by Jon Pressick
In 2013, if you are in the Bay Area and you are looking to hire a lady for any number of fetish services, the first thing that you are likely to do is to look at the listings on ErosGuide.com. Browsing through the thumbnails, you will see asses framed by garter belts, a lot of cleavage busting out of vinyl bustiers, and many different kinds of feminine faces staring intently back at you. Among the names of women who work independently—Lucinda Archer, Selina Raven, Colette—you will see several houses: Fantasy Makers, the English Mistress, and the Gates.
The Gates’ thumbnail depicts a woman in a tight black dress shoving another woman against a Saint Andrew’s cross and threatening her with a paddle. Click on it, and an ad appears with eight smaller thumbnails representing a variety of the house’s current crop of women.
The ad states:
The Gates has been open continuously since 1994, in the same safe, discreet and convenient location a short twenty minutes outside of downtown San Francisco.
Our home currently offers five lavishly equipped session rooms featuring a very wide array of equipment and devices, and each room has a distinct theme and ambiance, ranging from the Rubber Executive Dungeon—a formal and severely elegant space, to the Boudoir—a gentle and comfortable setting.
Stunning as our home and facilities are, they cannot compare to the breathtaking beauty of the women of the Gates. A brief glimpse at our website will introduce you to the physical appeal of our staff, and when you meet us in person you will be delighted by the wit, charm, creativity, grace and individuality you will discover in each of the ladies.
Here are a few of the many advantages we have to offer over others in our field:
• We are here when it’s convenient for you—open seven days a week from 10am until 10pm, available in as little as thirty minutes from the time of your call.
• We have a large staff body and several people available at all times, allowing you both variety in the selection of the person or people you see, as well as making ever-populargroup or “party” sessions an option without hassle or delay.
• Our ladies are of all different experience levels, body types, ages and ethnic backgrounds, giving you the opportunity to find the exact match for your preferences.
• Our differently-themed rooms make it possible for you to enact your fantasy in the setting that is most exciting to you.
• We are very competitively priced compared to many “independents” who offer services that are virtually identical to ours.
• We are happy to accept credit cards.
• We have established an excellent reputation in the community during our over seventeen years of service due to our ongoing efforts to provide you with a safe, clean, discreet, well-equipped and, most of all, fun and fabulous place to play.
Give us a call today to arrange your session, and we look forward to playing with you!
There is a link to a website, and a phone number to call. The Gates’ site has a simple red on black design. In their pictures, the women are dressed in leather boots, latex bras, vinyl corsets, satin lingerie. Some show their faces, some show their breasts. Some emphasize their feet, some their asses, some their dominance, some their masochism. They are mostly white, slender, and in their twenties. There are a few Asian ladies, a few black ladies, and a few that are curvier than the others.
If you call the number, you will be greeted by a single word:
“Hello.”
In the early 1990s, while grunge music was glamorizing the darkness of the American soul, when the obscene details of the American president’s sex life were international news, a barely legal young woman in Oakland, California learned that there was good money to be made dressing in leather and subjecting men to exquisite torture.
This woman who would eventually take on the name Sage Travigne was nineteen years old when her friend’s godmother asked her if she knew anything about bondage.
“I had tried it with my boyfriends,” she says now, “but I didn’t know it was bondage.”
The friend knew of a “playhouse” a few miles east of Oakland that employed young women to see clients for something called “fantasy and fetish exploration.” Sage was unquestionably attractive and naturally bossy. The prospect of making money off those qualities was very appealing; so was the idea of quitting her job as an assistant for disabled folks, where she knew she would never get a raise. Though she didn’t quite understand what this new job would entail, the style and attitude seemed compatible with her love of heavy metal and sexy shoes.
So Sage took BART out to El Cerrito and interviewed with the house’s “coordinator” Lorette. She was soon installed at Fantasy Makers.
Her first client was a foot fetishist and she had absolutely no idea what to do with him, but after a few sessions she began to realize she was a natural. The work suited her. The way Fantasy Makers was run, however, did not. Nothing was designed in a way that made Sage feel sexy, and she didn’t like the way Lorette condescended to her.
Eventually she moved to another house called the Shadows, which had classier facilities but presented other problems. The owner of the Shadows was male, and he shamelessly slept with his employees. Sage found it equally offensive that he charged the working ladies for sodas and snacks.
After nearly two years of working for others, Sage decided she had learned enough about clients to run her own operation. She rented a small apartment on Woolsey Street in Berkeley and took out an ad in Spectator magazine. She got male friends to do security. Eventually she had so many clients trying to book her, she began to wish she could be in two places at once. That led to her inviting other female friends to take sessions out of her space. As she realized she was running an organization, she decided to give it a name with an appropriate mystique: the Gates.
The early days of the Gates were a lot of fun for dommes and clients alike, but the whole thing would have certainly collapsed after a few exciting months if it wasn’t for Sage’s natural talent for order and accountability.
“Every rule at the Gates is based on a reaction to something that I didn’t like about other people I worked for,” she says.
Business continued to improve, so much that she was able to afford renting a much bigger house in Oakland. This place, which she now calls The First Big House, had enough space that she and her then-boyfriend Mark could build unique wooden bondage structures. With the extra money that was coming in she invested in more furniture, nicer gear, and bigger ads.
In January 2006, Sage was able to afford to move to a larger house across the street. She now employed around twenty women. At mandatory monthly meetings, they addressed interpersonal conflicts, and collectively brainstormed how the house could run more effectively.
At the first meeting after acquiring the New Big House, Sage said, “Well, ladies, the good news is, we’re not having a meeting tonight!”
There were cheers. The only thing a collective loves more than a meeting is no meeting.
“The bad news is, we’re moving! ”
There were groans.
So in the early winter evening, twenty-some plainclothes dominatrices hauled boxes marked Executive and Blue Room and filled with leather, rubber, wood, metal, and linens across 57th street to the new Big House, where the Gates has operated ever since.
In cutoff jean shorts and cotton tank tops, Sage is every bit the California golden girl. She has a slender, athletic build, with breasts and hips large enough to be vivacious without being “curvy,” and a clear, tanned face. Her hair is auburn-colored, and her eyes are icy blue. She is vegetarian, and fond of Newcastle beer. Even when she is being silly, which is often, she possesses an unwavering solemnity. When she puts together an outfit from her stunning closet of fetish gear, that calm demeanor, along with tight rubber corsets and six-inch black stilettos, holds her body high and proud.
Nowadays it would be an understatement to describe Sage as someone who understands bondage. At the age of thirty-nine she has been managing the Gates for
nearly twenty years. Of all the kinky things she has learned to do, tying people up remains her favorite. She has grown from an opportunistic teenager with a penchant for thigh-high boots to one of the Bay Area BDSM scene’s most established bosses.
Though she no longer takes sessions, Sage continues to teach the difference between a square knot and a granny knot to countless young women who are curious, as she once was, about this particular kind of sex work, and who want to learn about it in a woman-friendly environment.
In 2006, I was one such woman. I worked for Sage first on staff and later as a “right-hand man” manager, for four years. No other experience has changed my life so profoundly for the better.
It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Wednesday in mid-June and the morning shift is arriving at Oakland’s premier house of BDSM.
In a sense, “The Big House”—as it’s known to the ladies who work there—is the actual two-story Victorian house, which— due to careful soundproofing and window boarding—blends in with the other homes in its working-class neighborhood. “The Gates” is more of an abstract place, a state of mind. It is, as the name implies, a threshold. Through this opening, you may, for the price of admission, enter a world in which it is possible for your erotic fantasies to become real.
Some employees arrive by car, some by bicycle. Some walk from the nearby BART station. Some women’s partners drop them off, and some spring for cabs. Sage is a dog owner, and allows her workers to bring theirs to work, so there is usually a motley pack lounging behind the tall wooden fence of the backyard.
The coworkers greet one another enthusiastically. Morale is high. Autumn, who has long, straight, brown hair and a bombshell figure poured into a white velvet tracksuit, is the manager today. She grabs a clipboard off a nail in the kitchen wall and begins to assign tasks.
“Celio, can you do inventory? Louise, I know you like to sweep. I’ll take care of the recycling and the rubber wall polishing.”
After greeting her employees, Sage settles herself at her office desk with a meticulously organized datebook and a pint glass of steaming herbal tea.
The other women, who range in age from precocious eighteen to a very well-preserved forty-year-old, get straight to work without complaining. If there is a prima donna among them she does not take this moment to reveal herself. Dishes are put away and the whistling kettle is taken off the stove. Yards of cotton rope are pulled out of the dryer and coiled. When the chores are done, the women settle down at the kitchen table with black coffee and bottles of kombucha to discuss, along with their outrageous sexual exploits, life’s more mundane subjects—television, children, car trouble.
These routines are the only action in the house for about half an hour. Then, the phone rings.
The answering tension emanating from the ladies in the kitchen is palpable through the entire house. They have been trained to answer the phone before the fourth ring, and to put aside anything they might be doing—cooking breakfast, painting nails, doing homework—to prioritize the phone. On the other end of the line is the potential for money. And, regardless of their individual motivations, money is what they’re all here for.
This is a business, after all.
“Hello,” Sage says, in a voice just a few registers below her usual speaking tone. She doesn’t say, “Thank you for calling the Gates,” or “This is Sage,” or “How can I help you?” Her phone voice has a cool, emotionless femme-fatale quality. It’s not the accommodating voice of a perky secretary or the alluring voice of a phone-sex operator. Sage means business on the phone. She does not believe in flirting to get clients to book. She doesn’t “give free phone sessions.”
Sage asks the client what he’s interested in. She keeps the conversation focused on availability, times, and other practical concerns. When he arrives, the client will have a chance to discuss more intimate details with the woman he books.
The price starts at $160 for an hour, and is referred to as a “Donation.” It is nonnegotiable. The rate increases, with up-sell craftiness, to $220 for ninety minutes, $280 for two hours, and so on through overnight sessions. Adding a second lady to your scene costs an extra hundred an hour. Adding a lady for a “walk-on” or cameo appearance is $20 for ten minutes, $40 for twenty, $50 for a half an hour. Bringing another lady in for a golden shower is $20 even if it takes less than ten minutes.
Some people call the Gates because they have a very specific fantasy they can’t get off their mind. Many imagine that if the fantasy is consummated it will lose its obsessive hold. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Some clients are hobbyists. For them spanking is like tennis and bondage is like cooking class. These people consider themselves connoisseurs of an experience, and of the professional ladies themselves.
Some clients are enchanted by the general idea of dark, cruel women, of non-normal sexuality. Some of these people have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.
Some clients are looking for a mistress for an ongoing professional relationship, the way that other people might search for a good stylist, personal trainer, or therapist.
Some clients want to lie on their back while a woman literally walks all over them. Some of them want pedicured feet, or piss, or a silicone dildo in their mouths. Some want to be locked in a closet and ignored. Some want to be completely mummified in Saran Wrap. Some want the surface of their skin pierced with 24-gauge needles. Some want a gallon of water sprayed up their rectum with a shower nozzle. Some want a key-lime pie in the face. Some want to be called slave, slut, dog, whore, toy, butt-boy, worm, scum, or pathetic worthless cum dumpster.
Some arrive with scripts, with duffle bags of personal toys, with outfits for themselves, with outfits for their mistress.
Some want somebody to talk to.
When you book a session at the Gates, you arrive right on time. You ring the bell, and step through the front door to a glass-walled porch filled with potted houseplants. The door to the house swings open, and you enter.
Behind the door stands the lady you’ve booked your session with. She ushers you into a living room and sits you down on an enormous, comfortable, black leather couch. On the coffee table before you are some large hardcover books of fetish photographers Erik Kroll and Doris Kloster. To your left, freshwater fish swim in an enormous tank.
Your mistress sits opposite you on another, smaller couch. She may be in a dress, or robe, but she is not naked or in fetish gear. One of the rules of the house is that negotiation is conducted between two consenting adults with as little distraction as possible. Regardless of whatever depraved roles you may eventually play, this is a professional discussion.
She smiles, and greets you with pleasantries, like an old friend or a hairdresser. Then she gets down to business. What are you in the mood for today? What’s your fantasy? What are your turn-ons? What are you curious about, and what is an absolutely boundary? Do you have specific attire requests? Are you interested in a walk-on from another lady? There may be a new girl in training: how would you feel about her sitting in on the session?
She might ask you about any safety concerns you have. Can you be on your knees for long periods of time? How’s your heart?
She suggests you “get business out of the way,” and you hand her a bank envelope, or a gift bag, or a sweaty wad of bills. She retreats with a smile behind a thick black curtain to an unseen room. For a few minutes you wait, wring your hands, stare at the fish, flip through an art book. Your heart pumps and your imagination runs wild.
Behind the curtain is the world you don’t see.
Sometimes the woman who walks through that curtain becomes another person when she’s not putting on a show for you. The glamour melts away, replaced by conspiratorial winks, or weariness. Sometimes the woman is the same whether she is arriving, sweeping the floors, or flogging a naked man.
There are people who would probably pay good money just to be chained up so they could silently observe this backstage area: the office, the kitch
en, the locker room basement, the back porch. But that is not on the menu. Though countless scenes can be created within these walls, the world on the other side of the door is one to which no amount of money can permit you access.
Presently, your mistress returns, and probably says something commanding like, “Follow me,” or something cute like, “Right this way to your doom! ”
You can learn a lot about someone based on how they react to the news that you’re working as a professional dominatrix. Upon learning that I loved this mysterious work, my old friend Lucas mused, “If I had the money to go to that house, I’d hire all the girls for the night and we’d all get naked and just do something totally ordinary...like order a pizza!”
My mother asked, “What’s a dominatrix?”
And my friend Jason said: “Good. You’re going to learn a lot about men.”
What Jason had wrong is that being a sex worker merely confirmed everything I already knew quite well about men. Clients, with all their wildly diverse ages, classes, ethnicities, values, manners, and desires, have always been a snap for me.