This week's Column for Leatherpage.com

God Bless the Whole World, No Exceptions
By Sensuous Sadie
SensuousSadie@aol.com
www.sensuoussadie.com

The bumpersticker on my car says "God bless the whole world, No exceptions." The reason I have this particular bumpersticker on my car is because there are so many bumperstickers already that say "God Bless America." Even more so of course after the September 11th tragedy.

You might wonder why this "God Bless America" thing rubs me the wrong way. It’s not that I don’t want God to bless America. It's because the subtext of this slogan is: "God Bless America and also don’t bless all of the people in __________ fill in the blank." Maybe Aphganistan, maybe Iraq, or if you were from my mom's generation - use Russia, Germany or Japan. It's even more true in times of war when many Americans need to feel that God blesses only us because otherwise we might have to consider the possibility that the people over there who we're trying to annihilate might have God blessing them too. If God only blesses America, then we're different from those evildoers (as President Bush calls them) over in, well, wherever. The result of this approach is that we can fly over there and kill them without really comprehending the fact that they are too are friends, lovers, sisters, children - just like us.

So hey, you’re probably thinking: Sadie, what the heck does this have to do with the price of floggers in China? Well actually, it has quite lot to do with it because the vanilla community also often demonizes in the same way. It's a way of separating themselves from us, a way of denying that in all the ways that count - family, jobs, kids, love, and so on - we are just like them. For example, in a recent newspaper article about the mostly gay writing team of the television show "Desperate Housewives," this sort of demonization was expressed by Ed Vitagliano, the spokesperson for the American Family Association. He said: "The problem we have with programs that exploit sexuality of any variety – bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual – is simply that they are substituting sex for legitimate relationships. We would have a problem with homosexuality as well as adultery. These are all signs of human brokenness." You can just imagine what Vitagliano would have to say about spankings, bondage, and crossdressing.

Where does this leave us then, us in the community who are hoping and dreaming of a day when people won’t cut our love, relationships, and sexuality to nothing? Where does that leave me when the vanilla guy I dated last year said: "I just can’t date you because people who do that kind of sick stuff are disgusting." He didn’t say, and they never say to my face, "I won’t date you because YOU are obsessed, sick, and disgusting," but the implication was clear.

Even so, all this doesn't keep me from trying to reach out. Just this morning I bumped up against this attitude while sunbathing on a beautiful beach in Vermont. I happened to be visiting a retreat that is quite the hotbed of liberals - the political kind mostly, but generally very open minded to what the conservative world considers edgy: lesbians, gays, people who don’t recycle and so on. We were discussing my writing so I decided to tell her what I really write about and see what transpired. I figured I was reasonably safe being as just a week ago the center had convened their yearly conference on lesbian politics.

I told her that the reason I wrote about alternative lifestyles was to help people in our community feel validated and joyful about their sexuality, and being able to read about themselves in a magazine helps make that happen. She immediately characterized anyone who read a magazine like Prometheus - which is what I used as an example - as someone who must be "obsessed." I should have asked her if she had any magazines about her interests in tennis or photography, not to mention what it says about me that not only do I read the darn magazine, but I write for it.

In a way, she was like a deer in the headlights of my persistence. She clearly wanted to believe I was the "other," and yet there I was in front of her looking perky and altogether pleasant. She struggled with this conflict, I could see that, but in the end, denial won out. I was pretty bummed out, but you never know – maybe the next person who opened up to her might find a slightly more open mind. Maybe just a crack.

That of course is the same thing I am hoping to do with my bumpersticker even though it‘s quite clear that my educated crunchy friends get it right off, and most everyone else tips their head at my car like a quizzical terrier unable to figure what to make of it, or me. That is, it seems sometimes like I'm preaching to the choir. But really, I'm trying to winch open up a crack in the people who might not completely buy into that image of us as evildoers.

Publishing in Prometheus is preaching to the choir too, but our community also needs to validate itself before any of single one of us can go out there and face the people who deny us. There are also those working and writing for the vanilla community and that’s a good thing too. For example, an article recently ran in Seven Days, the Vermont arts newspaper, and to my great surprise editor Ruth Horowitz wrote of our community with an open mind and an open heart. The arts community is only one step away from our community in terms of flexibility to alternative lifestyles, but still this is a huge step away from years gone by when the only publicity we got was bad publicity. Bad publicity along the lines of "Local Sex Dominatrix Buried Men in her Basement" and dang if she probably didn’t recycle either!

As for me, I continue to work on the one-to-one level, hoping that while I clearly won’t convince the "you’re an obsessed freak" crowd, I may be able to reach all the people who are like my friends and colleagues who know about my lifestyle, and mostly could care less. Certainly none of them are quizzing me about any details of my love life. I harbor no true hope that we will ever be truly transparent because there will always be a fear of the strange unknown – and heaven knows BDSM is rooted in the strange unknown – but then there's also a gray area where everyone in our kinky community could live and work without fear of being outed. That’s what I’m really aiming for when I say "God bless the whole world, no exceptions."

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This bumpersticker and a t-shirt with the same slogan is available at Northern Sun Merchandising – Products for Progressives
http://www.northernsun.com/

Tough Love by Ruth Horowitz: A consensual conversation with two slap-happy Vermonters

*Sorry - this article is no longer online but I'm trying to locate it

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Sensuous Sadie is the author of It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene. Read an excerpt at 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 2005 Sadie Sez Publications