S/m is an art. It cannot be quantified or reduced to the abstractions of mathematics, and as such it is truth in its rawest form. Rainer Maria Rilke described this in one of his letters: "Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further." He is speaking of the Western Front in World War I, but he is also talking about all art, because what makes great art is that it takes us to that end of experience, without the bullets or the bayonets pointed at our bellies. The scene of "King Lear" in the storm can as dangerous to an audience psychologically as battle is to a soldier physically. War is an art.

Basic Training for war begins by stripping away a person's civilian ways. Sir, the many who taught me how to do S/m on a deeper, more intimate level than I had in my youth, knew this well. He had trained men during and after World War II and continued to train them as he grew older. He was one of those men who, on discovering his homosexual nature decided to come to the West Village and explore it. He was there from the end of the dark days of the 50s through the Golden Sunrise of Gayness that was the 60s and 70s, until AIDS and the conservative backlash of the 1980s change our ways. He was born in 1921 and died in 1983, one of the victims of the Gay Plague, as AIDS was called then.

I was introduced to him in Master Jack's studio on West 28th. He wasn't tall, maybe 5'8", but for a man in his late-50s he was in remarkable shape, thin and rock hard. I was used to Jack being very informal with me, someone I could joke with. He taught me to think about S/m, not just do it. "Tell me," he would ask, "What is she feeling," pointing to a woman standing in the corner, trembling from having been spanked. I was used to him treating me as a part of the scene without being in the scene.

The day I walked into Jack's studio to meet Sir was different. Jack was behind his desk, in his chair. Sir was on a couch, sitting very straight. Jack introduced us, but he was much more formal than usual. Not anything that I could state objectively, except for the fact that it was the only time I'd ever felt Jack's dominance. I didn't sit.

Sir asked Jack if I was the boy he'd been talking about. Jack said I was, and Sir stood up. "I hear you don't wear black."

"No, I wear red, like a...."

"You can call me Sir." These two were running a scene on me. How dare they?

"No, I don't wear black." I'm not going to guarantee the exactness of the above dialogue, but the smile on Sir's face is indelible in my mind.

As the conversation developed I found out that he was gay and that Jack thought that since I was having all kinds of woman problems I should maybe go and play with the boys for a while. Jack thought that it would be the better for me to learn this way than by simply coming to TES meetings. The reason that I'd walked by TES five times was because I was afraid that I'd be walking into a meeting full of Leathermen who wouldn't take no for an answer. I hated going to the Village because I was always being cruised, and here was the man who was every bit as tough as I thought of myself, and he was gay. It was my first lesson.

I went to his place on West 14th, and he examined me. Not a physical but a sincerity examination. We set the rules or rather the lack of them. There was to be no sex between us, but pretty much anything stimulating, frightening or painful was okay. What could he do to me, I wondered out loud to him, that I couldn't endure? That was my next lesson.

Sir had a whipping post that his slave could set up in the bedroom. It was waiting for me. His slave fastened me to the post, and I got the most thorough flogging I have ever gotten in my life. He flogged me many times later, but this one was different. He was trying to break me, to show me that there were things he could do that were beyond my endurance, and he did it without a safeword. That was the other lesson. It seemed that just as I was about to ask him to stop, he would back off, then he would take me higher and higher, then he would back off. I could feel him behind me, although I never saw him.

I passed out after what I learned later was an hour and a half. He told me that he'd wanted to take me there; I don't know how much of that was truth and how much of that was just taking advantage of the situation but it felt like truth at the time.

I woke up on the couch with the most incredible feeling of connectedness to the world. I had spent long hours meditating to find this place and here he had taken me to it with an hour's flogging. "Good Boy," he said, "Let's go to dinner." We went to dinner. "Now tell me what you felt as I was working with you." He talked me through the scene, probing me with questions. I didn't think he'd be that interested in how I felt, beyond the fact that I'd had a good time, but he wanted to know everything. This wasn't easy, I was still woozy from the flogging. As we talked I began to realize that he knew everything in my head, knew how I was at every step of he flogging. He was just getting me to say if for myself. How could I be that kind of mind reader? I asked him how he knew what I was feeling. "I've been there son, I've been there."

I went home to think and sleep, but the next night he wanted me with him to learn more. He showed me the technique of flogging then let me practice on his slave. Flogging is a matter of aim and reading one's partner; simple, except for the part about reading one's partner. He did the same thing Jack did, questioning me about how the woman felt.

This is the way he taught. First I felt it, then I made his slave feel it. It was a good way to teach me because I could see how my reactions were reflected in his slave's reactions. There are some things which are universal to all men, he would assert, and one of them is their reaction to pain.

He learned this during World War II. Combat veterans rarely speak of their experiences; it is too painful. He explained how he knew about pain by talking about combat. He had fought in the Pacific Theater in some of the more horrific fights of that war. One in particular, Tarawa, had been slog across an island with no cover, nothing to use to hide from the lethality of modern weapons and the sight of what they could do to a man. He had seen many killed and many wounded, both Japanese and American. "Men fight like individuals," he told me, "but they are wounded and die each like the other." Once they are wounded they scream, they cry, and they call for their mothers. All of them. He applied that knowledge to his S/m, and it worked. It was a lot of work to learn how to see it and feel it. but once you know that you can apply that.

If it was those who came back from World War II who began the scene as we know it, in their homes in the case of the Straight community and in Leather Bars for the Gay community, then this was the their time. The grinding conformity of the 1950s had been broken up when John F. Kennedy was elected president. A new generation, born in the 20th Century and tempered by war, had arisen and now they were going to take some of that freedom they had fought for.

West Street and the Leather Bars were crowded. New men were coming into the bars all the time. Stonewall had liberated the pent-up fires of Gay Culture, and these few men were in control of the leather brand of it, because they had the reputations for being good players.

For those who want to romanticize this time, I would caution against it. It really wasn't much different from our time, as the only real difference is that they didn't know about disease, so everyone was freer with his own body. The older venereal diseases seemed to be gone with the antibiotic revolution, and AIDS hadn't appeared yet. It hit hardest among the older ones, the ones who may have carried the virus from before Stonewall. Sir was one of them. He first began to be sick in 1980, and by 1982 he was very ill, covered with cancer lesions and losing his muscle tone.

He dismissed me in June of 1982. He told me he didn't want any heterosexual boy watching him die. He would go back home to die. It seemed appropriate to leave the place he had lived the life he wanted and return to the place he had escaped in order to have that life. I understood, but it made me cry. I was in his office on Wall Street, and he sat behind his desk looking very old. Master Jack died in September then Sir died in October. I left the scene. After Jack's funeral I just wanted to feel "normal" again, so I went out and pursued other interests. I hoped to find someone who could play, but who would not be a part of the hot house of the public scene.

Here is what Master Jack and my Sir taught me: Every person in the scene is a person first. Master Jack may have joked that all women were submissive in their bones, but I never saw him treat any woman with contempt. Sir could yell and intimidate with the best of them. His interest in the scene was danger, creating and experiencing danger, but he was among the most gentle of men when one was in trouble. It was what made them good tops, that they cared for people. I learned to listen, not just to the words, but to the emotions behind the words and most of all to the body. A person can fool you with their words, but the body never lies. I learned to be patient in a scene: Take the time, walk with your victim, don't try and get ahead of him or her. If it takes an hour and a half to warn him or her up, then it takes an hour and a half to warm him up.

I don't know where one can get this kind of training today. It seems that some people have this knowledge to begin with, while others can never learn it because the screams of their own needs drown out the signals they are getting from their partner. Sir used to say that if someone is lousy in the bedroom they will be lousy in the bar (or for that matter, the dungeon). This is my experience.