I got back from Europe in the first week of June, worked for ten days, and then took off again for another week +, for the British Discipline West Coast Tour and the SF Pride Festival. I am very lucky indeed to get so much paid time off!
In early June, I had just a couple of events:
- June 6th: co-facilitated The Exiles New Member Orientation at the SF LGBT Center. This was my last time as Orientation Officer. New folks have taken over, but they had a conflict for this evening, so I jumped in to do it one more time. Exiles members (and friends of mine) Allison and Skittles did the majority of the acting, and I got to do a short demo as part of the class. Such fun! Ten people attended, most had never been to an Exiles program before, we got several new members, and I made a new friend.
- June 14th: Black Saturday at the Powerhouse. Another fantastic evening with my gorgeous sash husband. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's the flyer for it.
The second half of the month was when I got really busy. Here's the story you've been promised!
The British Discipline West Coast Tour
The British Discipline Tour was a long time in planning. Several months ago, I had talked to my friend Josephine, who was brought up in the UK, and lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She is a fantastic presenter and performance artist, and for reasons best known to herself she had offered to come here for a week to teach and perform with me.
I really wanted to teach on British Discipline. I believe that there is a "British way" of doing BDSM that is different from the North American way and is informed by the British cultural heritage of corporal punishment in virtually every walk of life, and I felt we could teach about this with talk and demos. Now Josephine had taught a workshop on caning back in Europe, and she kindly allowed me to look over her workshop notes. From those notes, she and I developed the class we called British Discipline and Punishment.
We had a structure for the workshop, and plenty to talk about, but we wanted to include demos. In fact we wanted to open with a demo. Since Josephine and I both wanted to be the demo bottoms for this class, since we are both so fond of canes, we needed to recruit a demo top for the workshops. I am very lucky to have a good friend, Karen, who is a sadistic genius, and who I thought might be willing to be our demo top. She and Josephine and I discussed the workshop via Skype, and Josephine and I promised her that if she came on tour with us we would provide ourselves as a salt and pepper set of matched bottoms to serve her. This may have clinched it - I am not sure - but anyway, now we had a demo top to assist with (and, let's admit it, design) the scenes. Oops, I mean the demos!
Meanwhile I had negotiated with various groups to let us teach. The Exiles San Francisco, The Foundation for Sex Positive Culture in Seattle, the Bad Girls of Portland, and the Society of Janus (SOJ) in San Francisco all agreed to host us in June, over a period of a week.
As if all this wasn't enough, I had got a bee in my bonnet that I wanted to host a sort of BDSM cabaret night. Beth Bicoastal, my first runner up and the host of the Kink Salon at the Powerhouse, and her co-host Jason Husted, agreed to let me co-host their event for June. Since my idea was an "anything goes" cabaret, and in honor of the popular Netflix TV show of a similar name, I named the event "Orange is the New Black Hanky".
So, on the evening of Thursday June 19th, Josephine arrived at SFO. She only had one day to get over her jet lag, because on the Friday evening we and Karen had to show up to San Francisco venue Alchemy and teach The Exiles about British Discipline!
- June 20. British Discipline and Punishment for The Exiles. Josephine and Karen met for the first time in person, only 45 minutes before class started. Luckily there was chemistry there! The class went well, and was attended by over 30 people, a good turnout. All four demos were great in my opinion. After class there was a party in the space, and Josephine and I stuck around and she did some practical one-on-one teaching. She's such a giver!
- June 21. Orange is the New Black Hanky. Josephine, myself, my wife Marilyn, our talented friend Lo, and Lo's extensive collection of wigs performed "BDSM Improv". Think "Whose Line is it Anyway", with BDSM content. The audience got to choose the scenario and the props, and we enacted the scene. Also, Beth Bicoastal did some great readings; BC Cliver did a "special performance" which you just had to be there to appreciate; and Josephine got up and did a bit of stand-up, including a spiel about being dominated by her GPS.
- June 22. I had rented a car to take us to Portland and Seattle. (Luckily I have a travel fund for such purposes. This trip used up what I had left of it.) We set off before 5 am and drove to Portland, where we arrived in the late afternoon.We got into the Discipline spirit at the Black Bear Diner in Yreka...
- That night we went to a gig! Our British friend Rosie Garland (see my last blog post for more on her) is in a band called the March Violets, who were on a West Coast Tour as well. I was going to miss them in San Francisco, but we made it in time to see them in Portland! Yay!
- June 23. Day off in Portland. We had a great breakfast with Rosie in Multnomah Village, and then we hooked up with one of Rosie's band mates, and did a bit of sightseeing, assisted by my friend Melissa, who lives in Portland. We absolutely did go to Voodoo Doughnut, as can be seen here - and that evening, we spent some quality time with our hosts for the Northwest portion of our tour, my contest producers, Liza and Jody.
- June 24. We enjoyed a delicious Portland breakfast, including excellent gluten free bread (which I had and enjoyed), and then we drove up to Seattle for our next British Discipline workshop. The Foundation for Sex Positive Culture folks were great. The event was less well attended than The Exiles, but we still had a good and attentive crowd of about 15 people, including a couple of old friends of mine, whose presence truly delighted me. I thought the class went even better than it had for The Exiles. I still thought there was too much talking in that one part of the class, and I felt we could tighten it up considerably. Just as well, because the very next day we were going to teach for Bad Girls in Portland, and we only had 90 minutes instead of 2 hours! The demos, although fulfilling the same function in each part of the class, were different from the last time, thanks to Karen's design genius, and they kept Josephine and me on our toes! After class, we grabbed a late night rock-star meal at Dick's retro burger joint in the shadow of the Space Needle, before the long drive back to Portland.
- June 25. We had another great breakfast, did a bit of shopping at the Portland branch of Oregon Leather, and Josephine and I updated our class outline. We desperately needed to cut it: not only did we have 30 minutes less for class, but we had an extra demo to fit in. I had asked my friend Melissa if she would do a guest spot as demo top, and she had agreed. Originally I had thought she could replace one of the other demos, but by now I was enjoying those demos way too much to give one up, so with Josephine's considerable help, and relying on our handout for some of the detail we were no longer going to discuss, we managed to shorten the talking parts of the class by at least 30 minutes, and so allow time for the additional demo.
June 25th's class had to be the highlight of the tour for me.The Portland Bad Girls had outdone themselves with both publicity and hospitality. Bad Girls is a women's group, however they had opened this event to all queers,and run it to dovetail with the monthly Queer Leather Dinner. We got there to a hosted buffet of delicious food, including gluten free cookies as well as many other treats, and a room quickly filling up to the rafters. This was our best attended event so far with over 50 people. The atmosphere was electric. I'm sure this is why we all got so overexcited. Josephine's and my banter was I thought even funnier than usual (and a lot shorter!), and the demos were off the hook! The extra demo from Melissa added variety, humor, and extra stripes. The fact that the room was really full made the few moments when you could hear a pin drop even more exciting. My last demo of the night, though only ten minutes long, may end up as one of my all-time favorite scenes. I forgot the audience was there for a while - until I heard them all breathe out at once.
After class, we went to the Queer Leather Dinner, where we got a chance to talk with a lot of folks who had been to the workshop, and a few who hadn't. I was so happy to connect or reconnect with some great Portland folks whom I had been wanting to get to know better, as well as to wind down with my co-presenters. It was a wonderful evening and we got to witness a special event - about which I didn't yet ask for permission to write, so it shall remain a mystery here. Also, we got our picture taken really beautifully by Kinky. Sexy. Geeky., who captured the mood of the evening perfectly from my point of view. I think this is a fabulous picture. Do you agree?
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| Photo by Kinky. Sexy. Geeky. |
We took our leave, and went back to Liza and Jody's, packed up the car, and drove back all night and morning to the Bay Area.
- June 26th. After getting back home, I hung out with Josephine and failed to get any sleep. Who needs sleep anyway? It's over-rated. That evening we went back to Alchemy for the SOJ program. The class was again well attended, with about 30 people. Although we had two hours, we kept the shorter format which had worked so well in Portland, and used the extra time for demo and Q&A. For the first demo we had a guest top: Rebecca Wilcox, with whom Josephine had originally presented the material in her caning workshop. The demo was different of course, and just as fun to watch. Josephine was a joy to work with, and my demos with Karen were excellent and - as they had been every time - educational for me as well as the audience. I enjoyed myself a lot, despite being a bit (?) tired. Afterwards, we all went for pizza. (Extreme Pizza does a gluten free crust that is really pretty good.) And when Josephine and I finally got home, we slept the sleep of the righteous.
The San Francisco Pride Festival
June 29th was the San Francisco Pride Festival. I drove to San Francisco with Josephine and Marilyn. We got parking near the festival! (We arrived early.) I got to see the Dykes on Bikes take off, and then walked to our assembly point, passing many friends on the way.
I haven't marched in the parade for years, and have never been on a float or truck before this year. Excitement! As a titleholder, I got to ride on the Leather Alliance truck with my sash husband and a lot of other titleholders, including newly crowned International Mr. Bootblack, Scout, and Mr. LA Leather, Eric Paul Leue.
Here's a fine picture of me and a bunch of the titleholders on the truck.
And here's me giving my sash husband bunny ears. Because leather people are always so serious.
After the parade, I spent a little time at Leather Alley at Pride, a project of the SF Bay Area Leather Alliance, dropped into my synagogue's booth (more about them in my next post), and went to the VIP party (my sash got me a free ticket!) where there was a photo booth sponsored by Whole Foods. Of course I took advantage of it...
Later that night I went to the last Eclipse! event at the SF Citadel, where I participated in a fun demo. And then, home. Pride was done!And that was my title year experience of June 2014. I hope you enjoyed reading it!
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