Back in the day (e.g. when M was alive and I actually topped from time to time), I was the inferior top. He had better aim, better everything. I was a pretty shabby top altogether, I always believed. Now I think my insecurity wasn’t entirely accurate. When I took my friend’s canes and applied them to the misbehaving cushions, I found my aim good, my wrist snappy. My friend seemed to think I was hitting hard—and it was only 50% or so. I started to think maybe my topping experience hasn’t been normal, only having topped one person, a boy who liked to take a lot and hard.

Now, back in my own home, I have begun to wonder if I actually possess implements any more. I think they must have disintegrated in the closet, or got lot permanently wherever I put them away that I can’t now remember, like my work SIM card, or my husband.

A few days before encountering my friend’s hockey bag, another friend showed me her flogger. It was purple and brown and beautifully crafted. She let me touch it, and it seemed like it could be soothing and massage-y.

“Do you want to try it?” Friend Two asked casually.

I froze with a polite smile on my face: “I don’t know!” Friend Two didn’t push it; she just set the flogger down on the picnic bench where we were sitting. I remarked that if she’d told me it was a massager, I’d be all over it, but the word flogger was too scary.

But scary how? Certainly I wasn’t afraid it would hurt. I was afraid, on some paralyzed emotional level, to have anything to do with an object labeled Flogger. To use a flogger on myself , or to let someone else use it on me, felt at that moment like it would be crossing an invisible yet indelible boundary. It would mean engaging with kink on a level beyond the verbal. It would be in a way like a first kiss—the first kiss in this life after M.

My real first kiss (excluding stage kisses) came very late, at age 20, and by that time kissing had become a barbed, electrified barrier. I’m not sure I remember my first kiss with M. (Insane!) I remember the hug when we met for the first time, on top of the Empire State Building, and I remember the heavy make-out session on my futon, the first time anyone had touched me in a few places, and how hugely, overpoweringly exciting it was, like nothing I’d ever imagined.

But as for the flogger offered to me casually as a mere sensation experiment, I must have frozen because I was afraid to cross any physical barrier into anything that smelt even vaguely like kink. (How I hate that word, but when I use my word, tgi, people always ask me what it means, so I come off as elitist, speaking a dead, obscure code. But I miss that word. Lots! Come back to me!!) To have played with the flogger, even lightly in fun, would have been to step off of the sidelines and into the play. I wonder if on some level I was thinking, or Casey was thinking: If I do that, then people will start misconstruing my conversation and think I want to be whacked, and I don’t. Just like Casey was saying (it must have been her even though I didn’t know her name yet) before that first kiss at age 20: If you kiss a boy, it means you want to have sex with him.

I was terrified to kiss that first boy, but after two nights of faffing about (and confirming with my promiscuous roommate that kissing did not equal consent to intercourse), I finally kissed him. It felt strange, but not bad. His mouth tasted of popcorn, which he had been eating. He was a freshman and I was a junior, which was seriously robbing the cradle. I remember that night he asked me what I wanted. I was still adjusting to having crossed the first kiss frontier, though I didn’t tell him that. He said he wanted a Relationship, and asked if I did, too. I said I’d like to get to know him a little first. We dozed off, fully clothed, in my narrow university bed. A couple of days later, I heard in the dining hall that he’d started dating someone else. I was blindsided, embarrassed, crushed… Still, it was a good first kiss. I wasn’t in love with him.

Besides first-kiss boy and M, I think I’ve only kissed two other boys. I am 41 years old, and I know this is not normal. My sister makes out on almost every date. Even if she’s bored with the guy, she’ll make out with him to see if he gets more interesting. I haven’t kissed anyone except family, on the cheek, since I kissed M goodbye that morning 26 months ago. It’s not that I’ve resisted; there’s been no opportunity.

by Richard Dadd

Still, if the opportunity to kiss a man ever comes again, I’ll probably be afraid to cross that threshold. I think in person I can come off as very reserved, bordering on cold or conceited; the truth is I’m scared, paralyzed in a way that makes no sense when I explain it. I’m scared of sex, scared of kissing, scared of playing, and apparently even scared of touching a friend’s leather toy if it bears the label flogger.

In the Land of Fairy, you must never eat the food or you’ll have to stay there. If I eat the food in this new world—this hateful world without M—will I have to stay? Of course, this world isn’t like Fairy. We’ve got to stay no matter what, and there’s only one way out—the way he already went.

Night falls. Costumes: both of us still in overalls and white t-shirts. Me, boots. Marky, bare feet. At this time I had short hair. I tucked M’s packet of Marlboro’s (he still smoked one or two in those days) in my t-shirt sleeve, matches in my pocket. Before we started, we realized we wanted to get pictures. It was such a great setup in the basement, dark, a long row of birches against the wall. We didn’t have a camera, so I decided to drive to the gas-station 10 minutes away for a disposable camera. Marky went to prepare and wait in the basement. It was dark, remote, mist streaking across the road. I started to get scared, though I can’t remember exactly why now. Axe murderers? What if I had an accident? Ghosts? It was just very dark, misty, creepy, and ominous. I drove as fast as I could, bought the camera, and sped home. The house was deserted (marky in basement). I felt a deep dread – fear from the drive combined with fear about the scene I was about to do. Objectively, there was nothing to fear about the scene. I wasn’t going to harm him, or he me. I guess it was a kind of stage fright, and also the beginnings of the alchemy that elaborate scenes always brought.

We had both worked in the theater, me since I was five. For both of us, scenes (whether in private or on stage) were reality. We both entered the play with a commitment that created the reality. So, in actuality, I was about to become this sadistic guy in an orphanage. I was afraid of the atmosphere, and I think I wished I didn’t actually have to go through with it. Before going downstairs, I took off my overalls and put on the strap-on with the flesh-colored dildo. In my pocket with the matches, I slipped a tube of KY. Tucking my new cock into my white boxer-briefs, I pulled up the overalls, braced myself, and clumped downstairs to the cellar.

Cement floors, lit by a dim overhead light. Along one raw wall stood all the birches, arranged in descending size. Overalls down, marky bent over – what was it? Not an actual A-frame, but something like it? In his hands, I knew he held some keys. We had never played with a safeword, but since he wanted me to pull out the stops with the birches, and as I’d never wielded them, we decided to use the keys as a safeword (if he dropped them, it meant stop).

Why had we not used safewords? They were and are stock-in-trade for the world of playing. Maybe in the first few scenes we did during his first visit to Gotham there was a safeword. But, if there was, I can’t remember it. Neither of us used it. I suppose it felt artificial, like a violation of the playing contract. How can you be inside a created reality and also be evaluating whether you want to stop the creation? Either you trust your partner or you don’t. Maybe that’s the issue – safewords are probably most useful when playing with someone you don’t entirely trust. By the time we met face-to-face, I knew him better than anyone I’d ever met in my life, including my family. So, for us, safewords, though we might have had them, were something external and extraneous. Did we use the keys in this scene because I was uneasy topping? Probably. At any rate, to spare you the suspense, he clutched the keys hard the whole time, desperate not to drop them. Ha ha.

birches looked rather like this one

So, in walks my character. There was some short dialogue, and then I picked up one of the birches and started in with it. Slowly, building strength with confidence. He marked well, then, and the little welts started to raise. I tried various birches and then took a break.

I came up behind him and felt his bottom. Then I unzipped the fly of my overalls and tried to take out my cock. It had come loose from the harness, though, and fell down my trouser leg to the floor. Undaunted, I picked it up, turned my back, and put it back in place.

“This is the point,” I said, “when most boys ask me to fuck them.”

“Please will you fuck me?” he said.

“Since you ask.”

It was awkward buggering him with a strap-on through the fly of overalls, but I managed it for a little while. Afterwards, I put it in my pocket and zipped up. Then I lit a cigarette and stage-smoked. I don’t remember if there was much more dialogue. I think the scene was fairly quiet. I’m pretty sure I told him he’d have to be punished further for letting someone bugger him.

I didn’t make it through all of the birches, but I used more of them until I was drawing some blood. By this time, my strength to sustain the character was waning. Marky had had a lot. I wrapped up the scene and went upstairs, leaving him bent over naked in the cellar.

He was ecstatic about the scene. Absolutely loved it. This was a relief, because there had been a scene early in our relationship, a big scene with me topping, that he hadn’t liked so much at the time. Maybe the ghost of that scene was still haunting me, making me anxious about this one. At any rate, I was very relieved that the scene was over and that he was so happy with it. Did it turn me on to do it? No. Did I hate doing it? No. It was interesting using the birches, and it was a theatrical challenge, but I wasn’t doing it because it excited me; I was doing it because it was a cool idea and I loved him.

A couple of moments lived on afterwards. One, the moment of my cock falling off. I wasn’t sure if he’d realized during the scene, but it turned out he had, and had struggled to keep a straight face. We laughed a lot about it afterwards – zip, clunk, o wait… He also adored the line “This is the point where most boys ask me to fuck them.” I don’t know where it had come from. It was spur of the moment. He quoted it for years afterwards, though, and he found it a big turn-on until the day he died.

The birches are still in our [my] basement, in black garbage bags. I said years ago we should throw them out, but he insisted we could just soak them and use them again. In fact, they got used again at another time with another top (this time I was a Victorian governess), another scene that went down in history for us, sans buggery, though.

He would probably hate me telling our secrets like this…