Male

69

Perpetual dilettante. Now living nowhere and everywhere, but San Francisco more than anywhere else. My ambition when I was to young was to become a combination of Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Well, things happened. The truth is, I didn't have a clue. Never have.
I'm not very assertive at creating the life I want. What happens instead is that sometimes, rarely, I see an open door and I walk through it.

1) One of my friends in high school told me that there was a famous poet living in an insane asylum nearby and that I might like to visit him. So that led to the major direction of my life for the next five or six years and, among other things, led to my getting a BA in classical Greek along with my BS in mathematics.

2) At my first Society of Janus orientation, a young woman said that she was desperately looking for someone to do some typing for her. Since no one else seemed inclined to respond to her plea, I volunteered my services. This woman turned out to be one of the most intense sadists in San Francisco at the time. She gave me a session for free, and the next summer, I wound up staying in a house she owned, sharing it with a woman named Carol who was one of the people running Janus at the time. Carol was what Malcolm Gladwell ("The Tipping Point") calls a nexus (as were all the other people I am mentioning). Through being her housemate, I got to know a lot of the best known
people in the SM community at the time.

3) Here is one case that actually started with me taking the initiative. I put an ad in GP saying that I was looking for a woman to be a slave to. And a woman who I'll call Sarah also had an ad. At this time, aside from Lana, I hadn't really known any prodommes. I seem to remember that it was me who called Sarah rather than the other way around. We talked for quite a while and she suggested that I call her back in a few days. "Since you're from Honolulu, next time you call, say that you're Lee Hawaii. That way I'll be more likely to remember you." She identified most of her clients by geography rather than by their last name or profession or interests. So we exchanged quite a few long phone calls. I quickly realized that I could successfully flirt with her over the phone. And eventually we agreed that I should come to San Francisco and stay with her for two and a half weeks. So I did and it turned out to be a rather different experience than I had imagined. The day after I arrived, she had four "slaves" over at her apartment. We didn't take off our clothes and she didn't do any SM with us, but sent us off in on errands in four different directions. Over the next few days, I did various simple chores for her while she went off to work. (Her having a job had not been part of the original plan.) And at night I would sit at her feet and listen as she engaged in extremely long phone calls with guys who answered her various ads. After a few days, she said, "You do everything just fine, but you don't really seem to be in to it. I think I'm going to treat you as a houseguest rather than a slave. Except that I want you to behave as a slave when the other slaves are around." (I never did figure out what these guys got out of being her "slave." There was very little SM play involved.) So after two and a half weeks, I went back to Honolulu and we exchanged some letters and phone calls. The following year, I was in San Francisco on sabbatical and in the meantime she had moved to a furnished apartment she was subletting, and she said, "I have a bunch of furniture in storage I can lend you." I thought that it was rather intriguing that I would start out as a woman's slave and wind up with all her furniture. Anyway, she would call me about once a week and ask me if I wanted to go out to lunch with her, and usually I said yes, but I wasn't really all that thrilled with our relationship. She seemed typical of what most of my relationships with women had been like: someone who seemed to really like me and wanted to be around me, but who apparently wasn't interested in sex.
Okay, this is much too long. So I'll skip forward at least two years to a time when I was living alone in Honolulu again and I found out that Sarah was really in crisis. She wanted to come to Honolulu to live in my apartment for a while (which she had never seen), and given her mental state, I didn't think that this was a good idea at all. But one Monday afternoon, I got a phone call saying, "I'm going to be arriving in Honolulu Friday. Do I need to make a hotel reservation?" "Are you sane?" "I'm not completely sure," she answered. "Well, okay, I guess you can stay in my apartment for a few days and we'll see it works out." "Are you going to meet me at the airport?" "When are you arriving?" "Friday. The plane leaves here at 9 AM. It's America West." "When does it arrive in Honolulu?" "I don't know." "Well, what's the flight number?" "I don't know. It's America West." "Well," I said, "I'll probably be at the airport to meet you." (In fairness, I have to explain that she wasn't as flaky as this sounded, although it did seem typically Sarah. What had happened was that in those days when you could fly without showing photo ID, she had bought a ticket from someone else, but didn't actually have the ticket yet, so she honestly didn't know the details.) She wound up living in my apartment for about six months, and after that she often stopped by to stay with me on her trips from San Francisco to Japan and back. And I stayed with her sometimes when I was in San Francisco. She became one of the best friends I'd ever had.

When I had gone to my first Janus meeting, my big ambition had been to actually meet a real dominatrix and maybe, if I was really lucky, to become friends with her. Sharing living space with Sarah and later on with one of her friends who was also a prodomme and then also Lady Petra (see below), I achieved much more than this initial ambition. I got to learn a lot about what a prodomme's life is like and how she deals with her clients. (And perhaps most of all, I got to understand that a dominatrix is not a particular kind of woman, but rather a woman who has decided to sometimes play a particular role.)

4) For my first few years in Janus, when I would come to San Francisco in the summers, nobody ever seemed to remember me from the previous summer, except a young guy named Jay, who was very involved in Janus and who I gradually learned was an expert in bondage. One year while I was in San Francisco on sabbatical (this was a year after I met Sarah), Jay came chasing after me after a Janus Program Meeting and told me that his girlfriend, who was a top, might be interested in playing with me. Janet and I wound up playing several times at parties and she was able to get me into a number of parties that were designated couples only. Jay and Janet gave me space in their house to stay in for several summers after that.

5) One day Janet called me in Honolulu and told me that one of her housemates, Tom, was going to be in Honolulu on business and would have a girlfriend with him. Would I be interested in having dinner with them? I did, and Petra (the professional name she later adopted) stayed in my apartment for a week after Tom returned to Honolulu. She was working as an apprentice to one of San Francisco's leading prodommes, and following summer, she gave me a session which worked very well for both of us. She was the sort I'd always been looking for, a woman who liked domination at least as much as physical play, and the summer after that, I arranged to do four twenty-four hour scenes with her. These four scenes, which I described in articles posted on alt.sex.bondage, were certainly one of the most intense experiences of my life. And all because I had agreed to have dinner with a guy who at the time I didn't even know every well and the woman who was traveling with him.

6) At the Honolulu polyamory group (and what the hell was I doing there, who am seldom in a relationship with even one woman?) I met a guy who was living in Germany for much of the year, coming to Honolulu in the winter. He said, "I think you should send some email to my friend in France. I think you two would like each other." "Well, sure," I thought. But this woman and I wound up exchanging a lot of email and that summer I went to France and lived for a month with her and her kids. I'd never been to Europe and that time, and had always thought it would be more expensive than I could afford and more difficult than I could manage, but after that I went back several times, both to see Sylviane and to spend time at an intentional community near Berlin which that same guy had told me about (and almost had to bully me into visiting the first time).