My philosophy about virtually anything is that as long as it’s between consenting people and it doesn’t really hurt people, I don’t question other people’s values and judgments. That’s their right. If [people] question mine, it’s none of their damn business. I had more problems coming to terms with cross-dressing than with D&S. Where I may have some problem with D&S is the relationship of what I would do in fantasy as opposed to what I would do in reality.
I think my interests probably [have] to do with being highly sexed: very interested in sex, very imaginative. I like a lot of intellectual stimulation; it goes along with the physical stimulation. I like a lot of variety, not only sexually but in my life in general.
Probably the easiest way to do it is when my wife and I decide that one evening we’re going to do some serious D&S playing. Generally, we’ll start fairly early in the afternoon; we’ll set aside time to take showers and get dressed. Both of us will choose outfits that are fairly erotic, and in her case, provocative [is] an understatement: leather, PVC, all the accoutrements that normally go with a D&S lifestyle. We’ll have a fairly light but romantic dinner, a little bit of champagne, not a lot of alcohol, and no other drugs. Rather than create a whole fantasy game and roleplay, at some point we’ll move into the dungeon area that we’ve set up in the basement. It is not a permanent setup, it’s simply something that can be set up fairly quickly and easily. I have a variety of toys which I’ll use in the course of an evening.
Generally, [the D&S] is very spontaneous. [There’s] a lot of teasing, a lot of physical playing. I like to tease with a vibrator, nipple clips. We don’t do much in the way of gags, because my wife is not real big on that, although slowly but surely I’m trying to get her to accept that a little bit. I’ll blindfold her very often. And we’ll pursue that for about two or three hours. [Or], if we’re lucky, until either she can’t stand it anymore or I can’t wait anymore and we [have] reached the sexual portion of the evening’s entertainment. [For us, D&S] is always a part of lovemaking. There’s no humiliation involved. I don’t tie her up and leave her there for an hour. It’s always very physical and very much a question of lovemaking; it’s simply extending the intensity and the timing of making love.
When I’m submissive I like the feeling of restraint and of being totally helpless, out of control, that there’s nothing I can do about it. I also like the physicality of being in restraints and not being able to move. Before I met my wife I occasionally tried self-bondage, but I never found it very satisfying, because to do it, you always have to leave an out, and by leaving an out, somewhere in the back of your mind there’s an awareness that there’s an out. Because I tend to be a little cautious about things, I was never willing to risk doing it to the point where I might not be able to get out of it.
There are other things I don’t think you could do very easily in self-bondage. I would really like to experience suspension bondage, and I couldn’t find any really effective way to do that [with a way out]. I think one connection between cross-dressing and bondage is that I find the image of an attractive woman in bondage very erotic. At the same time, I’d like to put myself in her place to perceive it and feel it from her point of view. So being able to mix the cross-dressing and bondage allows me to see it from the woman’s perspective.
All of the bondage [and] D&S play that we do is intense. Obviously, if you spend three hours in a dungeon setting where you’re really going at a very elaborate kind of thing, that’s going to be more intense than if you just tie somebody’s hands over their head on the bed and then proceed to make love normally. One of our most exciting experiences was when my wife fainted. [She was] in our dungeon and blindfolded. We’d probably been at it an hour and a half or so. She was on tiptoes [with her] arms overhead. I had spent the last 15 or 20 minutes bringing her to the edge of orgasm. As she would get there, I’d stop and draw back a little bit. At one point she asked me to take her down and said, “I’m going to faint,” and she promptly did. I’ve teased her about it incessantly. This has been very interesting. I don’t think it had ever occurred to her [before our marriage] that people did this stuff.
If you’d asked me 10 years ago whether I would find a woman who would accept my cross-dressing and be willing to play D&S games with me, I would have said, “Naw, it’ll never happen.” So, as the saying goes, “Never say never.” I think we will continue to expand on what we already do. What D&S has certainly done for us is reinforce trust. You can’t do this sort of thing unless you have absolute trust in your partner. If you can share [D&S] and share cross-dressing with your partner, there isn’t a whole hell of a lot that you can’t share! The number of people who know me as who I normally am and also know that I’ve involved with D&S and cross-dressing can be counted on the fingers of one hand [with] fingers left over. This is something that we share that the rest of the world doesn’t have.
CHERYL HAGGERTY
I would say [I’m] pretty middle-of-the-road, mainstream, with the exception that I’ve been a transvestite for as long as I can remember. That has given rise to exploring different avenues and becoming an expert in D&S roles. [I’m] submissive, but as I get older I’m more interested in both sides. I think it’s a maturation process. One becomes more interested in giving than [in] only receiving. Whatever my inherent interests were originally, I feel like I’ve expanded to include other sorts of things as well. Some of the manifestations of my transvestism are taken out into the everyday world. If I’m on the softball field, people notice I have nails that are an inch and a half long. That’s a way of taking something out of the bedroom, I suppose! My wife doesn’t find D&S-oriented events too interesting. But she’s certainly aware of everything I do. No secrets in that regard.
I’ve thought much more about [my] TV side than the D&S side. I used to fret about it a good deal, particularly when I was younger. I pretty much made my peace [with it] in my early 20s for a couple of reasons. If learned psychiatrists and the rest of the lot couldn’t make much sense of it, how could I? So I just really never thought about it anymore. As for the D&S, I figure it’s who I am and that it’s no more or less a part of me than my interest in food or sports and so isn’t deserving of a whole lot of worry. [Since I had] a good experience of having thought through all that stuff about transvestism, by the time I started getting interested in D&S, I figured it was the same kind of battle on a different front and why sweat it.
I had early childhood experiments in cross-dressing which trailed off until I was about 12 or 14. I started wearing some of my mother’s lingerie, and that’s when the bad feelings started kicking in, [that] this is pretty weird and pretty awful. I have the feeling that that’s not uncommon, that kind of thinking at that age. I was frustrated by not being able to dress more often when I was 12 or 14. [I was] gradually able to do a little bit more and a little bit more, and by college I was able to squirrel away the smallest of wardrobes. I never threw stuff out, as do many TVs who go through purges of wanting and not wanting it in their lives, if only because I was convinced that this thing wasn’t going away. As much as I would swear to myself, “Well, I’m never going to masturbate again,” you know that doesn’t work. So I don’t think I ever reached any watershed decisions that I was going to be one way or another. It was a cyclical thing of guilt and then saying, “There’s no reason to be guilty.” [It] probably [lasted] 10 years. And then I just didn’t worry about it anymore. I guess it’s like getting gray hair. One day you’ve got black hair, and the next day you’ve got gray—except there’s 30 years in between.
My parents died when I was 15. I came back from school, lived with [my aunt and uncle] at home again for a year or so, went off to Europe, [and] came back. That was the first time I was really living on my own, and so I was able to consolidate a wardrobe that I’d kept partly at a cousin’s house, partly with me. I was able to dress up quite a bit more often. I started going out and meeting other TVs when I was in grad school at age 24 or so. When I came back to New York, I got
involved with a couple. [I’d] go to their home dressed as a serving maid and go with them to parties in New York. That’s when my interest in D&S started to evolve a bit more.
The role of the French maid appeals to me for a variety of reasons. One, it accommodates many different fetishes: the petticoats, the corsetry, the heels, the very, very short skirts. [I] like a good bit of exposure. I found that image enticing. But there were other components of the French maid role that went along with [D&S]: submission of many sorts, the more traditional trappings of spanking and whipping and bondage. It was that role that I found most appealing as a TV, because it did accommodate so many things. I could be on display as a maid, and I could be expected to perform either domestic chores or fantasy sexual services as part of the role. [D&S gave me] entry into being able to meet women who would be interested in my femininity [so] I could fulfill my own [fantasies]. I know of other people who do like to clean obsessively as a maid. They really get into their work! I do not. But I do more than some other TVs I know who have some very fleeting French maid fantasies. I like the feeling that I get [that] people are looking at me, and I like it all the more the more exotically I’m [garbed].
I don’t know what it was originally that attracted me to [the French maid fantasy]. It’s corny and sort of begs the question to say that it was fun. But it was fun. It was nice to do something naughty, I suppose. More and more I’ve come to enjoy the pose, although I don’t come anywhere close to liking pain. But I do know that within my own experience I’ve expanded the amount that I enjoy and tolerate.
At one of the Dressing for Pleasure balls, I and a couple of other people decided to go to [a club] downtown afterwards. I was in a vinyl French maid’s uniform—it was very short and I was quite well exposed. I was wearing a black leather “penis corset,” for lack of a better term, which was attached to a leash, and someone was leading me by that. Going through the hotel and being led on a leash out onto Seventh Avenue across from Madison Square Garden, where I usually go to see a Rangers’ [hockey] game, was a thrill. I just loved it. And being on display, wearing my highest heels and shortest skirt, being in bondage and everything was a lot of fun.
I would like to go further. The question is whether I’ll be able to, for financial reasons, because my life may take another direction. I was married last year, although I’ve been living with [my wife] for eight years. I’m contemplating children down the road, and I figure that that will have some impact on my activities. I would like to continue to develop in areas outside the sexual world. I don’t think there’s one particular experience that I’m dying to have that I haven’t had. [Nor do] I feel if I don’t have it, I’ll be unfulfilled and life won’t have meaning.
GYPSY
I consider myself bisexual. I prefer intercourse and sexual activities with a male, but I’m very comfortable in the S/M or B&D scene with sexuality involving females. I wouldn’t consider myself lesbian. I do enjoy the touching and feeling, the sensations of arousal brought on by hands and voice, whether it be male or female. And I do enjoy, as a dominant, playing with couples and with females. I have attended some all-female parties, and it’s been a very enjoyable experience. I play the dominant role in my current relationship.
The more I have gotten into the Scene, the more it has become an integral part of my basic personality and enjoyment. In the relationship with the gentleman that I live with, we don’t keep it just strictly between the two of us in the bedroom. Over the course of the last year, I have more or less been coming out of the closet.
I didn’t have these fantasies as a girl. I was married at 21 and stayed married for 17 years in a rather unhappy relationship. We had children. I was married to an alcoholic. I think I suppressed a lot of my sexual desires. If you’re in a relationship with someone who you don’t love anymore and you lose respect for him, it’s very hard to be passionate. Sex got less and less within the marriage. I became more independent and dominant within my marriage over those years because everything fell [to me]. I think that’s just a part of my basic nature. Then as I got my divorce and got out on my own, I had an awakening of my sexuality. When I got into the Scene, I often said, “I’m tired of feeling like Atlas with the weight of everybody’s responsibility on my shoulders. I want somebody to do for me, please me for a change.”
I got into [D&S] seven years ago as a submissive and found it to be quite a sexual turn-on. [Because] there’s a predominance of male submissives and a lack of female dominants, I have slowly gone into being dominant. That’s where the need was, and I gained confidence in my ability to do that. Within the realm of trust and respect and caring, I can please and bring sexual enjoyment to other people, even though intercourse is not always a part of it.
[I got into D&S] through a gentleman at work [who was] a fairly close friend. He was a photographer on the side, and he took pictures at some of the Miss Gay Oklahoma pageants and showed me his work one day. I said, “Gee, this is great. I have a theater background, I’ve always had gay friends; I’ve been to the drag bars; I think it’s fabulous.” I approached it from that view. He slipped in some pictures of himself and let me know that he cross-dressed. There was a group of cross-dressers in Tulsa. He said, “Would you like to come to one of our meetings?” I did; they were wonderful people, and it was enjoyable.
One of the gentlemen played on the side in the B&D scene, and he told me about his and his wife’s activities. I thought that [was] very interesting. I’d always wondered what that was about. He said, “Would you like to get together sometime, and I’ll show you?” So he brought some of the bondage magazines, some of his implements and toys, some ropes and some little whips and nipple clamps and things like that. We got together, [and] basically, he was looking for a dominant. This is how he introduced it to me. I allowed him to put my hands in bondage and do some light touching in a sexually arousing [fashion] to me. I found it quite pleasurable. Then I did the same to him. Over the course of the next three or four years, we would get together occasionally, mostly with me being the dominant. One summer [when] my children were gone, I had the box of toys at my house so he could come over and play, rather than going to a motel room. Another gentleman that I was having a relationship with at that time happened to see something that I hadn’t put away and said, “I see some of your toys.” I was shocked and pretended ignorance. He said, “I had a girlfriend that I did this with for some time.” He was dominant and asked if I wanted to play. I said yes; this gave me a chance to play the other role, and I found it extremely arousing, sexually. We got into a lot of heavy things. He was strictly dominant and wanted to control me, so we got into spanking and whipping and heavier bondage. It was one of those things [where] we would do it one evening and couldn’t wait until the next time.
[Eventually], he moved away, and I found myself going back to the dominant role—often over the first five years it was just an occasional thing that I would [try]. [But] over the last two years, I found myself going more and more to the dominant side.
Two years ago there was a meeting in San Antonio, called the Texas T-Party. I went there; it was a whole convention of cross-dressers. Being very open to the cross-dressing scene, I met a lot of people. [And] that’s where I met my partner. Nothing transpired [that] first year. I went to the second one, and we became more acquainted. He invited me up to the Pennsylvania area for another weekend event of cross-dressing, and we talked much more about the B&D–S/M scene, which I was much more interested in getting into.
At that point my job was not inspiring, my personal life was not going anywhere, and he wanted to pursue a relationship with me and said perhaps he would look for a job in my area. With the cross-dressing scene and the S/M scene so concentrated in the New York area, I said, “There’s nothing here for you to come for. Why don’t I come there?” That’s when it really exploded. I don’t think a week goes by that we don’t participate, sometimes several times a week, in some sort of activity within the Scene.
I love [D&S]
. Having a theater background, I love the exhibitionist part of it. To a certain extent, it’s like putting on a show with costumes. I love to dress in outrageous boots and clothes and leather and spikes and corsets and wonderful things like that. I highly enjoy that aspect of showing off. I enjoy [teasing]. I enjoy seeing how you can manipulate a person—all done by mutual consent. I love chains: I love the sound of them. I like putting [somebody] into bondage. I enjoy playing with men who are into worshiping me, wishing to please me. They feel like putting the female on a pedestal. [They] sit at my feet and lick my boots, massage my feet, answer my every whim, please me as far as taking care of me. I like playing with men in that regard. I’ve stood on them, made them suck the heel of my shoe, things like that. [It makes me feel] powerful—important, special, above them, in control. I think that men [believe] that they have to play the macho role. They don’t want to do that. They want to say, “I worship you, I love you,” but society says, “Ah, you’re a wimp; you’re a wuss; you’re pussy-whipped.” They don’t let other men know that they [want to] do this.
And for those who cross-dress, dressing in female attire may allow them the soft side of themselves that they can’t show when they’re male. In [a] scene, I treat them as females. [I] tell them, “You are mine.” Even though they’re dressed as female, they know internally—and sexually and genetically—that they still have male equipment, so they still want to have sex as a male, but they want to play the submissive side. I take the aggressive dominant side and treat them as the woman.
I would not be happy in a straight relationship with somebody that did not want to play in the Scene. [I know] many relationships are like that: The wife is not interested. Even if the wives give the husbands permission to go to club meetings and respect them [and] allow the other party to play [outside the marriage], it’s not the same as having your partner play in the Scene.
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