Life After Promiscuity: A BDSM Love Story

By Dorothy Freed

A REAL-LIFE JOURNEY INSIDE THE BDSM SCENE

 

Dorothy Freed has been involved in the BDSM scene since the 1970s. In this memoir she writes openly, nostalgically, and lyrically about exploring her sexuality, including her experiences as a submissive and a Domme in a decades-long committed D/s relationship. This collection of interlinked vignettes gives the reader a front row seat to her diverse kinky adventures, providing sexually charged anecdotes that shed light on BDSM and her observations and reflections about the lifestyle. It is laced with humor, warmth, and rich descriptions of San Francisco and The Scene as it progressed over many years. It's a celebration that proves that you're never too old for passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordwooze Publishing
• Release date: Jan 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224208135

Book preview

Foreword

Dorothy Freed had been part of the Bay Area BDSM community for many years prior to joining us at the Erotic Reading Circle at the Center for Sex & Culture several years ago – though I had not gotten to know her when I began exploring the scene in the late 1980s. Anyway, that’s not what she was initially writing about when she came to the Circle and quickly became a dedicated participant, sharing her work month after month with a group of seasoned writers as well as newcomers, everyone’s work received openheartedly and met with supportive feedback. At that time, she came to share chapters of the memoir she was writing about coming to San Francisco as a divorced young mom in the 1970s, and the life of promiscuity that let her narrow down what (and who) she really wanted. That book was published as Perfect Strangers after she had read almost every chapter to us. But you already know from the title of the book you hold in your hands that Dorothy’s life after promiscuity was yet to come.

Perfect Strangers takes us time-traveling back to the Haight-Ashbury and other iconic San Francisco scenes, but it didn’t gather together all the tales Dorothy had to tell. At the very end of that first volume she introduces us to her Sir, the man at the heart – quite literally – of her second memoir, and the one with whom she embarked on her BDSM adventure. As I sit down just before Valentine’s Day to tell you a bit about it, I’d say she has written a deep and moving love story – in the guise of a kinky erotic book.

Because Dorothy’s bond with her Sir is kinky – and deep. And her stories about their erotic adventures do more than open a window into their almost forty-year (and counting!) relationship. These chapters also take us back to an exciting and pivotal moment in the Bay Area’s BDSM community – to me, they’re also a love letter to a time and a place.

The early 1980s saw a kinky community that was emerging from the shadows and that had begun to diversify into multiple clubs that welcomed people of a variety of kinks, identities, and interests. Gay and bisexual men had their own realm at The 15 Association and bars like the Bootcamp and the Eagle, and if they were into fisting they could play at the Catacombs. Dykes, bisexual women, and lesbians had been welcomed by Samois since its founding in 1978 (after it broke up it was succeeded by the Outcasts). Heterosexual BDSM players could gather together in one big group – though the biggest club, Society of Janus, had been founded as a pansexual support organization and until the mid-80s welcomed everyone. (Janus generally did not throw parties in those days, but its members would learn about their play options through the well-networked organization, and other play groups like Serpent Mountain had ties to Janus members.)

Players could also choose to pursue their top and bottom interests with clubs that were female-dominant and male-submissive, like the mystically minded Service of Mankind Church or the Essemian Society, or male-dominant and female-submissive, like Gemini. And big parties for all of the above were not unheard of, some held at the Shotwell Meeting House. The Folsom Street Fair, which also brought all kinds of leatherfolk and kink-interested players together, began in 1984.

If dominance, bondage, or S/M play attracted you, it was easier to find compatible partners in kinky spaces. Many of the play spaces in that era were private, too – BDSM parties often happened in people’s own homes, and you first had to find an entrée into the community to be invited to them. If you got your hands on a copy of Spectator Magazine – which had started as the sex section of the Berkeley Barb – you had it made. Dorothy met her Sir the way many sex-and-sensation-hungry people did in those days – via classified ad.

Once you had met someone in the scene, you could explore it at greater breadth. And explore Dorothy does, with her Sir almost always at her side. She takes us to house parties, to more public places like the notorious event held in a shuttered Hamm’s brewery, where you could look down from a catwalk into huge empty beer vats with scenes going on inside. And because this is an erotic memoir and the document of a long and devoted relationship, we are invited into the home Dorothy and her Sir share, to be flies on the wall and see the cuffs, the suspension devices, the sex toys, the dominant desires and submissive satisfactions.

Dorothy brings us into the sizzling hot play – but also into the headspace of a strong woman as she steps into a submissive role, learning more about her own desires as she goes. We ride along with her adventures, experience her attraction for her Sir, and see the new persona that emerges as she gets more and more comfortable with their play. We learn about kinky sex, for sure – but also about the role of kink in an ongoing relationship.

I didn’t come to San Francisco until the later 1980s, so I missed the blossoming of the community that Dorothy experienced first-hand. But that was decades ago, and even dedicated kinksters in the twenty-first century might not have any idea how we met and connected back then. For that matter, dear reader, you might not be a kinkster at all – at least, not at present – but this tale is for you, too. Dorothy’s gift is to open the door for all who are curious about what’s inside, and when you peek in, you’ll clearly see how erotic BDSM can be. You’ll also be invited to experience Dorothy’s love of power exchange – and of her beloved Sir.

—Carol Queen, San Francisco, January 31, 2021

Introduction to the BDSM Scene: San Francisco, 1983

My story began with a stern dark-haired stranger and the erotic innocence of a newly collared slave.

My ascent or descent into the world of SM, as we called it then, was, all things considered, relatively painless. The true pain was endured long before I acknowledged the truth of who I was, erotically speaking—during the dishonest years, when I fantasized but did not do, desired but did not dare.

Until I came out, I scratched only the barest surface of my deepest erotic needs…

I was a college-educated visual artist, a business owner, and the divorced single parent of two young adult sons. As an unattached woman in the mid-70s, in hot pursuit of sexual liberation, I had engaged in enough of what kinky folks refer to as vanilla sex to last a lifetime—partnering up with at least one hundred men, whose names, but for an exceptional few, were soon forgotten.

In the end, when this rampantly promiscuous cycle of my life drew to a close, the lovers who stood out for me were the bold ones, who held my hands pinned above my head and pressed against the mattress while they plunged their cocks deep within my opening as they fucked me. Others bound my wrists with silk scarves, or slapped my ass and laughed unapologetically at my pretense at outrage.

By the time the ’70s ended, so did my casual sex lifestyle. By then, I had taken sufficient time to analyze my erotic experiences—and understood the intrinsic nature of my desires by the mental images that triggered my orgasms.

By the early ’80s, I moved beyond the limited world of casual sexual encounters and began a serious flirtation with BDSM—despite my considerable fears.

My fears, and most likely everyone else’s, about coming out kinky were as follows:

My realization that my greatest erotic turn-on was sexual submission placed me, as a strong independent woman, immediately at odds with the feminist ideals of my time. Being sexually dominant would have been the more acceptable choice for the ’80s woman—blood-red lips, saucer-sized earrings, padded shoulders, and high platform boots. On the surface, at least, submission appeared uncomfortably like the passive female role model I’d grown up with in the ’50s, a time when men brought home the bacon and women cooked and served it.

The mindset of submission turned me on above everything. Socially acceptable or not, I was wired that way.

But what would become of me if I permitted myself to live out my secret fantasies—or rather, what would I become?

Might my desires escalate out of control, until I had no limits left at all? Could spanking or the use of nipple clamps be gateway activities to more extreme and brutal forms of play?

And there was the pithy issue of how far outside of society’s tightly defined norm did I really want to venture? After all, it’s one thing to play SM games and wear trendy black leather handcuff belts and skirts with thigh-high slits—and another thing entirely, to self-identify as a sadomasochist in a culture that labeled it as perversion.

In 1983 I had three extraordinary experiences. First off, mere weeks after coming out kinky to a few trusted friends, I summoned all my courage and attended my initial SM event—a flagellation demonstration presented by the Society of Janus, a pansexual organization dedicated to promoting safe, sane, and consensual SM practices.

The event was held at the old Hamm’s Brewery, located in San Francisco’s steamy South of Market district—where I confronted the undeniable truth of the nature of my erotic desire.

Then, on December 10, 1983, I met my Sir, who would become my Dom and life partner, as a result of a relationship ad I placed in the now defunct San Francisco Bay Guardian. We met on a blind date that was so dynamic, so filled with explosive emotions, that I felt moved to give myself to him as his property on that same magical night!

And on December 31, during the final hours of 1983, came the invitation to enter the world of my fantasies, at a New Year’s Eve party that took place in an upscale home overlooking the Bay. This extraordinary evening began my personal year of wonderful—the year I could not stop smiling! It was a year of constant erotic arousal, and multiple orgasms, and the kind of sexual satisfaction I had longed for all my adult life!

If this was indeed perversion, it felt right to me!

Flagellation Demonstration

The BDSM club’s flagellation demonstration took place on the top floor of an abandoned San Francisco brewery, in an empty beer storage vat the size of a swimming pool. Two black-booted Dominants, one female and one male, had already climbed down the steep metal ladder, affording access to the vat’s black-painted floor some eight feet below.

There, a suspension system, consisting of a hefty wooden beam, had been laid across the vat’s opening, and was tightly clamped to the six-inch-high concrete lip protruding from its top. This was installed for the Dom’s use—as was the wood-framed, padded spanking bench set ominously on the floor. The Tops strode about looking steely-eyed, their whips snapping, indicating their readiness for action, as they waited for the festivities to commence.

A Rubenesque submissive with a girlish face descended the ladder, setting one foot carefully before the other, as she eased her bulk from one rung to the one below it. She began removing her garments after reaching the bottom, folding them neatly and setting them, with exaggerated care, on the floor to the right of the bottom rung. Her movements were slow and trancelike as she approached the Dominants. Her melon-sized breasts and fleshy ass cheeks swayed with each step she took. Dropping gracefully to her knees, she kneeled before the black-clad Mistress, pressing her lips abjectly to the woman’s highly polished boots. Chilly-eyed, the Domme stared down at her for a good thirty seconds, before commanding her, with a sharp snap