. How did you come to do that?
 
Chris: "I thought we needed one so I took a swing at it. It’s a long twisty tale. It started with an effort at the second Leather Leadership Conference (LLC) and our effort to put together an educational initiative. This was something I did with Jack M, also of Black Rose, and Gil Kessler the education chief of Gay Male SM Activists (GMSMA). Gil had taught a forty-hour school for tops for ten years. Gil thinks I was the first het to go through it. The goal of the initiative was to set an educational standard for the scene in general. We designed a full curriculum, a forty hour training plan, based on what Gil was doing at GMSMA. One of the elements of that training curriculum was training for Dungeon monitors, something GMSMA did not do at the time.

"We had just thrown the first Black Rose festival, which had a twenty thousand foot dungeon with twelve hundred players. The DMs had virtually no training before being thrown in there, and to say that monitoring a hundred plus play stations was a challenge would be putting it mildly. We knew we needed something more rigorous, both to make for a better DM and for liability issues. We didn’t have anything. Not an outline, nothing. Just the idea that it would be a good idea to do. I was having lunch with Michelle Buchanan and the late great Leonard Dworkin on the second day of the LLC conference and asked if he (Leonard) had ever seen any dungeon monitor training materials. ‘Oh sure’ he said and went into his enormous archive and came out with what might be the first DM guide ever written, from ORGASM, a group from Oregon that folded in the eighties. Later that day, at LLC, APEX presented their brand new dungeon monitor guide they had developed for their parties in Phoenix. I couldn’t believe how detailed it was. I had imagined an outline, a single sided eight and a half inch sheet maybe. We hadn’t yet done much beyond outline form at Black Rose yet, but here was a whole little Dungeon monitor book.
 
"The first Leather Retreat was coming up so I spent a few nights reading both of the guides with the aim of building one of our own. The ORGASM guide was good on generalities but weak on specifics. The APEX guide was extremely detailed but was tailored to one specific playspace. I keyed in the outlines to both guides and juggling them together into a single flow. After the outline was in place I added some material that seemed important but wasn’t in either of the guides I was working from. Then we added a section on unsafe play, ‘danger signs’ for DMs to watch for. There was one other guy, no longer active in the scene who helped, and a dominant from New York who had put some stuff together on safety and that was the first edition. It’s grown over the years in detail, but the basic structure hasn’t changed all that much. I xeroxed them at work and hand stapled about fifty that Jack brought to Leather Retreat. After the weekend Jack and I incorporated lessons learned and with a number of other experienced people we got it ready for Black Rose 98. Then Jack used it to train DM’s for Delta Brotherhood, and we added improvements from that trial.

"We have used it for all the Black Rose festivals since, and it’s formed the core of Leather Retreat training. I’ve taught the course myself about ten times. A lot of good people have contributed to it, a nurse, a doctor, a paramedic. Other groups have used it as the basis for their own DM training. It’s been a reasonably successful export."
 
Sadie: Were there any areas that were too sensitive or political to include?
 
Chris: "No not really. As an educational document a DM guide is comparatively easy to write, for a number of reasons. A DM doing his job right doesn’t do much but stand around and watch. By comparison, it’s a much greater challenge to teach someone how to flog or cane someone, or tie someone up. As far as politics go it’s a simple task as well. Implement club or event policy in words, and train from that. What gets interesting is when the club policy hasn’t been thought out to the level you need it to be if you’re going to teach it to others. So you write draft policy, send it to the board for review, they respond with a ruling and that feedback gets worked in. Typical process for professional technical writing."

Sadie: Even with DM training authorship I think that you may be perceived by some as something of a renegade?
 
Chris: "That amuses me to no end too. No I’m not universally loved by the scene cops and prudes of our community. Why? Who knows? Sometimes I play heavy, and that freaks some people out. I like trying new things, experimenting with new approaches and some of our tribe regard any innovation with alarm. Recently my friend Eric M gave me a big patch of chain mail and I just instinctively rolled it up and put it to use as a flogger. It works great especially through jeans. I’ve always done stuff like that. I’ve written articles pretty critical of gossips, scene cops, and this holier than thou attitude that afflicts the community sometimes. I wrote a piece called Leather Ethics that described the nasty behavior that gossips, drama-queens, scene scolds, and uber-doms use to play their trade. Oh they hated me for that!

"One year three or four of them got together and sent letters to the Black Rose board demanding that they do something about me, and my heavy play habits. Like ban me from the club, as if that would change my behavior. The funny part was that they were complaining about a scene in which I was bottoming. The ringleader was a woman who hadn’t even watched it. Just heard how horrible it was from a couple of her henchmen."
 
Sadie: This was the scene that the well-known fetish photographer Barbara Nitke photographed?
 
Chris: "That’s the one. I’ll admit it was a very heavy scene. It took two weeks for my back to heal. But there was not blood all over the floor. I was not carried out on a stretcher. I sustained no permanent injury. It took place at a time the dungeon was closed the only way to be there was by invitation or if you were dungeon crew. My friend Yoni was attending as a nurse (in this cute white plastic nurse’s uniform!). My friend Bernadette was there as a spirit guide and informal DM. The audience was seated forty feet away to the side. I mean it was a stupid thing for anyone to whine about. I had drafted the DM guide for Black Rose. Joseph had drafted the DM guide for Chicago Hellfire. It’s not like we didn’t know what we were doing. But people who want to piss and moan will never be satisfied. By the way, two weeks later my back was perfectly healed."
 
Sadie: A lot of people are familiar with your writings and your being a "scene personality," but not as many know you are an artist as well. You have some pretty strong, as well as innovative ideas about fetish art. Care to share some of them?

Chris: "Ever since I started my own collection of other artists work, and I saw how much original art adds to my own daily life, I’ve wanted to promote collecting and connoisseurship among everyday folk. Having art up that you love is like living in a cathedral with custom stain glass windows. I love the idea of waitresses and garage mechanics owning collections of original art just like the moneyed classes. There are two major obstacles to selling art in America. Number one: Americans are not typically raised or educated to have an appreciation for original art. If they do have a love and familiarity with art, it is typically Blue Chip artists like Van Gogh or Picasso or the Impressionists, seldom any curiosity for contemporary, unknown painters. Second Problem: Even if you do have an interest in art its prohibitively expensive. I mean Van Goghs have sold for seventy million! In a perfect world watercolors and sketches by major artists Cézanne, Picasso... would go cheaply, maybe one hundred, two hundred a pop but that’s not the world were living in.

"This problem is compounded in the fetish art world where the base of potential buyers is small. This puts our greatest artists (such as Joseph Bean, Barbara Nitke, Fakir, and Chuck Arnett) in a position where they are recognized by the leather tribe as being our greatest collective voices, but there aren’t enough people buying art to support them. I can’t think of one fetish artist who makes their living on fetish art. I suppose People like Eric Kroll qualify, but I would bet it’s magazine layouts that pay his mortgage and not print sales.

"It’s not like any fetish folk will buy just any fetish art. Gay men may not find anything interesting in Eric Kroll’s tied up female models. I dare say your garden variety het male dom is not going to be buying a lot of pictures of guys getting enemas, even if they are exquisite. Even if he does buy fetish art. See what I mean? Leatherfolk are terribly fragmented as a market sector.

"Lastly, and most importantly, when people attend SM vender events where fetish art is being sold, unless the artwork is priced at a give-away, Fetish folk prefer toys or clothing. Stuff they can use. Very few people in the scene are prepared to buy a framed and matted fetish artwork, for the price of two floggers. There are exceptions, but that’s the rule."

Sadie: Let me read you something you’ve written: "As long as I’ve been around we’ve had a small but vocal minority of leatherfolk who seem fixed on judging, condemning and often fabricating lies about the behavior of others." Why do you think this is?
 
Chris: "Its human nature. Look, kink is an attribute that seems to select at random. Across socioeconomic levels, across race, across personality types. As a variable, it’s fairly independent of other factors. Some kinky people are going to be gossipy, judgmental prudes. Others are going to be great people. It’s a nice fantasy to think every single leatherfolk is a nice guy or gal but that’s not how life is. I try not to let it bug me but it is bizarre isn't it? How people venture out here to the sexual fringe, start hanging around leather bars and SM clubs, engaging in this outlaw lifestyle and then start trying to impose and enforce Sunday school values. That’s not what most of us came to this lifestyle for. I mean if you want total safety and total normalcy, you can stay home, right?"

"Another reason I wanted to work the DM training thing was I wanted to really study what is safe and what isn’t with a fresh lens. I felt there were big gaps in the SM motherhood I was taught when I was starting out. Some things that were called irredeemably unsafe really weren’t. Other things that were wildly hazardous were just ignored. To pick just one example I know at least five people who have bankrupted themselves on toys, fetish clothes, and flying all over to SM conferences. There has been very little in writing to date warning about the spending spirals life that the SM world often encourages."
 
Sadie: What’s next for you? What are you working on today?
 
Chris: "Well I am just completing a piece called (take a deep breath!) Black Leather Jackets: a brief History of SM according to Biker Nick as told to Mandrake. It’s a slightly fictionalized history of the leather movement from the thirties to the present, narrated by this oldguard Master who’s at an SM conference having a miserable time and decides to write to a student of his about the old days. I’ve actually started giving theatrical readings of the story and it’s gone over pretty well. I might even try to stage it as a play. Anyway I’m self publishing it as a book with some of my illustrations and hope to have it ready by the spring. I’m building my own home dungeon, which will be very cool. I’m pulling together materials for a talk at Leather Spirit Weekend on SM/Spirituality after 9-11."
 
Sadie: Can you tell us anything about that?
 
Chris: "Well it takes me a long time to pull one of these together, so right now I’m just reading a lot. Mostly ancient literature, particularly literature emphasizing violence, like the Iliad and the Orestia. September 11 happened because religious fanatics decided that doing violence to people was fine because the victims were different, lesser than they were, making it moral. There are tiny virulent strains of religious life in all faiths that do that. Emphasize exclusion, authorize violence, devalue other divergent points of view, and ways of life. I don’t think it’s possible to abolish hatred, I think learning to manage our actions is where the hope lies. People hate. They just do, for all kinds of reasons. There are people and things that I can’t stand.

"I used to believe I would know I was attaining spiritual grace when I didn’t get angry anymore. I don’t look at it that way now. The real breakthrough as I see it is recognizing that anger, fear, and anguish are alright as long as you can still live a good life, manage your actions, and accept that people you dislike ought to have a right to live a good life too. Judith Martin aka "Miss Manners" once said that good manners are ultimately more important than "being moral". The al-queda bombers were trying to implement Gods will right? That’s a moral position when viewed through that lens. Had they been operating from the traditional standards of the Middle Eastern hospitality it would have been unthinkable to murder civilians working at there desks, whether they forfeited their own lives or not. The shields of many of the Christian crusade bore the phrase ‘God wills it’ as if as explaining for why these god-fearing followers of "the Prince of Peace" were murdering, raping, looting, and maiming innocent strangers. We all know of the decent church-going German men and women who had pets, loved their kids, lived law abiding lives and wound up as sadistic concentration camp guards.
 
"For people of kink, I think SM really does offer some of the answers. The SM world offers opportunities many religious faiths don’t. Because pleasure is celebrated in SM culture. Because physical joy, no matter how off beat, does seems to come from a higher place. Because power is appreciated, not in its abuse but in how it helps create shared joy. Submission, lauded in all faiths, is generally treasured in the scene, and not merely exploited for the financial benefit of some pastor, priest or mullah, or for the consolidation of power of those high in religious hierarchies."
 
Sadie You've written about how tough it is for you to define the SM spiritual experience. Yet, you clearly keep trying through your columns. What keeps you writing?
 
Chris: "I really love doing it. I don’t think I could if unless I did enjoy it. It just takes too long. When you work out the pages per hour ratio, I can’t imagine anyone would write unless they were utterly compelled to."
 
Sadie: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

Chris: "The spiritual energy of SM is hard to articulate in words, and even today with more in print on the subject than ever, I still haven't found anything that nails it dead on. Joseph Bean whom I regard as a world authority, if not THE world authority on SM spirituality has written comparatively little on the subject (hint hint Joseph!). Perhaps because of this difficulty I've found that visual imagery is sometimes the most immediate way of conveying it (other than engaging in topspace or bottomspace yourself, or having a leisurely discussion with someone who has).

"Fakir's photography gets there, and photographer Barbara Nitke gets closer to capturing the spiritual essence of the highest levels of SM play than anything else I’ve seen since Fakir. She describes her work as seeking to capture and convey the loving quality in SM but her photography is much more profound than just that. She uses long exposures and weird film stocks which leave blurred ghost images, and this inner luminescence to her models (who are real SM practitioners at play) that actually seem to depict energy flows and the holy powers SM can invoke. She can nail the experience of SM, how it feels, not just how it looks, better than almost any other artist or writer I’ve seen. She conveys a sense of the sacred that typifies the best religious art. Her site is www.barbaranitke.com  and I recommend anyone curious about SM spirituality to go there and just revel in the images. She is also at the shockfront of obscenity laws concerning sexual imagery and the web, but that is a story for her to tell."

Sadie: Thank you very much!

See more art by Chris M.

Read Chris M's articles on BDSM & Spirituality 

Introduction to Going Deep: Topspace, Bottomspace, and Sado-Erotic Ecstasy  

The Spiritual Dimension of SM

Topspace, Bottomspace, and Sado-Erotic Ecstasy   

Bodyplay and the Spirit  

The Black Leather Space Suit: Pleasure and the Oft Forgotten Top

On Holiness & Higher Powers

Ritual  

Sensuous Sadie is the author of It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene. Read an excerpt and more at Sadie's Kinky Goodies http://www.sensuoussadie.com/sadieskinkygoodies.htm. She is the founder and leader (1999 - 2001) of Rose & Thorn, Vermont's first BDSM group. Comments, compliments and complaints, as well as requests for reprinting can be addressed to her at SensuousSadie@aol.com or visit her website at http://www.sensuoussadie.com/. Sadie believes the universe is abundant, and that sharing information freely is part of this abundance, so she allows reprints of her writing in most venues.
 

Copyright 2003 Sadie Sez Publications