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laura@lantoniou.com
Read Sadie's Review of Laura's Book The Reunion
Laura Antoniou's work has become well-known in the erotically alternative community for her "Marketplace" series (The Marketplace, The Slave, The Trainer, The Academy, and The Reunion), described by Libido magazine as "an elite and secretive world organization, dedicated to the auctioning and overseeing of the world's finest lifestyle slaves... a world so vivid in sequel after sequel, it takes on a reality of its own, one that's visually hard to let go of once the reader has put down the book." The fifth book in this series, The Reunion, is due out from Mystic Rose books in February 2003. Antoniou has also had great success as an editor, creating the groundbreaking Leatherwomen anthologies; as well as By Her Subdued, a collection of stories about dominant women; and No Other Tribute, which features submissive women. Her non-fiction anthologies include Some Women, and an homage to author John Preston entitled Looking for Mr. Preston. Antoniou's novels and anthologies have been published in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Korea, to international acclaim. Antoniou has been a featured speaker and presenter at the University of Washington (where her essay "Unsafe at Any Speed" was first presented), as well as Columbia University, the New School, and New York University, as well as leather, s/m, lesbian, and writers' conferences throughout the United States.
Sadie: Your Marketplace series of erotica is enormously popular. Aside from your excellent writing skills, what do you think it is about this particular storyline that really resonates with your readers? Laura: "SMers like stories about people being sold into slavery. It's pretty much the standard mythic tale of the genre, with or without informed consent. The only things I do differently is strive for a more inclusive array of characters, spanning all genders, sexual identities, and even things like body shape and age. I just wanted a fantasy world that looked a little like my real world. With more money, though." Sadie: Consent magazine described your books as having "occupied a unique place in BDSM fiction. Instead of simply focusing on a series of sexual encounters, the novels examine the complexities of a hidden slave-holding society and the motives and the inner quandaries of slave-holders, trainers and slaves, while still delivering an enticing, passionate and hot story." What makes your stories more than just another series of kinky sex scenes? What is the creative process like for you? Laura: "The creative process was best described by another writer as staring at the computer screen until blood starts coming out of your forehead and strikes the keys. It is certainly nothing like effortlessly waking to spend a few gentle hours on my sun-drenched porch with my cat and endless cups of coffee. For one, I have a day job, so my writing tends to get crammed in on weekends and vacations. For another thing, I don't have a porch. "I tried writing a book which was just a bunch of short stories, each one an excuse for a sex/SM scene. That perfectly describes The Catalyst, my first complete project in my professional writing life. I think it's...to be honest...lightweight stuff. But it's also proven to be one of my most popular books; what a surprise, right? There's a sex scene every 20 pages or so. "But I don't want to write like that. I like stories where, when the characters have sex, it's important to the plot. I like to read about sexy people who don't have to be having sex in order to be sexy. I also like to toss the things that people think of as the ‘sex scenes’ into the text like the casual, silly moments they are, when in fact the real power dynamics are elsewhere. Let's face it - there's plenty of porn for people who need hardcore fucking scenes and six pages of descriptions of costumes and fetishes. I want to write about the times between the big, showy scenes. And hopefully, there will always be readers who want that, as well." Sadie: It's common for readers to think that a "marketplace" or slave academy in real life are actually like they are in fiction. What real life experience do you draw on to write your books? Laura: "I write fiction. When I am writing non-fiction, I generally write essays, never stories. I don't want people to ever imagine that I believe there is really any sort of SM-based organization where people actually get trained, bought, whatever. I made it up. Of course, I am inspired by earlier writers, who also made up their stuff, like Reage and Preston. But it's all make believe. "What's real is that I am a sadomasochist. What's real is that I have bottomed, I've served, I've topped, and I've even been known to be dominant from time to time. I'm a sexual activist, and an amateur social anthropologist in the SM scene, and a part-time curmudgeon. All of these things flavor the things I write about, for better and worse." Sadie: There is this beautiful thing you said in a speech a few years ago. You said: "I was real the time that I passed a blade along smooth, unmarked flesh, parting the skin and drawing up the blood and fighting the urge to bend and lick it off, to suck their life right out of them, until I could hear that heart beat again, feel the pulsing in my body, and be with them utterly." Your writing is remarkable in how it draws in the reader, even when you are writing about something that might even freak them out a little bit. Do you consider yourself an edge player? Laura: "If there is such a thing, then yes. If I was an athlete, I don't know whether I would be into extreme sports; but as a sadomasochist, there are parts of me which are not nearly satisfied - even interested - in going to workshops and reading books and quoting mantras and playing like it's a performance and not the only thing that makes my body and mind respond in a sexual way. "I often tell people that as a sadist, it doesn't even raise my interest until the moment I know the bottom really doesn't like it. In a dominant role, I am uninterested in willing and eager service based on what the bottom likes to do - I get off when I know they're being obedient even though they loathe what they're doing. As a bottom, I never wanted a scene to end with my orgasm, or a feeling of well being - I really stretched for the places where I would feel inches away from being destroyed. To me, edge playing isn't about what you do - it's about how you do it." Sadie: You describe yourself in this way: "I'm a writer. I'm an editor. I am a dyke. I'm an exhibitionist. I am girth-endowed. I'm visually challenged. I am queer and a sadomasochist and an activist." Labels have their limits, however. What can you tell me about yourself that would surprise our readers? Laura: "Hm. I really like Kraft macaroni and cheese, in the white cheddar version. And Captain Crunch, and Krispy Kreme donuts. (Hence the girth endowed.) I have a collection of plastic horses. I like Hawaiian shirts. I can listen to Patsy Cline for hours. I like gadgets, but never use them to their full capacity. (My cell phone has an alarm clock?) I often feel uninformed, or dumb, when trying to understand the news. I'm a web log junkie trying to break the habit and cut back on the number I read regularly. I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. I have a collection of comic books. Anything else you might find surprising?" Sadie: How is fame treating you? Do you find that women want to do you as a celebrity fuck?" Do you like that or does it bother you? Laura: "Nah, I'm not that famous. If anyone has really tried to star fuck me, I've been pretty dim about it. But then, as my wife can attest, I tend to be pretty dumb at the whole cruising game, anyway. Often, people have to come to me later and smack me and say, ‘Laura, didn't you notice that whatshername was all over you?? What, are your glasses fogged up or something?’ And of course, all I'll remember was that some nice girl asked me for a light. I was once told I have a high IQ, but go figure. I can't read a come-on with bright lights and sirens going off. It's amazing that I ever dated at all." Sadie: What is your religious background? In what ways did it affect your approach to BDSM? Laura: "I was raised Greek Orthodox, and gave it up sometime in my early teens, as I reached that teen angst period where I wondered whether I believed in anything, let alone God and Jesus and all of that. The sadomasochist in me predates even my knowledge of being a Christian, though - I was playing sick little games and having sick little fantasies way before I understood the whole trinity, Jesus-rose-from-the-dead thing. Luckily, I escaped any sort of Christian conflict about sexuality - I never thought it was evil or that I would be evil for thinking about it and having it. How, I'm not so sure. Maybe it's because I really was born to be a pervert and a hedonist." Sadie: You write an article on an experimental Seder for the Jewish Leather Community. Why do you feel that a different kind of Seder be used for people into BDSM? What are the key differences? Laura: "There are thousands of seders - Jews love to reinvent themselves, you know. I got the idea many years ago, before I converted to Judaism, when I was friends with another convert who had made a joke about what a great seder could come out of the leather community. I didn't do any more than talk about it though, until my wife Karen finally sat down one year with all of our haggadot - a haggadah is the book which guides the seder, and the ‘ot’ makes it plural - and started looking at the language, sings and prayers. She gathered pages of material for me, and once I got off my butt and started to contribute, it started to take a real shape. "Our seder - which is called Avadim Chaynu, which means ‘Once, we were slaves,’ is ritually correct. It has all the elements any other seder will have, from the four questions to the glasses of wine. But what it also has are times when we can sit back and examine what it really meant to be a ‘slave.’ What it means now. What it means to be ‘free.’ How we can live our lives Jewishly and still be kinky as hell. How we can be perverts and still honor our Judaism. How we can welcome the stranger to our tables even when we feel strange ourselves. "I think the first one was a success. We sat at the table, Jews and non-Jews, coupled and single and in polyamorous relationships, tops and bottoms and all colors and shades between and beyond, and when it was all over, people still wanted to linger and talk and share. We'll be doing another one this year, inviting more and different people, in the hopes that we can catch the feeling again." Sadie: You will be doing a presentation at the Leather Spirit Weekend in June of 2003 on living Jewishly in a D/s relationship, and the leather Passover haggadah. How much of your BDSM experience has a spiritual basis? Laura: "My SM is not spiritually based, is much...baser. My SM is about emotional and physical responses, and an urge that defies easy descriptions. My spiritual life, the life which is concerned with God, is a philosophical and emotional set of needs and responses, without a physical component. Also, I'm a convert. I was a sadomasochist long before I was a Jew, at least by Jewish law. (There's a theory of a sort of retroactive Judaism for converts, which is beyond the scope of this interview, I think)." Sadie: How did your experiences with the spiritual realm change your BDSM practice? Did they change your life as well? Laura: "At a time in my life when I thought that the whole leather community was a crock and so full of shit that we would need extra barges to tow it all away, I left both the leadership positions I once had in a couple of organizations and I left off participating in meetings and going to conferences, and I wrote books and threw myself into work. During that time, I found myself drawn to Judaism as I began to feel that I had this gaping hole inside of me which was rapidly filling with an impotent rage. From the minute I finished sitting through my first Friday night service, I could feel just a corner in that pit starting to fill with something else. "Now, years, eons, later, I can say that my conversion helped me to handle burnout and frustration and anger better than a lifetime supply of Zoloft. I was able to focus on something else, and my years of conversations with wiser and better people than myself made me able to examine things like my rage (and my feelings of impotence) and work past them, through them, until I got to a point where I could attend a leather convention and feel inspired again. "So, although my spirituality didn't change my practice per se, it made me better able to deal with the changes that came in my relationships to the SM community and to my personal practices." Sadie: You left what you call the so-called community in 1993, choosing to spend all your time writing. As an ex leader myself I can understand getting sick of the politics and shenanigans, and in fact I made that very same decision. Nevertheless, I've been told that as an independent writer, I may well now have a greater effect on my community than I did when I was officially in a leadership role. What are your thoughts about this? Laura: "Who knows? Certainly, as a writer I have reached more people than I could ever meet at leather conferences. But I have no way to measure how I might have changed them, or their minds, or their thoughts, for better or worse. I only hope that I can entertain, and occasionally cause a moment or two of reflection. But a leader? I'm not a leader. I'm just driving along the train tracks, watching the train chugging ahead of me." Sadie: A number of readers I know do not integrate spirituality into their sexuality, and in fact think the whole thing is a bit silly. They just wanna have fun! Do you believe that the spiritual element is present whether or not they want to tap into it, or is it always present? Laura: "I think fun is fun, and spiritual is spiritual. There is nothing wrong with the fun, fun, fun way of doing SM, and everything right with it. I wish MORE people would cop to the fact that they do it for fun, instead of trying to imbue it with religious, or philosophical, or even historical significance. Who needs that shit when there are so many ways we can relate together as just plain people who can explore fantasies and have fun? "I often ask people, ‘Why do this if it isn't fun?’ Go to church or temple or shul or to your circle or coven or mystic wagon in the sky for spiritual fulfillment. Go read up on your family name if you care about ancient traditions and meaning. Take up karate or pottery or silk worm raising if you want to learn a discipline with a mentor. "If someone finds spiritual fulfillment in their SM, that's fine, too. But I never assume that this is a goal, or even a good thing, let alone something people should strive for. It's personal!" Sadie: What are the parameters that you think need to be present for Dominant or Submissive space to move into a more spiritual realm? Laura: "Haven't the foggiest idea. I believe that you're into feeling spiritual, or not. Personally, I think that if two people share the same level of spirituality, then they can work on such a goal together. But what if the top is Catholic and the bottom a Buddhist? When the bottom finds peace and meaning in meditation, the top finds it in Mass; who gets to lead? What if the top thinks this spiritual stuff is crap, and the bottom sings in a gospel choir and occasionally leaps up in church giving witness? How can those two evolve spiritually together? "Spirituality is too general a term to apply to a single concept. I choose to define it as a philosophy concerning the nature of God, and one's feeling of connectivity to how they see or feel God. If people feel the desire to embrace a more spiritual life, they should parse their own souls and turn to the authorities they believe in/trust, and examine the traditions which have meaning for them." Sadie: You've mentioned that you had some issues with your body. Can you tell me a little bit about this, and how you worked through them? Did you find that BDSM was a catalyst to a more healthy self image or body image? Laura: "I haven't worked through my body image, LOL. Working through it might mean that I've become comfortable with my body, and I'm not. I'm just not motivated enough to change it that much. There's a difference. I don't mean to suggest that I don't care; it's just that I've worked such things lower down on my list of things to care about. "My SM relationships taught me a lot about my body and its ability to take pain. But one relationship in particular, when I was a boy to whipmaker Mitch Kessler, taught me to stand with my shoulders back even if it did stick my belly out. Before that time, I was more afraid of how people would see me; after that time, I was more concerned with how people would know me. That was an important thing to learn." Sadie: I understand that you lean toward polyamory in your relationships. How did you develop healthy boundaries so as to succeed in a relationship style that can be very challenging by definition? Laura: "Well, I am married now, and although we are open to other relationships in theory, we're still (almost 5 years) in the state of fulfilling a great deal of each others needs. Before this particular relationship, though, I maintained my ability to create boundaries by not living with my lovers, and choosing people who were also either in other relationships as well, or people to whom I could institute relationship rules. (For example, I would not enter into a monogamous relationship with someone supposedly in service to me, unless it was strictly my decision, and not their relationship demand. That's just the way I work.) "Also, I tend not to be a jealous person, and I am someone very concerned with appropriate behavior. I've had jealous people in my life, and every time, it's been an unpleasant experience. I am definitely not one of those people who thinks that jealousy in my lover or partner is flattering Instead, I find it threatening to my feeling of security! So, let's just say that I heighten my ability to maintain different relationships by carefully choosing who gets to be in any relationship with me." Sadie: You titled a speech that you gave: "Unsafe At Any Speed, or Safe, Sane, and Consensual, My Fanny." Saying that, "No one will publish this, which is why I'm reading it out loud." I’m sure you are aware of how important the SSC slogan is to increasing acceptance of the BDSM community in the larger vanilla society. And yet you are one of a few writers who allow that perhaps everything is not always adhering to that pleasant slogan. Have you gotten a lot of flak over this? Laura: "Some, but much more flak for saying that I defend my right to play when I have been drinking or enjoying a less than legal substance. Mostly, I hear from people who quietly cheer my SSC rant, which is nice sometimes, and scary sometimes, (laughing). I don't like SSC because it reduces and limits things which I think common sense and romance and passion and responsibility and trust need to guide. You can't replace those things with a slogan of ill-defined concepts. My friends at the NCSF argue, with good effect, that it gives us something to tell the media, so that we can explain to them that because one whack-job lured women to their death over the internet by using SM community language, it doesn't mean that the 3000 people going to Black Rose are all stockpiling 55 gallon drums to get rid of their dates on Monday. It's annoying to have to think that people can be that stupid, but I suppose they are, and therefore, I concede that the NCSF and groups of mostly newbies who are really scared to be actually trying to do this stuff rather than type about it, well, those people can have the slogan. Me, I'm just a sick fuck." Sadie: I've read that lesbians do BDSM in a very different way than heterosexuals, more sexual and more intense. It does seem to be in alignment with the way you describe your own predilections. Would you agree with this? Laura: "Well, I'm sexual and intense, and on behalf of the lesbian nation, I declare that we all are. AND we all have multiple orgasms, too." Sadie: You have an interest in protocol in the BDSM relationship. This word has come to have a lot of meanings. How do you define it, and what do you think the role is for protocol in the contemporary BDSM experience? Laura: "A protocol is a system of rules for a situation. I think that in an SM relationship, a protocol between the partners which defines their roles and responsibilities and creates a unique understanding between them is vital to the survival of the SM side of the relationship. Lovers may stay in love, and married people may just meld quietly into the land of ‘no play, but we're too busy and we know it in our hearts and besides, who has the energy?’ - but SMers who want to ‘keep the magic’ will often have certain things they *do* - postures, words, duties, rituals, secret handshakes, for all I know - which reinforce for them the dominant and submissive aspects of their lives. That's why I think having a protocol - and supporting it, actively, everyone holding up their end - is part of what can make a relationship work. It probably won't save a bad one, but it might save one that has potential." Sadie: Regarding protocol, one of your Marketplace characters says, "You are being conditioned to obey. Your obedience is what is being trained, not the positions." My guess is that this concept is often misunderstood, just as novices often think that BDSM is about the toys. Can you expand on this? Laura: "Too many people think that what they need is ‘a’ protocol, instead of their own protocol. So, they get one off the internet, or out of an old magazine, or they make one up based on what they read in a novel. And they confuse ‘learning the slave positions’ with ‘helping my partner to feel enslaved’ or ‘doing things which make me feel enslaved.’ So, they'll apply themselves to someone else's' fantasy, and then wonder why this doesn't fix anything. "Obedience is hard. Parroting words and holding a posture is what the folks at McDonalds do. I want people to examine themselves and their motives for doing this sort of thing, to really look deep and find the triggers which launch the feelings of ‘this is right’ and ‘this is me’ And then, I want them to build on those concepts, as a team, to create a style of living which will remind them of their places and reinforce their choices as often as they need - more often if possible! But to do that, you have to know yourself and you have to be open to the potential in someone else as well. It ain't rocket science, yet somehow, a lot of people seem to skip over these basic relationship drills." Sadie: You've written that service by itself can be both a motivation for and the expression of a rewarding power dynamic Can you expand on this a little bit? Laura: "That would take way, way too long, and would need words I don't know. It's one of those ‘you'll know it when you feel it,’ things." Sadie: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers? Laura: "I have a wish list at Amazon.com. I no longer smoke big cigars, or smoke single malt scotch, but I like ice-cold Cosmopolitans and little Cuban cigarillos. I really have nothing against California. Some of my best friends, yadda, yadda, yadda." Sadie: Thank you for chatting with me! Laura: "It's been a pleasure."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sensuous
Sadie is the author of It's Not
About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene (http://www.trafford.com/robots/03-0551.html).
She is the founder and leader (1999 - 2001) of Copyright 2003 Sadie Sez Publications
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