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By Virginia Vitzthum

June 15, 1999 | Perceval endured 10 years of sexual abuse by dissociating, his mind floating off from the body being raped and fondled by his mother. Dissociation is an elegant escape from brutality, but a less and less coherent self returns after each flight. (Many sexually abused kids end up with multiple personality disorder.) Perceval remains compartmentalized and splintered 50 years later. "You can't choose emotions to keep," he says flatly. "You kill them all."

On Lee's orders, Perceval constantly adds to his "Myth," a story-journal about the master-slave relationship the two use to heal Perceval from the incest. "Survivors usually get to experience rape and incest many times," Perceval writes. "Not because we want to, exactly, but because we do not feel it when it actually happens, so we replay it in our heads ... We do that until we die -- or until we let ourselves feel it."

Four years ago, after his father died, Perceval entered therapy. He also started reading about gay men and noticed that many had had childhoods like his. He went to a workshop for gay men given by the Oakland sex school Body Electric. There a combination of breathing and massage sent him into a trance. From his altered state it became clear that, by inserting enemas and other things into him, his mother had sexually abused him.

As a child, he escaped into the Greco-Roman, Norse and Arthurian myths. Now he's taken his name from the young knight of the Round Table and stories are back at the center of his life: He's documenting his rituals with Lee, and he recounts his childhood at his incest survivors' 12-step group. Narration, naturally a somewhat dissociated act, seems more so when Perceval relates his mother's abuse. The weary monotone reciting the child-abuse spiel is flatter than the rest of his personality.

Talk therapy and bodywork helped him sort the memories, Perceval writes, but he still didn't feel "the feelings that should accompany those memories." He needed a new personal mythology to replace his mother's drama, to "record over the messages." He began building the next version of Perceval using the fragmentation he learned at his mother's knee, his childhood books and the role-play of S/M.

The myth-making kicked into high gear when he met Lee, who took control of the ritual, sex and psychotherapy. Lee sized Perceval up as someone who'd "done a lot of recovery work and was ready for someone who could play the role of a teacher, a protector, a daddy, a master, so he could give up some control and allow himself to become a boy in a sexual way." Though that last phrase makes me queasy, being a "sexual boy" is a fait accompli for Perceval: "Abuse sexualizes the whole universe. I'd get a hard-on seeing a sunset or hearing a symphony."

The first time they "played," last March, Lee tied Perceval loosely to the bondage table. Perceval read this as an invitation to resist, so he began to slip out of the bonds and said, "I'm really a top, this is all a mistake." Lee, who probably weighs 40 pounds more than Perceval, slammed him back down and tied him tighter. After flogging him, Lee held Perceval and stroked his hair and face. Perceval says he began to sob, but all feeling stopped, he realized later, as his mind alighted briefly on his mother, with her two moods of "amorous and punitive."

Then Lee ordered Perceval to write about "what the evening brought up for him," a practice the two have continued. Perceval writes third-person accounts of their scenes and mails or reads them to Lee or to his answering machine. Lee's other overarching order is that Perceval must tell Lee if he starts to feel abused -- physically, psychologically, or verbally. "The realization that I could say 'stop' and it would was mind-blowing," says Perceval.

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