I asked for all this pain

I experimented in the S/M scene to cede control and test my own limits. What I never expected was to feel safe

Published September 22, 2013 7:00PM (EDT)

  (<a href='http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=1663373'>DoctorKan</a> via <a href='http://www.istockphoto.com/'>iStock</a>/Salon)
(DoctorKan via iStock/Salon)

There aren't many men who can control someone just with their eyes, like some sort of Batman supervillain with an extra-sensory ability to throw anyone they look at into a hypnotic trance. Master Avery, however, is one of them, and as I sat across from him in a Manhattan bar, talking about the S/M scene we were going to have the next day, I would have done anything he told me. It's not just that I wanted him sexually (and as a lithe 5-foot-10 with distinguished graying hair and classically masculine features, he's everything I want to have sex with for the rest of my life), but it’s like I wanted to be a part of him, as if I wanted to become him by becoming his -- a strange shift only possible through the crucible of heavy pain, bondage and submission. Either that or evil superpowers created by a toxic waste spill. Both could work.

I first discovered Master Avery this January at the Sundance Film Festival as one of the costars in James Franco's gay sexploration pseudo-documentary "Interior. Leather Bar." He was showing actors how to flog, tie up and otherwise torture each other in what was supposed to be a late-'70s gay leather bar. From the first moment I saw him, in chaps and a leather cap like a Tom of Finland drawing come to life, I knew I wanted him. It's not just that he was attractive, but also dangerous – the leather daddy who will push you to your physical and sexual limits, an archetype that lives in the collective gay fantasy as much as a locker room romp with Jake Gyllenhaal.

We met in the bar before our session to address the particulars, and he asked me a simple question, "What do you want?" and I really had no answer. I wanted to give S/M a try, to blow past the doldrums ordinary sexual encounters (as easy to come by as ordering chicken pad Thai from the joint down the block) and try something 50 shades of new. As a fairly controlling person in my personal life, I wanted to be completely powerless, overcome by another man in a way that erases...

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By Brian Moylan

Brian Moylan is a writer and sexperiment who lives in New York and bruises quite easily. Follow him on Twitter @BrianJMoylan.

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