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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 particular on one corner 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. The seat I thought I was so lucky to get turned out to be in the path of traffic, which meant people in their various glories kept trying to get by me, which required my standing up. The person going by would put both of their hands on my hips and sometimes give a little thrust. In that environment, it felt as natural as shaking hands. At some point, a guy dressed as a monk tried to push by me; I noticed him  because he was fat and I had to actually move my chair in order for him to fit. When I looked back to the stage, the stripper had commenced giving himself a blowjob. I'd heard about this activity, but now I can testify: some guys really can. It didn't look too comfortable and he didn't actually come, but he did get a big round of applause. The handsome emcee came out in his shiny jacket and introduced the next act, a group of gorgeous pagan witches who chanted while ritualistically performing cunnilingus and inserting their fingers into each other. Afterward, the emcee re-emerged to introduce one of the final acts, a naked gymnast wearing a leather head mask (whatever you can imagine is true), and while the emcee was joking up there, I realized for the first time he had no arms. His hands were connected at his shoulders, and he tilted his head to speak into the mike. Oh my god, I thought to myself looking around. I'm in Berlin in the late 1920s.
Once I noticed the armless emcee, I remembered this was a charity ball for the disabled, after all. Only then did I notice that ten percent or so of the people present (anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred people) were disabled: women clad in rubber sat in their wheelchairs with their breasts exposed, men wearing leather chaps on their withered legs went by on crutches. It's not that they'd been hidden before; there was just so much else to notice. Outsiders, the group who put on this ball, focuses on sexual freedom for the disabled. But rather than seeing their role as providing a service, a sort of dating for disabled singles group, Outsiders aims to remind people that we all have the right to define our own sexual boundaries and needs, rather than have society define them (or the perceived lack of need in regard to the disabled) for us. The idea behind the Ball, apart from raising money, is to celebrate the shedding of restraints placed upon us. Most people see disabled people as ugly or pathetic or childlike, and not in need of sex. If they do have sex, it's viewed as disturbing or kinky. Outsiders doesn't see it that way. And their approach works. Because I went, and after only twenty minutes was thinking, Oh, it's okay if total strangers hold my hips in a suggestive manner. By the end of the night, I was seriously considering letting the monk (remember the fat monk?) spank me. I ran into him in the Dungeon, which went into full swing after the Oscars were over. (Annie Sprinkle was there, I heard, but I couldn't see her; too many other things vying for my attention.) That was when I began to regret the bullwhip; it's not actually my thing, SM, but I saw how I might be giving out that signal. While I was watching men get tied to planks and whipped, and I mean whipped, and beg for more as if it was ice cream, the Monk came up to me and offered his  services. And I almost said yes. It's not a particularly important fantasy of mine, to be spanked, but to be spanked by a monk? I mean, what a good story that would make. Except what about afterwards? Being spanked by a monk is sort of hilarious and kinky, but having been spanked by a monk — is that really the karma I want accumulating in my life, jangling after me like so many tin-cans tied to my bumper (no pun intended)? What would I have gotten out of that single, actual moment? What would I have lost in the endless moments that followed it? They were questions I wasn't used to asking myself; I'd been too busy collecting anecdotes. I realized that each time I'd done something I wasn't comfortable with for the sake of a story, I'd given up a little bit of who I was sexually.
The venue for the Ball was perfect; a cavernous, multi-roomed club that felt like the Middle Ages, modernized. You could go dance in several spaces, or you could just wander around the performances. These included QuiverDance, which entailed lying on your back, sticking your head through a giant mousehole and watching people dance over you. (Guess if they are wearing underwear.) My personal favorite was the Grope Box — a black, ten-by-ten-foot box. You could either go in the box, or you could stand outside the box and stick your arm through one of the holes (several of which were thoughtfully at wheelchair height). I stood on the outside, and inside was someone dressed like Queen Victoria in a nightdress, dangling out of her skivvies. It felt like Queen Victoria had been putting in a lot of time at the gym, and also that all those rumors were true: she was a man. Other sideshows included the Group Bisexual Massage Room, and Sparky, which involved sitting in a dentist chair and having mild electrical charges applied to the body parts of your choice. There was one room in which you could have sex standing up; I walked into it by accident, but it was too dark to see anything. At one point, I had to pee; in the bathroom, a sign asked me if I wouldn't rather go visit the "Pee-leasure Room." I've never actually wanted to pee on anyone, but I was in the swing of things, so I went to look for it. I never found it, the place was too big, but I did have a lot of interesting conversations along the way. "I come every year," a pirate told me. "I work for the phone company; most of these people are just regular the rest of the time." He pointed out his girlfriend, buying a beer down the hall, a nurse with a giant dildo. "She really is a nurse," he confided. A little before three a.m, I discovered the Sensual Grotto. This is actually just one big orgy — Eyes Wide Shut but with better music. You could either join in, or you could stand behind the screens surrounding it and watch through the eyeholes (again, thoughtfully provided at different heights). I watched for awhile before deciding what to do. The only two things not on the menu were sex with animals and pre-adolescents.  One woman was having sex with a man in a wheelchair, and there were some crutches thrown on the floor, but I don't know whose they were. Most of the sex was safe sex, but not all of it. According the rules (a short version of which was posted all over the club, a longer version of which was handed to you at the door in booklet form), safe sex was expected, and if you ran out of condoms, a steward could provide you with more.
Finally, three guys approached me and asked if I wanted to go in with them. "Don't worry, it won't take very long," one of them reassured me. Did he know how funny that was? "No, maybe next time," I answered congenially. How can I explain what it was like at that Ball? How can I get across to you that, despite all the things I've told you, it wasn't sleazy? I started smiling when that guy gave himself a blowjob, and I think I didn't stop until about noon the next day. The whole thing just made me happy. Was it because it was so well organized and felt so safe? Was it because everyone had to wear a costume, which meant there was no division between the lookers and the looked at? Or was it the drastically unusual presence of the disabled? Walking around Religious Sex only seventy or so hours earlier, I'd been thinking how sexuality was something you put on like a dress, that sexuality was something you had to acquire, like any other commodity. But having the disabled participate at the Ball was a truly radical political act, because it enabled all of us to recognize that sexuality is not a right which must be earned or a possession that must be purchased, but a state of being equally accessible to all individuals. Even those who sometimes have to fight for that access. Personally, I don't think I've ever experienced such freedom of sexual being as at the Ball, and it was because I didn't do anything. I thought about entering into that Sensual Grotto (I still think about that Sensual Grotto) but I knew that not having sex at that moment was actually, for me, in that particular moment, the most radical choice I could make. It sounds so simple and almost trite to say it like that. But my realization was potent: desire is what fuels life, and like any other energy source, others want to control it. I've always wanted other people to define sexual power for me — to let me feel sexy, to tell me I was an adventurer, an explorer — but the Ball was different. I'm not moralizing here; I'm not saying that you're happier if you choose not to take part in orgies, that sex without love causes unhappiness. I'm just saying that seeing disabled people — the very people we are taught to believe are most ugly, unsexual and damaged — unashamedly say yes to sex, taking something that the world told them was not their right, taught me that I could say no. I could just watch. I could walk away. Sexuality, I understood just then, is just part of something I am, a state of being rather than a state of action. And that's true whatever my body looks like from the outside. The drag queens started showing up just after three a.m.; I couldn't see the monk anywhere; those three guys had found someone else to go into the Sensual Grotto with. But I was tired by then, so I went home, satisfied. |
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