CREATIVE SEXUALITY

This week’s column was written by Michael Bettinger, a retired psychotherapist and family therapist who treated gay men and gay couples, dealing mostly with issues of love, relationships, family, spirituality and sexuality. He is also the author of It’s Your Hour: A Guide to Queer Psychotherapy.

I recently attended the Leather Leadership Conference in San Francisco, (www.leatherleadership.org). Each summer, I attend a weekend in the country known as Leather Levi Weekend (www.leatherlevi.org). Twice a month I attend a meeting of the Leathermen’s Discussion Group (www.sfldg.org). Yet if someone asks me if I am a “Leatherman,” I am perplexed as to what to answer. I don’t have much of an erotic attraction to leather per se. I wear leather both because I ride a motorcycle and I find it stylish. But truth be told, I am usually naked during sex.

The problem I have is with the name of these events. Our community goes by many names with the “Leather Community” being one of the more common. However, a lot of us, including myself, do not have an erotic attraction to leather. Wearing leather garments does not mean we are “into” leather, any more than wearing cotton underpants means we are into “cotton.” Calling ourselves the “Leather Community” is misleading. “Leather” is at best a weak metaphor or euphemism.

All the other labels for our community are equally problematic. We are at times referred to as being into SM or BDSM. Those terms are no more accurate than Leather. Many legitimate members of our community (such as those into fisting or watersports, for instance) have no particular interest in SM or BDSM. Their interests lie elsewhere.

We also need to reject calling ourselves the Kink Community. By definition, “kink” means that we are somehow twisted and/or flawed. While I think it is fine for us to affectionately call ourselves kinky among ourselves, it is a negative term and should not be our primary societal identification. We are actually neither twisted nor flawed in terms of our sexuality.

Sometimes we are referred to as the alternative sex (alt.sex) community. We are not however an “alternative” to anyone. We are who we are. Alt.sex defines us in terms of them. There are similar problems with calling ourselves the sexual minority, sex radical, sex outlaw or non traditional sex community. All these terms are trying to define us by what we are not. None of these terms come close to describing the reality and diversity of our community.

But there is a way to describe is that is positive, accurate, and descriptive. We are the Creative Sex Community. Creative sex is the blending of erotic desires with disparate elements in a harmonious manner. That is what we do. Let me explain.

Virtually all sex is creative to some extent. Adding special lighting or mood music to sex involves creativity. Some of us however raise these additions to an artistic level. Like artists using any other medium, we take disparate elements that just don’t seem like they should go with sex, and make them fit together harmoniously. Some of these disparate elements which we successfully mix with our erotic desires are power games (dominance/submission, master/slave, bondage), pain (whipping, flogging, caning, pinching, slapping, spanking, punching), toys (dildos, vibrators, vacuum pumps, electrical stimulation), non-sexual objects (athletic gear, boots, shoes, uniforms, food), non-sexual body parts (feet, hands), archetypal role plays (parent/child, authority figure/powerless one, human/animal), body fluids (piss, spit, blood, puke, shit), body modification (branding, tattoos, scars, temporary or permanent piercing), and athletic feats (fisting), to name just a few. The list of possibilities is endless. Like the visual artist who can use anything in his or her art, as long as he or she can make it work well, we are free to attempt to add almost anything into our sex lives, provided we can pull it off in a way that gets us off.

Creative Sex is inherently playful, and those involved get all the benefits that any adult (or child) gets from true play. Creative Sex allows for other realities. While it might appear that Creative Sex involves a big element of make believe, what is happening is quite real to the participants. The apparent contradiction between make believe and reality can best be understood to be resolved on the “spiritual” level. At a minimum, what is happening in these encounters is related to the “spirit,” the incorporeal part of each of us. We become artists who are creating playful sexual scenes that exist on both a real and a spiritual level. Creative sex thus allows for the integration within a person of many seemingly disparate parts of an individual’s personality. Or more simply, through creative sex play, you get to be all the parts of you that you really are.

There is a universal need to create in all of us. For some of us the need to create is much more intense. We who are into creative sex are drawn to creating the new and different. We feel drawn to create with our sex lives ephemeral experiences of great pleasure by combining elements not usually associated with each other. In the process, we create an enormous diversity of sexual expression.

Everything exists along a continuum. There is a continuum of creative sex, from mild to wild. Sometimes it involves simple archetypal verbal role plays (daddy/boy, doctor/patient). For others, it involves complex apparatus (crosses, slings, whips, chains, electrical devices, leather or rubber gear, etc.) As long as it involves combining elements that are generally not associated with erotic desires with our sex life in a harmonious way, it is creative sex.

I am suggesting that what we need to do is to start using the term Creative Sex instead of Leather, Lifestyle or other labels. Some year I would like to attend the Creative Sex Leadership Conference. One summer I would like to attend the Creative Sex Weekend. Some month, I would like to go to the Creative Sex Discussion Group. If you are active in any organization that is using the term Leather or another inappropriate label, please ask them to consider changing that.

It will take a generation for this change to occur, but it has to start sometime, and that time is now. For this to work, “Creative Sex” must reach a critical mass of usage. If you now start referring to us as the Creative Sex Community, eventually that critical mass will be reached and the Creative Sex Community will be the name by which we are known.