Crashing the Black Rose

In the Leather Market, vendors are hanging their insanely expensive wares: talon rings with spinning spurs, rubber hoods, breathing tubes, tit clamps, ball gags, chain-mail tank tops, crippling stilettos, leather corsets, all thicknesses of rope, fur-lined handcuffs, vinyl chaps and bustiers and lots of flowing Stevie Nickswear. The most exuberantly filthy garment in the whole bizarre bazaar is a tiny, transparent latex miniskirt -- a dingy, yellowish window for a perpetual moon. Alexis and I chat for a while with a father and son who sell a variety of chastity cock cages -- lockable metal structures that confine, contort and sometimes stretch the penis. The objects are beautiful and horrible, like the twisted gynecological specula in David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers." "The scene's about control and surrender," the mild-mannered father explains, "and guys who see their power in their cock and balls like it taken away."

On our way down to inspect the dungeon, a pushy fellow gives me his card, which, he claims, has no last name because he's a Fed with a security clearance. Unbidden, he launches into a lecture about why he's a dominant. "I basically like a woman who's in my power who I can humiliate and embarrass ... It's like Orwell said in '1984,' the way you exhibit power is to make someone do something unpleasant." The Fed waits until three other Black Rose volunteers join us, then starts taunting me: "You'll be playing down in the dungeon; you're going to love it." I don't want to give offense by expressing just how unappealing the prospect is, so I stammer and my face gets hot. The Fed rhapsodizes, "Ah, a blushing cheek. A sadist appreciates a blush like a painter appreciates a cloud moving across the sky." Maybe I could do a little flogging, I think as I listen to this bully.

After he leaves, a few people sidle up and mutter, "That guy's an asshole, don't listen to him." Alexis introduces me to a submissive, saying, "Now, he's nice." And he is nicer.

(By Sunday night I realize that I like the bottoms, the subs, the masochists more than the masters. And not just because they give me what I want -- better interviews -- but because they consider questions and form thoughtful answers. They seem more at peace with their kink, while the dominants swagger and bluster and overcompensate. The tops answer questions I direct at their partners, sometimes after the bottom defers with his or her eyes, sometimes without such a cue. Because I've seen men, especially men of my parents' generation, treat women this way all my life, the female-topped couples seem better balanced. Plus the male submissives -- compact, muscular guys in dog collars -- are the most attractive quadrant: visual oases amid the rolling dunes of pale flab.)

Alexis takes me across the parking lot and down the steps into the Exhibition Center, where it looks like the set-up for a satanic prom. A young woman is sticking black roses into styrofoam half-spheres to decorate the columns scattered across the floor while a guy in jeans folds shiny black police tape into bows. Many of the 200 volunteers and 45 Black Rose staffers who set up, monitor and mop up after the festivities are scurrying around the gigantic basement with tape and extension cords and stepladders.

The dungeon is sectioned into vague rooms with hospital curtains. Spanking benches share a nook with a ventilated coffin, stocks for different extremities, a stretching rack, an X-shaped lashing cross and a 3-by-3-foot cage with a tiny footstool inside. Enormous toys like these pop up all over the vast rumpus room; the really weird shit is cordoned off in the corners. Through a loading gate at one end, they're tossing in bales of hay and building tiny wooden stalls for the equestrian show, a bizarre phenomenon I will experience fully on Sunday. Pretending to be a horse or a dog, a Canadian explains to me that night, is "the cutting edge of depersonalization."

In the far corner lies the fluorescent-lit bloodletting space. Atop the temporary linoleum floor are a gynecologist's table with stirrups, examining lights, dentist's chairs, medical waste containers and tables for temporary piercing and "cutting," as Alexis puts it. The latter term conjures depressed adolescents on psych wards, and it all starts to seem less theatrical and more pathological.

"Great," I think, "maybe there'll be a place for bulimics to puke, too." Does "cutting" only sound more unhealthy than the rest because I know it as a term for self-mutilation? Though the American Psychologists' Association has removed "S/M" from its manual of disorders, aren't all these tortures somewhat insane outside a sanctioned "playspace"? Is it less crazy to have someone else wound you or to wound someone than it is to wound yourself?

The answer appears to be yes in the flogging workshop, where two large "Impact Acceptance" charts, anterior and posterior, color code the potential for permanent injury to various body parts. Though a roughly equal number of women and men attend the conference, almost everyone in this circle of whip-crackers, including the two instructors, is male. Many are wearing camouflage and other military garb.

A gray-haired butch woman peels off her shirt and bra and offers up her tiny back for a demonstration; an Englishwoman who seems to be her partner stands in front of her, holding her hands and comforting her. The teacher smiles clench-jawed every time his flogger, a bundle of half-inch leather strips about three feet long, hits her reddening back. Over her friend's flinching shoulders, the Englishwoman admonishes the crowd, "Don't ever hit the kidneys or the neck, people. That's just not cute."

Throughout the weekend, I find I can only stay at the Ramada for a few hours at a time, so I end up making five separate trips out to New Carrollton. As I drive home at dusk on Friday, Billie Holiday's "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do" comes on the radio.

With a collage of fragmentary images swirling around my head -- the Fed who wants to humiliate women, the Englishwoman urging classmates to leave the kidneys alone and the roomful of men with whips -- I try to follow the singer down into her seductive masochism. I want to understand, not judge, but when I add overpowering and pain and sex, I keep coming up with domestic violence and rape. My "consenting adults" mantra helps me accept that woman offering up her back, but it doesn't work as well with the men so eager to whip her as effectively as they can.

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