SCENEprofiles Interview with
Rebecca Brook
Columnist & Moderator of Leatherchurch 

RebBrook@aol.com 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/leatherchurch/ 

Read Rebecca's column Body & Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer

SENSUOUS SADIE:  You are the moderator of Leatherchurch. What was it that motivated you to start this unusual discussion group?

REBECCA:  "The short answer is that I wanted a place where I could talk about my faith and my sexuality in the same 'box' without being ostracized or laughed at.

"The long answer is a bit more complicated (and spirit-filled). I started Leatherchurch on February 8, 2000. At the end of January – about a week and a half before I started the list – I'd had gallbladder surgery. On February 1, the Tuesday after my surgery, I went to a contemplative-prayer service led by an Episcopal priest whom I admired, but didn't know very well. Now, I'd been to this service before, and nothing had ever happened to me during contemplative prayer, except that I got distracted by my shopping lists. But this day, probably because I was in a vulnerable, receptive state from the surgery, I had a vivid vision of standing in a beautiful garden and of being held in love there, of being as precious to God as the trees and birds and flowers were. I mentioned this rather shyly to the priest afterwards, and he asked if I wanted to have lunch. During the lunch, when I asked about his life, he told me that he's gay and that he feels quite isolated in the city where we live, which doesn't offer much in the way of gay culture.

"I got really upset after the lunch, thinking about this man's isolation. It took me two days to figure out that I was responding to my own isolation. When my husband and I moved away from New York, we'd left the BDSM scene behind, and so I was feeling very closeted, *especially* at church, which I'd only started attending about a year before. So I decided I needed to try to address my feelings of isolation, and starting the list was one of the ways I did that. But then, the very same week, my husband and I discovered that there was a leather group in our area, and that it met right down the street from our house! And another odd thing happened. On February 1, I decided to buy a postcard of flowers to remind myself about the contemplation vision (which I really thought had just been my imagination). I didn't get around to it, because I was too busy. But a few days later, a friend – whom I *hadn't* told about the vision – stopped by with a get-well gift after my surgery, a coffee mug with a reproduction of a Monet painting of a woman in a garden. So, basically, I think God was spending that week whapping me upside the head with abundance to try to get me to be more trusting.

"The following March, I acted on that message by coming out as a leatherperson to the priest who'd told me he was gay (I'm now out to one other priest as well). It was frightening, but it went very well; he was accepting and supportive, and has since thanked me for teaching him a bit about the leather community. He even mentioned leather in a homily he gave once, knowing I was the only person who'd understand the reference!

"When I started Leatherchurch – which my husband and I were calling the 'kinky Episcopalian project' – I didn't think there'd be anyone else out there. The list is still very small by Internet standards (about 85 people, very few of whom actually post), but there are enough of us to convince me that I'm not crazy. I think it fills a genuine need for a number of people who feel closeted about their sexuality in their religious life, or vice versa. Periodically I get depressed about the low list volume and decide to shut the whole thing down, but every time I've felt that way, something has happened to convince me to keep going. Very often that encouragement has taken the form of someone delurking to tell me that the list has been helpful, and then disappearing again. This has taught me that people don't need to post to be getting something out of the list – so when people don't post much, I try to have faith that somebody somewhere is still finding the discussion valuable!"

Sadie:  You write:  "If you tell people you're kinky, they may assume you barbecue babies for breakfast; if you tell people you go to church, they may expect you to begin spewing fire-and-brimstone Bible verses." Assuming you aren't doing either, what are you doing?

Rebecca:  "Well, for me – as for most people in the scene – being kinky means honoring consent. It's not about coercion or violence, which is something many outsiders don't understand. A lot of vanilla folk associate BDSM with criminal behavior; you can't blame them, since it seems like every time the cops capture some serial murderer with sixteen slaughtered women in his basement, the press reports that he had a collection of BDSM magazines or equipment. And maybe he did, but nobody talks about all the perfectly responsible, caring individuals who also collect that stuff, and nobody ever says, 'Newsflash! The killer had MILK in his refrigerator! This means that anyone who enjoys dairy products is obviously a deranged sicko!

"This is a tricky area, though, because to some extent, we have only ourselves to blame for the bad press. Because there's still so much stigma attached to BDSM, very few of the responsible, law-abiding citizens who enjoy it are willing to come out and say so. Very few of us can afford to be out that way, and I'm the last person in the world who'd ever tell people that they have to out themselves. I'm not very widely out myself. I know people who've lost jobs over this; I know of people who've lost access to their children. It's not a trivial issue. But then, where are people supposed to get positive images to counter the psycho-killer stereotypes?

"Last year sometime, there was a case in New York where a guy killed his girlfriend and then got into his car and ran down a bunch of pedestrians in New York. And the cops found BDSM magazines in his house, and the press, to its credit, decided to interview people who worked at leather stores in the city, all of whom said, very reasonably, 'No, what we do is NOT about hit-and-run driving!' A friend of mine, a clean-cut managerial type, told me about this and griped about the fact that all the people who got interviewed had tattoos and multiple piercing and weird hair, which to his mind only reinforced the notion that kinky people are freaks. And I said, 'Well, those were the people who were willing to go on camera to talk about it, weren't they? Did you go up to the camera crews in your three-piece suit and say, 'Hi, I'm an affluent professional without body modification, and I also enjoy BDSM, and I'd be delighted to speak to you about it?' I understand why you didn't do that, because I probably wouldn't have done it either, but then, whom are they supposed to talk to?

"This is why organizations like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom are so important. We need people who are willing to be up-front and fight for our rights, and then maybe more of us can afford to be out without fearing repercussions.

"As for the Christian half of the question, it's also very easy to see where the negative stereotypes of Christianity come from. Churches have hurt a lot of people; organized religion has a lot to answer for. But faith has also done a lot of good in the world. Not all Christians are alike;  there are something like 292 Christian denominations. Some people, like Falwell, use their faith to exclude other people, to make pronouncements about who's going to hell; others, like Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King, Jr., use it to work for peace and social justice, to welcome the disenfranchised into the Kingdom of God. The question is, do you use your faith to shut people out, or to welcome them in? You can find both of those tendencies running through every denomination, and through every congregation within every denomination, and through just about every individual in each congregation. Overcoming 'us/them' thinking is the biggest challenge any of us face, as individuals or institutions.

"I try to stay on the inclusion side of that divide. I call myself a 'proud member of the Christian left.' Going to church has made me more aware of, and more active in, social-outreach issues. I slip sometimes, because I'm human and imperfect and have a formidable temper; I snap at people and get into stupid arguments and make things worse, instead of better. You've seen recent evidence of this on the list, Sadie! But my faith also assures me that repentance and forgiveness are real, that I can pick myself up and go on and do good work again. And I've come to believe very deeply that we're all part of patterns that are simply too big for us to see, and that nothing we do is wasted or unimportant, even if we can't always see immediate positive results."

Sadie:  You write:  "For me, both the scene and the church offer the comfort of communal ritual while affirming the sacredness of the body."  Do you find that people understand your message about the similarities here, or do they resist your ideas?

Rebecca:  "Well, some people understand – especially if they've experienced both things themselves, of course – and some are resistant. My sense is that many people in the scene are more suspicious of the church than the church folks I know would be of them. I've heard people in the scene make pretty appalling generalizations about faith communities. For instance, I was once asked to lead a discussion about spirituality and BDSM for our local leather group, and one of the women there, who was Wiccan, said, 'In my experience, all Christians are sex-negative hypocrites.' And I said, 'I'm sitting here as a sex-positive kinky Christian, so isn't that part of your experience too?' But she couldn't see that. She'd been very badly hurt by organized religion as a child, and she wasn't able to take in new or conflicting evidence. The tragedy here is that so many people who rightly accuse certain churches of intolerant, either/or thinking fall into exactly the same errors when they talk about religion – and they can't even see it.

"In contrast, the two priests to whom I'm out – the one who's gay, and another who's married with kids – have been very thoughtful and willing to be educated about what I do. Admittedly, that's a very small sample in a very liberal parish, and I'm painfully aware that there are plenty of people in the church who'd condemn my sex life. But in general, the clergy I know are more open-minded, and more willing to admit that they don't know everything, than much of the outside world gives them credit for. Clergy are spiritual emergency-room personnel;  they've seen just about everything, and they don't shock easily!

"One of the priests I'm out to, when I told him that I'd be leading a discussion of spiritual issues at the leather group, offered to come speak to them. It turned out that he had a conflict that night, but after the meeting, I said, 'You know, it's good you weren't there, because some of those people, if there had been actual Christian clergy in the room, would have gotten out their flame-throwers and started piling up the kindling.' And I think that's incredibly sad."

Sadie:  You have said that "I could walk around naked, or be bound to a table, and be perfectly safe, even in a room of people I didn't know. I learned that the scene is a far more trustworthy place than the surrounding culture that so often reviles it." It seems like this would be antithetical to what we might assume. Why do you think this has happened?

Rebecca:  "The leather community as a whole – and that's already a tricky statement, because of course the scene isn't monolithic or uniform! – tends to be deeply counter-cultural in that it emphasizes consent rather than control, power-with rather than power-over. Experienced players know that the bottom is always the one who's ultimately running the scene; newcomers tend to be very surprised by this, and it's certainly not the way things usually work in, say, corporations or government. I can't speculate how we've developed this; I'm not a historian or an anthropologist. But I do know that many of the people I know in the scene are much more thoughtful and articulate about sexual dynamics, and power dynamics in general, than a lot of straight vanilla people who've never had to examine their assumptions about how things work. My sense is that many straight vanillas, and certainly many of the young people I meet, still operate according to received opinions, a script they've been handed:  boy meets girl, boy and girl fall into each others' arms, boy and girl have sex. Everything's supposed to be instinctive and easy. Sexual minorities have to figure out how to write our own scripts; we know that very little is instinctive or easy!

"About ten years ago, some college – Antioch, I think – instituted a code of sexual conduct which required explicit consent before each step. 'May I hold your hand? May I kiss you? May I unbutton your shirt?' And a lot of vanilla commentators made fun of this because they thought it was too mechanical and unromantic. But someone writing in the Village Voice pointed out that this college code was actually very similar to a BDSM negotiation, where everything's spelled out. Kinky people have learned how to be romantic with our eyes wide open; we know that negotiation can be a form of seduction, and that it's every bit as romantic as swooning. That's very empowering for all parties in the relationship, and it's a great gift for us to share with the wider culture, if we can only get them to realize that we're not axe murderers!"

Sadie:  You write:  "The women's movement of the 1970's marginalized lesbians because heterosexual feminists were leery of being branded as 'man-hating dykes.' Vanilla lesbians and gays have marginalized the leather community partly because conservative propaganda equates queer sex with leathersex and leathersex with violence, abuse, and pedophilia." What do you think that we, as a community, need to do to fight this kind of marginalizing of different types of kink within our own community?

Rebecca:  "Well, all of us have to be wary of the kind of 'us/them' thinking I talked about earlier. And we have to figure out who our real opponents are and stop wasting our energy on picking fights with each other. John Ashcroft hates all of us; if we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately, to quote Ben Franklin. And we have to work on loving ourselves, so that we won't have to put other people down to maintain our own self-esteem. Most marginalization of other people comes from internalized self-hatred:  'Okay, if I can find someone who's worse than I am, I won't have to feel so bad about myself.'

"None of this is easy. Us/them thinking is a fundamental part of human nature:  it's never going to go away entirely, and people who represent alternative ways of thinking are always at risk. Jesus was killed because he was a political radical:  he shared meals with, and offered free healing to, *everybody.* He didn't hold with the purity codes that governed who was okay and who wasn't. And that was simply too threatening for the existing power structure of his day. Things haven't changed all that much in the 2,000 years since then, unfortunately. I often say that if Jesus came back tomorrow, certain elements of the religious right would crucify him again in roughly twenty seconds, because he'd be hanging out with all the wrong people. He'd be drinking wine in gay bars and traveling around with groups of homeless kids and street addicts, and the NIMBY types would have fits. The resistance to 'the other' never goes away – but neither does the message that there's another way of seeing the world, one where we're all loved and worthy and where healing is not only possible, but plentiful. I believe that God's will for all of us is abundant life, not suffering. That's a vision of a world where there's enough of everything for everyone, because people share what they have, instead of hoarding it. We're certainly not there yet, and I don't know if we ever will be, but it's better to work towards that vision than to give up in despair. The important thing is to do what you can, where you are, with what you have. And in our little corner of the world, that means learning to love and welcome folks who don't play the same way we do – just as we hope that other people will one day learn to love and welcome us."

Sadie:  You've commented that "If you try to talk about what you do in bed, or how you worship, with anyone who doesn't share the same practices, the conversation's all too likely to end in embarrassment, anger, or hurt feelings." There are some commonalties in the scene. How do you work around this? Why do you think this happens?

Rebecca:  "People have a lot of baggage around both faith and sex. One approach is never to talk about either of them; another, advocated by Guy Baldwin, is the 'tell them a little bit' strategy where you only talk to people about these topics on a need-to-know basis. I've discovered that if people get to know me first, without the labels of kinky or Christian, they're generally much more accepting once I out myself as either. 'Well, I'm not into that, but you're a good person and I respect you, so I guess it must be all right.'

"The fear is that if you do something wrong or offensive, people will say, 'Well, obviously that's because you're kinky and therefore immature!' or 'See, all Christians *are* intolerant bigots!' I don't enjoy situations where I feel as if I'm representing my entire sexual or faith community to whomever I'm with – which is why I always try to emphasize how diverse both communities are. 'I'm not speaking for everyone, only for myself.'"

Sadie:  When were you first aware of having a higher power in your life?

Rebecca:  "I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware of it, although I haven't always been able to describe it, and I certainly haven't always expressed it by participating in organized religion. I only started going to church a few years ago. I had a very slow, meandering conversion, which is far too long a story to tell here! My short take on this is that God's the air we breathe, and spirituality's the process by which we become aware of the air we breathe, and religion is the mechanism we use to express and act on that awareness in community with other people. But the air's always there, whether you're conscious of it or not. When was I first aware of breathing? I don't remember!"

Sadie:  Was this related to or independent from your religious upbringing (or lack of it)? In what ways?

Rebecca:  "I didn't have a formal religious upbringing, which I tend to think is a good thing. My father's lapsed Catholic and absolutely loathes organized religion, and I've met so many people who've had bad experiences with church as kids, when it was forced on them, that I'm deeply grateful to have come to the experience as an adult, when I could make my own decisions and choices. I'm a consenting Christian:  what a concept!

"My earliest formal experience with spirituality was in various 12-Step groups. My mother's a recovering alcoholic, and I used to go to meetings with her when I was little because I just loved listening to all the stories, which were much more moving and exciting than anything on TV! So that's where I first encountered the phrase 'higher power,' and also saw the very powerful effects of faith on people's lives. And that was also my first experience with the kind of inclusiveness the Gospel talks about. If you're an alcoholic and you want to get better, you're in:  no us/them, no social divisions, no concept that bank presidents are better than street bums. AA saves lives, and it's free. It's an absolutely amazing alternative to the consumer culture where most of us live most of the time; it's much more similar to, for instance, the very early Christian church, the kinds of communities the disciples formed after the first Pentecost. Being able to spend time in that world when I was a child was a great gift."

Sadie:  When did you first start exploring the connection between BDSM & spirituality? Was there a particular experience or moment that set you on this path?

Rebecca:  "Good question, but hard to answer! I think the process of coming out to myself as someone who was willing to be tied up by my partner, or seen in sex clubs, was very similar to the process of coming out to myself as someone who was willing to pray, or to be seen in church. In both cases, it was a matter of saying, 'These are things that will feed me and places that are important to me, so I'm going to do this even if other people laugh at me for it or don't understand.' And I think those two processes were happening at the same time, although it took me longer to go to church than it did for me to go to sex clubs! But they're both so recent – within the past ten years – that I don't think I have enough perspective right now to identify key moments."

Sadie:  Your essay "Body and Soul" states that "Every Sunday in church, we confess our dependence on God, the power in whom we live and move and have our being, whom we praise and thank for all good gifts. We kneel in joy, not terror. To the people who sneer at such submission, who claim that church is a crutch, my answer now would be a simple shrug and the response, 'Yes, sure it is. So's breathing.'" Do you think there are any ways in which BDSM is a crutch?

Rebecca:  "My point in that section of the essay was that, if you choose to look at it that way, *everything's* a crutch. None of us exists entirely alone:  the air we breathe was here before we were, and we don't make it ourselves, and we can't live without it. Our lives are about interdependence, and that's cause for rejoicing, not a sign of weakness. BDSM emphasizes interdependence more than many other forms of sexual expression do, because it's about being willing to be vulnerable, to trust a partner to do for us rather than feeling as if we have to do everything ourselves. It's about claiming abundance, if you look at it that way. I'm one of those bottoms for whom being tied up is a lovely little vacation from 'real-world' responsibilities, but that doesn't mean that I'm irresponsible the rest of the time:  it means that I have *more* energy to spend on my responsibilities when the vacation's over."

Sadie:  You have written that "I no longer believe in love at first sight, not unless and until it's tested by some solid doses of hormone-free problem solving." What experiences have you had that gave you such a practical approach?

Rebecca:  "Well, the first-hand experience I had was of falling in love at first sight with someone I believed to be my soul mate, someone with whom I genuinely had a lot in common. This guy was older than I, and also wealthy and famous. He wooed me, seduced me (with my full consent!), convinced me that he wanted to marry me and father my children, and then dumped me two-and-a-half months into the relationship, three weeks before Christmas, over the phone. I was a very young twenty-six, and I was devastated:  the entire episode really shook my faith in my own instincts and in men. Since then, I've seen a number of friends fall in love at first sight, and I always worry for them – and more often than not, it seems, things end badly, with the same sort of sudden and extremely painful disillusionment I experienced.

"What happened there, I think, is that the man and I had hit a rough patch around the holidays, and the hormones weren't helping us solve the problems. We didn't have the necessary communication skills:  it was all sex. (I should add here that this was a vanilla relationship, since I hadn't realized yet that I was kinky; if it had been a kinky relationship, we probably would have talked more! More on that below.) Sex is a wonderful thing, and I'm all for it, but love at first sight is usually 'lust at first sight,' and if you can't settle your squabbles about toothpaste and taking out the garbage, the sex won't last very long, either.

"My husband Gary and I had some hot-and-heavy hormones going as soon as we met, too. But it took us six years to decide to marry, and in the meantime we'd dealt with a number of real-world problems:  geographical separation while I attended graduate school, significant difficulties in both of our families, career conflicts, etc. That's the kind of stuff you need to be able to handle to stay married. Our relationship became kinky very early on – I realized my true leanings shortly after I met him, and I'll always count it as one of the blessings of my life that he shared them! – and when we decided to marry, my therapist told me that she thought the communication skills we'd developed in the scene were one of the things that had made our relationship so solid. And I'm deeply grateful that I didn't marry any of the many people I dated before I met Gary, because if I'd gotten married before I figured out that I was kinky, it would have been a disaster. Kink-discordant relationships are one of the biggest issues I see on my list, and one of the most painful."

Sadie:  Your partner Gary Switch is also a writer, and Contributing Editor to Prometheus magazine. You do seem like a well matched couple in terms of your BDSM and writing interests. How would you describe the BDSM element of your relationship?

Rebecca:  "Well, it's certainly very important. I couldn't be happily married to someone who wasn't into BDSM; I also couldn't be happily married to someone who wasn't supportive of my writing. Gary's my first and best reader, my in-house editor, my smartest critic. And of course I'm also delighted that we have a mutually fulfilling sexual relationship! We're not 24/7 lifestylers, though; we keep the BDSM dynamic in the bedroom, and since we're both switches and SAMs, it's a pretty light, cheerful dynamic anyway. When we're by ourselves, play is foreplay; we're primarily sensation junkies, not into particularly heavy scenes. We do enjoy public play and wish we had access to more of it, but that's difficult right now for a number of reasons:  geographical location and lack of time and money."

Sadie:  How have you negotiated boundaries in your relationship vis-à-vis play with other people?

Rebecca:  "Our foremost rule is that neither of us plays with other people unless the other is there too. This prevents jealousy, which I'm afraid is one of my besetting sins (and 'play,' here, excludes genital sex:  we're fluid-monogamous, for both emotional and practical/medical reasons). We broke the rule once, a few years ago, when a friend of mine asked me to be part of her visionquest; that was a woman-only scene, so obviously Gary's presence wouldn't have been appropriate. He was fine with it, though, and the following year, that friend and some of the other women who'd been at her visionquest helped me top Gary in a long scene we did to celebrate his 50th birthday. So he got his reward!"

Sadie:  You are an Episcopal laywoman who's particularly interested in the connections between radical sexuality and incarnational Christian theology and practice, yet Gary has described himself as not all that spiritually oriented. Is this something that you have agreed to disagree on, or does it sometimes turn to fisticuffs?

Rebecca:  "It's definitely a conflict, but all marriages have some conflicts. We try to keep our senses of humor about it. We often joke that Gary and I have an agreement:  he doesn't do church, and I don't do jazz. He's actually extremely patient with, and tolerant of, how much time I spend at church and on church projects, especially considering that I wasn't religious at all when we met. This isn't what he signed on for:  he married a sex radical, not a church lady! He doesn't believe in God himself or understand why I do, and I think he finds my conversion utterly baffling, as do many of my other family and friends. So in that sense, it's sometimes been difficult. But he helps when he can – he's cooked for various church meals, for instance – and he certainly agrees with my beliefs about social justice, even though he takes a different road than I do to get there."

Sadie:  How do you work around Gary's not-so-spiritual orientation in terms of your play?

Rebecca:  "It really hasn't been an issue, because play is no more explicitly spiritual for me than eating or swimming or writing. The conflict comes up more broadly because, increasingly, I see everything I do through a spiritual lens; I believe very strongly that everything can be a form of prayer. And Gary finds that way of thinking alien. But it's not something I talk about much – I mean, I'm not sitting there eating my salad and giving a running disquisition on the manifestation of God's goodness in the lettuce leaves, you know? – so our two worldviews can coexist pretty peacefully. We do the same things; we just think about them and enjoy them in different ways. And I'm not, thank goodness, one of those Christians who believes that everybody has to swear a loyalty oath to Jesus Christ to avoid becoming a charcoal briquette; I think plenty of people can, and do, succeed in loving their neighbors who've never darkened the door of a church at all. So I don't lose any sleep over the fact that Gary doesn't go to church. I believe that Christ wants followers, people to do the work of loving the world, rather than worshippers, people to fall down and kiss his feet. I think my job is to care for other people as well as I can, not to worry about sorting them into piles; I'll leave that to God. And I love my husband, and frankly, I think he's a better 'Christian' than plenty of church-goers I've met, although both he and they might find that heretical!"

Sadie:  I have a theory that people are either "writers" or they are "BDSM players who happen to like writing." The key difference being the way they feel about their own professionalism as a writer, and how they respond to editing. What are your thoughts on this?

Rebecca:  "I define 'writer' as' anyone who writes,' but not everyone writes well. The writers who improve, who get better, are the ones who welcome constructive criticism, as well as praise. They're the people who want to know how they can make their work better. *Good* writers have learned the difficult skill of RE-writing. And good writers also read a lot.

"I started writing when I was twelve; I didn't figure out that I was kinky until I was twenty-nine. So for me, the writing definitely came first. But it doesn't have to work that way for everyone."

Sadie: Thank you very much!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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 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 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