I initially wrote this as a stream of conscious note on my iTouch while riding through the underground tunnels of my adopted hometown. There is part of me that wants to just publish it unedited, as the raw thoughts that streamed into my head during my performance of the socially acceptable role called a "commuter". This way, i can provide a view into my mind during a period of "normalcy" and day-to-day activity. But, i'm not even sure this is something the reader desires, nor do i necessarily think it is all that authentic.
Why would the reader really care about my thoughts during a period of routine banality? And even if they did, are these the only representation of my thoughts that i can offer? Admittedly, the forum for the words i publish here takes the shape of one that pursues the boundaries and landscapes of my sexuality, so it makes sense that the subject of any thesis i make should also resemble that same shape. But there are parts of me that wonders if this one-dimensional character has worn its welcome. Perhaps i've lived all i could through this web journal, and the authenticity resides elsewhere inaccessible to my readers.
With that said, i present to you the following, with as few edits as i could make to maintain authenticity:
I live a double life. I have two Twitter accounts. I have two separate Gmail accounts. The same with YouTube, DeviantArt, Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, etc. On one vein, I maintain my public, identity-laced persona, never veering past the deviant line my mind constantly crosses. While the other sprays his sexual/physical avatar all over the place. It is the best example of arrested development I can think of. Yet, I can do little about this truncated existence. Society insists I remain closeted. (is it society's insistence or, perhaps, my own?)
Meanwhile, I'm taunted by those who have managed to broadcast a public, kinky representation of themselves and I have to wonder what penalty must they pay?
FetishKitsch - They are a genuine, intimate couple who have chosen to film their kinky, fetish-laden sexual escapades. For numerous reasons (their genuineness, their attractiveness, their passion, etc.), they have managed to make a living doing this, for the most part. This is not the bit that i covet. I do not wish to turn my play sessions with my girl into a commercial venture. I've made a few photos and one video, but have no plans to expand on these efforts. What attracts me to their level of openness is their geography. They do not live in fetish-friendly Germany, or even the tolerant environs of the U.K. (or even Canada). No, in fact, they live in the slow Mid West of the US of A. They have no compunction for revealing not only their sexual tastes, but their faces and their names (assuming they are not pseudonyms). I envy their liberated approach to exposing their sexuality. Some may look at my site and think i've done my own emancipation. However public i've been, you will never find my name/face associated with the identity known as "Deity".
Darenzia - She is a bona fide fetish model. She's stunning. She's modeled with some amazing beauties and for some amazing photographers. I adored her as skin candy through the various websites and periodicals i explored. It wasn't until i found her on Twitter that i developed an intellectual crush on her. I cannot recall how i came across her Twitter feed, but it has been an absolute thrill to behold. She has a rapier, sarcastic wit that doesn't quite fit the graceful elegance of her beauty - and that's what makes her all the more interesting. She talks shit about everyone. She knows how to use the medium of 140 characters to add pizazz into the world, all the while wishing you could personally witness the life she leads. In the time that i've been following her (as myself, not Deity), there has been no less than 40 times i've wanted to reply to something she posted. I recognize i run a little bit of a risk for my "professional" self to publicly declaring through the list of those i follow on Twitter that i keep track of the comings and goings of a riske, fetish model. The only explanation i can offer as to why i do it is that i've grown weary.
I'm tired of putting one face forward while concealing another. Next year will present me with my fourth year of authoring content through this site, via this Deity persona. There is a great deal of frustration in only being able to interact with a virtual audience, meanwhile living a life as someone my closest associates only know to a certain depth. I look at FetishKitsch and Darenzia and wonder what it would be like if i melded the two spheres. Would it turn out to be what i wanted, or were all the risks i drew up in my brain factual and not exaggerations.
Am I too safe? Too cautious? Perhaps too self-important. It's very hard to determine when to play it safe and when to let go.
Constantly hiding sucks. Especially if it's just rote and unnecessary. Should I risk it and put me and my girl's likeness out there just to say "Fuck this, I'm sick of hiding."? Or should I not take the bait and stay veiled?
I do not have so much hubris to believe my little web journal gets anywhere near the notice or traffic that FetishKitsch and Darenzia get, so it may not be all that much of a risk were i to take away the masks i keep on both my girl and i.
Lately however, those have not been the questions i've been pondering. As i face the end of another year, and think forward about the year to come, i wonder how much longer i will continue to give this persona and these black walls any more of my energy.
13 comments:
Yes.
Hiding sucks.
I have close friends who know nothing of all this. I had a story published in a real book you can hold in your hand and I couldn't celebrate with them. I'm involved with a man, and have been for more than 2 years now, but for various can't tell my friends. One friend, who happens to be a masochist, knows I am submissive and a little about the relationship, but no more than she could see on the blog.
I am single, yet not, and can't tell friends that I feel very fulfilled as things are.
I keep a part of myself hidden away in a golden box. It glows fro the gold and glows from the happiness inside. But around others, I keep it locked tight.
And who knows? Maybe some of my friends are harboring the same secret?
It's sad...
It can at times feel as if we have split ourselves into two pieces – the person we present to the world and the person we know ourselves to be on the inside. I know it has frustrated me.
But, consider this: If we, the readers, were to meet you on the street knowing what we know about you, I don’t think we would feel that you have split yourself in two at all. Your reading of the power exchange is, I would bet, right in line with all the other aspects of your personality.
As well, I would take a guess that your sense of your place in the power exchange you share with your girl has had a huge effect on the other aspects of your life – your working life, your friends and family. One learns so much about oneself by this sort of introspection, attention; mentoring and guidance that I choose to believe those inner elements are capable of rising to the surface to do good more generally in the world.
As an example, the patience you have learned to exhibit must surely come in handy in your professional life. The guiding of those below you in the workforce has no doubt benefitted from all you have learned about leading another human being in a power exchange relationship too. I really do think these parts of us are, to some extent, transferable into other situations.
As I said over at my own journal, these concepts of dominance and submission aren’t necessarily intuitive for most people and I think we are lucky to be living in a time where we have a way of reaching out to one another with like minds for support and sustenance.
As Aisha said to me earlier today, our web journals are “sacred” places. You must, of course, do what is right for you but I have benefitted so enormously from reading your words over the years that I remain hopeful that you might be willing to share with us your thoughts for a good time longer on whatever time frame suits you.
If your friends, family and business associates never know precisely how you live you life, they will at least experience knowing you as the person who has benefitted enormously from coming to know and express himself so vividly and powerfully on these pages.
So you're leading a double life. Think of it as something cool. It actually is. Who'd benefit from a lifting of your anonymity? Certainly not this audience of yours.
Jane's right, your writing is quality content. Do you need more endorsement than that?
Of course it might be interesting to see more of what you do to her. But only as an extra to your prose.
Oh, and would you please capitalise the I's? Not to do so is a silly habit of yours.
I do not hide who or what I am and there are both benefits and drawbacks to this. The drawbacks however are nothing more than irritating niggles, such as idiots in local pub making (what they think) are smart comments. However, I do have the luxury of not having to be concerned with any professional life.
The way I always saw it was that those who truly love me and know me, both family and friends, will accept me, and if they don't then they really should not be in my life. They don't have to approve, don't have to understand, they just have to accept. And in all honesty I lost nobody from my life after 'coming out' - the only negativity I have encountered was from my ex-husband when he was attempting to discredit me in custody hearings.
I suppose you have to ask yourself - what's the worst that can happen if I publically show that side of me - then take it from there.
Bare in mind that what we do scares the bejesus of us every single day.
I guess we have learned to embrace the life we never intended as we have just fallen into what we do right now. We do not intend to do it forever, but we do know that we will leave an indelible mark on the internet. Hopefully that mark will be limited to the fetish community.
We have vanilla friends, acquaintances, and family who have no knowledge of our double lives, and I fear to think of the consequences if they did find out. It is just something we have to live with in the backs of our minds.
We try to rest in the fact that whoever would find our site would already be looking at fetish porn. That and neither of us intends to be famous for anything else in our lives.
If at any point our two lives were to collide and we would be forced to choose, our fetish lives would probably cease to exist.
o.g.,
How are you doing, darlin? Sounds like you're doing well. Whenever we have family over to our place, or if someone housesits, we have to basically hide all of our equipment and paraphernalia. That part, while it is irritating, it also seems like i'm cheating myself because this is our home. These are the walls that make up our safe house, and i still have to hide?
Vesta,
Certainly there are elements of our power exchange that both inform my everyday actions but are also informed by these daily interactions.
It just doesn't feel so sacred anymore. Most times, these days, it feels more sacrilegious than anything else.
reader,
Thank you very much for your comment.
Unfortunately, i'm beyond the need of endorsement from my readers to keep writing here. That need must come from within, and i feel like every entry i post as Deity continues to expand the distance from my identity and the one attached to that nom de plume.
Not capitalizing the I's is something i've explained a few times. It's just hard-coded by now. Something that we'll not fuss over too much, right?
shape shifter,
How exactly did you come out? I'm not sure i know the details of that. I'm very curious to hear more, should you be willing to share.
dan,
Is it worth the implications? No, clearly not. Thus the reason i've remained so ardently anonymous. Ask anyone who has reached out to me via this journal, and even though we've established some amount of dialogue that might encourage a veil of trust, my personal details remain very, very submerged.
Not sure how my fetish/kink live would cease to exist. I've forcibly tried to expel it before, and it was a soul-wrenching exercise in futility.
@Deity - I suppose the easy to way to answer your query is to say that I simply did not hide any more. For example, if my mother asked what I was doing at the weekend I would tell her I was going to a fet club, if my eldest daughter asked what was in the parcel I had been delivered I would show her the latest bit of kit. After I was collared I wore my bracelet that states clearly "property of Keith", which of course prompted questions at work, with family and non-kink friends. At the time, our local munch was based in a pub in our (very small) village and both landlord and locals knew who we were. I became politically active re BDSM rights and met with a number of MPs. Basically, all these small things added up to people realising exactly who I was and for the first time in my life I felt free.
I'd love to say that living your life openly is the way to go... but you know me and know that there's NO chance I'd advise such a thing! :-) But I do dream of it, for you especially. I know it's frustrating, living in dual ways, but perhaps you're analyzing too much as well? After all, we're talking about things that have always been essentially private and haven't ever needed to be made overtly public till our generation. (At least, not in the same internet-y way.) Perhaps the question is just to wonder whether you need to "hide" yourself versus whether you need to "broadcast" yourself?
I expect the answer, in your case, is found somewhere in the middle.
Much, much love,
a.
Dear a,
It is a pure joy to hear from you.
I am most certainly analyzing too much, but is it that these things only have a public life because of the Internet or do they have that public life because we have a public life?
I really try to refrain from comparing a bent for kink/SM to one who is homosexual - but i feel it is inevitable. On the one hand, you could've operated normally as a "nuclear family unit" in the 50's if you had a penchant for SM - you just needed to keep your whips and leather in the closet. Whereas, if you truly wanted to be honest with the world about your homosexuality, you had to risk breaking a vast number of social norms.
In this way, i agree with you. There are few people who need to know what i need to get off, especially if that entails having my wife tied up in the bedroom, while i go polish my Buick in my suburban driveway. But isn't being public about your homosexuality, in a sense, letting others know what you need to get off?
Look at me. This is what you're capable of. One comment and i'm wishing i had a conversation with you - but instead i'll conduct it in my comments section, for now.
Much, much love back to you, darlin.
Think of it as something cool. It actually is. Who'd benefit from a lifting of your anonymity? Certainly not this audience of yours.
Jane's right, your writing is quality content.It just doesn't feel so sacred anymore. Most times, these days, it feels more sacrilegious than anything else
Your closet is constructed from your need for social acceptance and a thousand instances of social sanction. How could you not bridle against it? It's an affront to your dignity and self-respect, made worse because you are complicit. That's enough to make anyone with any pride feel a little bit sick.
But here's the thing: you know that what you are and what you share with your sub is a thing of beauty. You know this deep in your bones. You know it in myriad moments of ecstasy, pain and solace. So other people don't get it, and would react in negative ways if they found out? To be what you are has taken courage, stepping away from the mainstream to create a space and ideals dictated by you. But you need a pinch more courage to heal what ails you, to become completely unto yourself. Then you will not resent having to put your toys away when family comes to visit. It will cause no more disturbance than if you refrained from fucking on the coffee table with your father-in-law on the couch.
It's different that so much of your life is saturated with dominance, submission and sex (and if there's one thing that causes trouble, morbid fascination and revulsion, it's difference). If anything, have pity for the others, that they do not know your joy, and would so dreadfully misunderstand it if they were to discover the props of your lifestyle. Just don't beat yourself up for hiding. We all need family, work and a safe place in the tribe. Maybe part of it is that you need to get over being so pedestrianly normal as to need those things too?
Sorry for another post, but I wanted to clarify that I meant no offense by suggesting that you are in some way pedestrianly normal, or that you might have a hard time with it. I just meant to suggest that peace may come by reconciling this normality with your sexuality. I really think that however atypical you may be in sex, it is very good and normal that you need some social acceptance. To put it in other words, you may put stock in being a freak, but I don't think you want to be the kind of freak that eschews family and friends.
Furthermore, I don't think your sexuality is quite what you think it is. There is a part of you that craves dominance. There is a different part of you that realizes that the dominance you seek is somewhat antediluvian and primitive. You're a modern man and don't want to be primitive. It's an extremely uneasy dichotomy you carry around with you there. The challenge of modernity is not to see the dichotomy, the black and white, but to integrate both into a common, seamless whole. I don't claim to have done this myself, but imagine that it can only be accomplished by becoming at ease with the fact that you are at once both primitive and modern, at times driven entirely by appetite, but capable of great discipline.
Having read your blog a bit, it seems you already have all of the pieces. Absolve yourself. Then you can start to see your life with your sub as a delicious secret, made all the more precious and finely textured by its contrast with your "normal" life.
You’re making such great progress! It’s going to be a beautiful piece. Tell me — is it an original design? What’s it’s significance to you?
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