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This is a very peculiar remark coming from someone who has eight places where he advocates bondage, one instance where he advocates "Discipline (pain as pleasure)" and offers one brothel technique called "The Goldfish" which advocates tying two people on a bed then leaving them to have sex with each other. (Comfort, 1972, pg. 193) I've always wondered exactly how Dr. Comfort defined "S and M".

The way in which our sexual liberty has been denied is by covering it up. In the 1950s and early 1960s religion and politics were taboo around the dinner table, so sex was nonexistent, except for that conversation which every parent was supposed to dread with his or her child of the same gender. At least this was the myth. Underneath this myth was another culture, that of men's magazines, beatniks and bars. Like most repressive cultures, the 1950s gave rise to a subculture of discontents. The 1960s and 1970s were simply a matter of uncovering that culture. It started with Hugh Hefner, in the 1950s, taking away the tease from the men's magazines by presenting nude women and his Playboy philosophy. (What is ironic today is that the cutting edge magazines for men have now covered up their models.) Hefner presented the beats to the mainstream along with Henry Miller and James Bond. One of the interesting notes from the early days of Playboy was that Mr. Hefner was arrested only once. He gave a party at the Mansion in Chicago and then decided to go to the Wacker Drive underpass to make cave drawings. He was arrested for defacing public property, or something like that.

The next big breakthrough for sexual liberty was the James Bond books. President Kennedy was asked to give a top ten of his favorite books, two of them were James Bond books. Within a week they were on the best seller books. These were my first S/m books. To those who only know James Bond from the emasculated movies (even the Sean Connery ones, although "From Russia with Love" was pretty close) this might seem an odd statement, but a reading of Casino Royale which has several chapters towards the end in which Bond is tortured by having his balls battered with a carpet beater will dispel that notion.

My next introduction to the world of S/m came after I graduated High School and found the Gor Books. For those whose remembrance of these books has to do with the demonization of John Norman, these books were very much an influence on the scene in the 1970s. The Boris covers were made into posters and Master Jack, the first and only President of TES, had them on the walls of his play area. For those who don't know the Gor Books, they were about this mythical planet, a counter-earth, ruled as something of a scientific experiment in survival of the fittest. In this situation women, because of their physical weakness became the prey of men, who could enslave any woman of another city-state or tribe from them. Rather like Mycenaean gone wild.

Then there was Dr. Comfort. While his crack about S/m scared me to a certain extent, the idea that one could tie someone to the bed and give her an orgasm validated my experiences. Here is an interesting anecdote that will illustrate this time better. Dr. Comfort did a lot of his research by calling people prominent in the sexual scene. One of those people was Pat Bond, the father of TES. When Mr. Bond mentioned that he was thinking of forming a political group around SM, Dr. Comfort attempted to discourage him, thinking that the realms of sexuality and politics were incompatible. The idea that sexuality was not spoken of still ran very much through his consciousness, in spite of his understanding of the need to bring it out into the open.

Two years after The Joy of Sex (1974), three other books came out on sexual instruction, these books were specifically, and with one exception, labeled with the term SM. The Leatherman's Handbook, by Larry Townsend, was a book on the Gay SM scene with some instruction, and it was mostly just a platform for Larry Townsend's short stories. SM: The Last Taboo: A Study in Sado-masochism, by Gerald and Caroline Greene, was a book oriented the joys of the cane and the English vice but it was also the first book to try and examine what we do and how it has been studied. They have a chapter on Havelock Ellis and De Sade, two important figures in the study of sexuality. They have a Chapter on B&D (Bondage and Discipline) which covers both the works of Larry Townsend and "John Willie" and the difficulties they encountered. John Willie (real name John Coutts) was the publisher of Bizaare Magazine, the first magazine devoted especially to fetishes and off beat sexuality, rather the parent of "Penthouse Variations". They connect B&D to fetishism and make it sound rather more like a craze than their main interest: male submission and English discipline. In this SM: The Last Taboo, follows the tradition of The Joy of Sex in that it is as much about the author's fetish as it is about the scene as a whole.

Lastly, there was the infamous Imaginative Sex from John Norman, the author of the Gor books. This is the book which was set upon by the wolves of the anti-violence feminism movement. Mr. Norman's fetish is bondage and rape. Of course he is only talking about fantasies (he suggests that the husband should clap his hands so that his wife can react as if she is being whipped.) but humorless politicians needed a bête noir and Mr. Norman was handy. Imaginative Sex is about bringing the mind into the bedroom and instead of the same old thing sexually, using scenarios and fantasy to enhance a marriage's sexual component. It is really a very wonderful book which, if you ignore Mr. Norman's obvious sexism, tells us a lot about what we do. Within the Gor Books we find the beginnings of the cult of the collar. Although it is mentioned only once in Imaginative Sex. For me it was my interest, put right down on paper. My first play partners used to get the book before we played. At the end of the book are a list of 53 scenarios and several appendices on how to dress and discipline a slave girl. Most of this information is about as useful as his advice about whipping, but it is a hot read and a source of ideas. It comes so close, but in the end you can't learn BDSM from books.

TES began as a political organization, "Masochist's Lib" as the Village Voice famously called it in a report on an early meeting, but it quickly became a place in which people exchanged information on technique. This is the origin of all the demos and workshops from the last 33 years or so, at least in the heterosexual community. When I came to New York, TES and the Gay Leather Bars were the only games in town, and I was not gay, so after much soul searching, I had within me as sense that S/m was a mental illness after all, and I had gotten into all kinds of trouble the last time I had come out about my perversion. I think I walked up to the meeting five times before I finally walked in.

It was very different from what I had expected, Leathermen hitting on me, that kind of thing. Rather it was a bunch of people much like me. I seem to remember there were maybe 20 people there, but even more I remember the welcoming atmosphere. All you had to do was stay for the circle, a thing which was mandatory at the time. Another difference was that they served beer and wine at the breaks, the prohibition against drinking/drugs and playing had not arrived, beyond an admonishment not to play while impaired.

Jack use to start the meetings with a story to show what TES was about. The one he used mostly was framed as a question. "If a woman came to you and asked to be spanked, who would be the sadist, the man who spanked her or the man who told her that it was immoral to want to be spanked?" The audience laughed, we all knew the answer to that, we had heard the joke. "Beat me", says the masochist. "No', says the sadist.

After several meetings I finally got the guts to approach Master Jack. Jack ran TES rather like a small southern church, to the point of occasionally asking the audience at meetings to "Say Amen" to something that was said. He was a genial host but always seemed to be occupied with some kind of business and hence, to me the new guy, somewhat inapproachable. I learned that we were in the same business. He was a photographer, and I was an actor and model, and that gave me a chance to approach him away from the meetings. I called, introduced myself and asked to show my modeling book.

He recognized me from the meetings right off and asked why I'd never spoken except in the circle. It flustered me, but he ignored it, and we talked as he looked at my book. He told me later that he was drawn to my intellect and education, in spite of the fact I was still a punk kid at 26.

Jack was born the same year as my father and while not a veteran of World War II, he was old enough to have been. He'd had many jobs over the years, from jazz musician to photographer. It was from his days as a musician that he got the other story he use to tell before TES meetings. "Everything sexual has been considered immoral at some time. When we use to pass the jug in the band we would give the pianist a paper cup, because we knew he liked to eat pussy. Today everyone eats pussy."

His mentoring of me was mostly social and intellectual. He would ask me questions, I would answer them. I would ask questions, he would answer them. I asked him very early how to meet submissive women, and he gave the answer, "First you hug them, then you kiss them, then you fuck them, and then you bring out the toys." It was his way of saying that you had to have a relationship first, then you could take it to an S/m relationship. Sometimes he would pose questions to me from discussions he would have with other people. One day I came to his studio and he asked me "If the Dominant takes care of the sub, who takes care of the Dom." I answered, "The Dominant takes care of himself, that's part of the definition." He used it in the meeting the next week.

It was a very personal kind of thing. One day, after bragging about a particularly notorious scene I'd done with a lesbian top, he began to call me "Super-Dom!". I at first took it as a compliment, until I heard the laughing behind my back. One of the things that everyone learns, newbie to experienced player to lifestyler, is that we have all made mistakes. Jack certainly made them; he was not a technician, but he made up for it in his knowledge of women. He could prolong a spanking for hours giving his "victim" orgasm after orgasm. He would conduct his parties sitting in a throne like chair with a naked woman draped over his knees dressed in almost nothing. The woman would be required to stay there for the whole night if Jack wanted, and no one turned it down.

Once, when I told him about making a woman kiss my boots in an office, he asked me what had happened after that. I told him that unfortunately she'd fallen in love with me. He asked me why I hadn't brought her to a meeting, I told him that I didn't like the way she looked. He laughed, and told me that I was the Dominant and could do something about that. Later I did bring her to a meeting, but she decided that S/m wasn't for her.

He encouraged me to do my first public scene. It was a demo on Gorean bondage techniques, including chains and locks. It was the scariest moment of my life. I had worse stage freight than I'd ever had in a play or movie, but it gave me the confidence to begin to be who I was, but it was also a change in our relationship. When I began to want to learn technique he decided to pass me onto someone else to teach me technique.

Jack had the normal homophobia of his generation, but he had contacts in the Gay world. The man he passed me to was very much a part of that world. I will simply call him Sir, because I made a promise once to him never to use his name in public, and I will respect that promise.