The day before I flew out of New York to London, I went to Religious Sex, a fetish clothing store in the East Village, to look for a bustier. The night before, I'd been having dinner with friends and one of them ran to her closet and offered me her bustier, which I tried on over my long-sleeved shirt right there at the dinner table. The effect on the men at the table was immediate, despite the fact that the thing didn't fit too well. They didn't say anything other than wow, but it was obvious that a single piece of clothing changed their opinion of me. Two-and-a-half feet of boned black material wrapped around my chest, and I was something very different from what I'd been only a minute before.
I needed the bustier for my "costume," the one I had to wear to the Sex Maniac's Ball in London. I'd first read about the Ball in a magazine when I lived in London in the early nineties. My impression then was that it was a lot of otherwise uptight people dressing in leather and rubber and playing at being wild, all to benefit an organization which I vaguely understood helped disabled people find sexual partners. The magazine article focused on the different "fetish corners" of the Ball, and focused in on one in particular where extremely grateful men were diapered and given pacifiers to suck. What interested me then was the idea of this happening in England, a country not exactly known for its open sexuality. Did the fact that it was "for a good cause" give permission for all that repressed sexuality to bubble up, unfettered and flamboyantly fetishized?
As I walked around Religious Sex, looking at all the rubber dresses and intricately ripped-open clothing, I couldn't help but think about how sexuality is something you literally wear; not you, but something you put on, a costume. I was planning to wear my britches and boots on the bottom half of me (I ride horses in my spare time; that's a whole story-of-a-costume in its own right) and I figured I'd just spruce up the top part of me. In the end, I couldn't find anything that fit right and I settled for a black muscle shirt with long black satin opera gloves, and a bullwhip I bought for $9.99 at a novelty store. The bullwhip turned out to be a mistake, but more on that later.
There were two rules for going to the Sex Maniac's Ball: you had to wear a costume and you couldn't go alone. I ended up going with Mark, the husband of an employee of my brother-in-law, if that indicates anything. You'd have thought it would be easy to find someone to go to something called a Sex Maniac's Ball, but everyone was afraid I was asking them to something sleazy. Was I? By the time I got to London and was heading off to Waterloo Station, I wasn't so sure myself. I had three fears. One, that I was about to attend a party stuffed with British versions of Linda, a tedious middle-aged math teacher I know who wears a French maid costume to Halloween parties each year and thinks this is risqué. Two, that I was about to get myself into something very slimy and depressing, a place with prostitutes and the fat old men who ogle them. Or three, that it would simply be a version of one of the long-winded drag queen parties through which I've suffered far too many times.
Why was I going to the Sex Maniac's Ball? Did I think I was going to have sex? Partly, yes, but it was also more complicated than that. Over the past few years, it's became clear to me that I've become a sexual materialist of sorts, acquiring episodes and stories and experiences so that I could define myself via other people's perceptions of me. Until fairly recently, I was willing to say yes to sex not because I always wanted to say yes (I don't have to explain that the idea of sex is often more interesting than sex itself, do I?), but because it was all part of my attempt to live a life that appeared outwardly interesting. Comparing my inside to other people's outside, as the twelve-step saying goes. I thought sexual freedom was the freedom to have sex. It never occurred to me there were other freedoms at stake.
When I got to the front door of the club, I'd apparently just missed two guys who wanted to enter but were in street clothes. After they were told they could only come in costume, they simply stripped and left their clothes at the coat check.
Mark and I had to wait in line to get into the main exhibition space, but this hardly matters because standing there and looking at everybody was an education in the best possible sense of the word. The lack of inhibition was astounding: people of all ages and body sizes in the predictable leather garb (I saw then how trite my own costume was); a lot of naked people with body paint (my favorite was a guy with zebra stripes and a full tail sticking out of his rectum); a fair amount of men in various stages of undress handcuffed and being led around by a leash and collar (and several being led around by piercings through their penises); doctors; nurses in rubber; priests with indecent holes in their robes; and a number of surreal costumes that make no sense but involve elaborate harnesses and headdresses. One guy was dressed as a latrine. The most striking couple was dressed in full Victorian regalia, as if they'd just stepped out of A Christmas Carol. Since all the nudity and the overtly sexual outfits became so banal so quickly, I decided that the kinkiest costume in this setting was someone in a full-body white rabbit outfit. Not a Playboy Bunny, but a huge white rabbit, like Harvey. Pervert.
The pre-Ball show was the Erotic Oscars, which went from nine to midnight. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but when we finally got in, there was a man in a futuristic monster outfit up on stage and woman with a three-foot red penis, from which she was squirting white fluid in a menacing manner. The emcee came out, a startlingly handsome man with a silver jacket that was blinding when the spotlight shined on him. The next act consisted of an obviously professional male stripper who gyrated in a not particularly interesting fashion. Enough already, I thought, but then noticed a woman wearing barely anything giving a guy in a rubber sailor suit sitting next to me a blowjob. I'm not sure what's polite here; to watch, or not to watch? I do both.
of all ages and body sizes in the predictable leather garb (I saw then how trite my own costume was); a lot of naked people with body paint (my favorite was a guy with zebra stripes and a full tail sticking out of his rectum); a fair amount of men in various stages of undress handcuffed and being led around by a leash and collar (and several being led around by piercings through their penises); doctors; nurses in rubber; priests with indecent holes in their robes; and a number of surreal costumes that make no sense but involve elaborate harnesses and headdresses. One guy was dressed as a latrine. The most striking couple was dressed in full Victorian regalia, as if they'd just stepped out of A Christmas Carol. Since all the nudity and the overtly sexual outfits became so banal so quickly, I decided that the kinkiest costume in this setting was someone in a full-body white rabbit outfit. Not a Playboy Bunny, but a huge white rabbit, like Harvey. Pervert.
