Different Loving

by William Brame

  KELLY T

  I’m a preoperative transsexual, female to gay male. I only [recently] figured that out. Before that, I was just confused! Up to the last couple of years all my sexual experience was as a straight female with straight males. I was a tomboy all the way through my childhood and as a young adult. When I look back and look at photographs of me, I almost always look like a boy. I didn’t have any idea that transsexuals existed, and because I was interested in men, it never occurred to me that I might be anything other than a straight female.

  I used to make up a lot of stories when I was a child. In almost all of them, I was a boy. A lot of them involved a good deal of D&S. If it was a pirate story, then I was one of the pirates torturing the captives or, alternatively, being tortured. The ones that I remember from when I was sexually active as a female were mostly control ones rather than any heavy S/M. They usually involved being ordered to do something humiliating.

  I had a child seven years ago. I sometimes have trouble making the mental transition from thinking-talking about leather stuff to being Mum and discussing the reasons why Jell-O sets! During pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding, the male side of my personality almost disappeared. It’s very difficult to pretend to be a boy when you’ve got a baby hanging off one tit! But when my daughter was about three, I discovered CB on CompuServe; [it] is a [Citizen’s Band simulator]. People from all over the world can sign on with computer and modem and have a typed conversation. I went on there as a female and discovered “compusex,” which is where two people go into a private area and type a fantasy to each other. People who’ve never tried this always think it sounds totally weird and cannot understand how it could be sexy, but it can be extremely exciting. I discovered that I was TS by doing the kind of fantasizing that is possible on-line. I tried out both sub and dom [roles]. As a female, being dorn worked best for me. But after the first couple of times, it got boring. After a while I discovered the gay channel and had a lot of fun on there, talking to [male gays], still as a female. It came out that some people gender switch on CB because there’s no way of telling what gender the person behind the [screen] really is. So I picked a male handle, and it was 100 times more exciting than anything I’d tried as a female.

  I must have done this for about 18 months without ever consciously thinking through what I was doing. It’s amazing how much you can hide from yourself. I would occasionally think, This is a strange thing to be doing, but I’d just push the thought to one side and keep on doing it. Later I picked a personality closer to my real one. Kelly was me, but male and younger. As Kelly I really started getting into D&S. I talked to any top. And one of the guys who I talked to is the man who is my lover now, my master, Ray. That was three and a half years ago. I’m very lucky to have found him. When we were just talking on the CB and by phone, he didn’t know that I was physically female.

  It became obvious that the charge attached to being male is orders of magnitude greater. For a long time after I had my daughter, my nipples felt almost numb, although before that they’d been very sensitive. The first time with Ray was the first time in years that I’d felt anything there. It took us several months of playing around for me to remake that erotic connection. Suddenly it worked again.

  I did try [sex with a woman] once in high school, and it was a nonevent. It didn’t turn me on at all. It was just an experiment. I also got my husband to tie me up, which he did, very gently, and stroked me with a fur hat. [But] he’s really not interested in it. And, although it doesn’t bother him that I am, he’s not. He would try it for me. Or he would have as an attempt to get our sex life back working again, but it wouldn’t have worked anyway, because he would always regard me as a female. It’s very complicated, and I don’t understand all of it.

  [Our separation] is a mutual decision. Although [my husband] likes me as [a woman], and we’re still very good friends, there’s no way he could live with Kelly. He’s very straight. He’s a very nice guy, very sweet, but he wants a female. He thought he married a woman, and it turns out that he didn’t. It’s a big chunk for him to deal with. He’s having quite a bit of trouble with it. But he’s not taking it out on me, luckily. Before I told him, a lot of people warned me [that] he’d do weird things. In fact, it didn’t happen like that. I’m very lucky to have someone like him.

  I will be going to the gender dysphoria clinic at the local hospital. I was referred [last year], but they have a nine-month waiting list. Both kinds of transsexual operations have some things in common: Both involve hormone treatment and surgery. The hormone treatment works better from female to male than it does male to female. When you start hormones as a female you grow facial hair and chest hair. Your voice deepens, and your periods stop. You feel incredibly horny, apparently. You can have breast surgery, but they can’t construct a realistic working penis yet. The hormones enlarge your clitoris, but it doesn’t grow more than about two inches long. It’s like a little tiny dick. Or they can take a flap of skin from somewhere else on your body—either your abdomen or your forearm—and make a tube. It’s a not very good pretend one. You can put a rod inside to stiffen it, and you can then do the fucking. I’m not sure how far I want to go. As a gay man, I’m the one who’s on the bottom. I don’t have a very strong drive to be the one doing the fucking.

  Last November was my first meeting with Ray. It felt real weird to be in the same room with this person who I knew very well but [who] physically was totally unfamiliar. We walked round and round each other like a couple of stray dogs. I was apprehensive because I’d never done it for real. In everyday life, I’m not at all submissive—I’m a fairly aggressive son of a bitch. So this would be quite a change. Also I am physically female, and we were going to be [treating] me as Kelly; I didn’t know whether that would work. Some of the things that we wanted to do were going to be painful, and I didn’t know how I would react. I didn’t know whether I could actually submit or whether it would feel wrong and I wouldn’t be able to do it. But when he sat on the bed and I was standing across the room, he took the collar and beckoned me over. I went and knelt between his feet. He put it on me, and it was fine. I knew then everything would be okay. I wasn’t scared anymore. He put the leash on the collar under one boot and pulled on the leash so that it pulled my head down. I kissed his boots and licked them for a long time. I always used to think bootlicking would be humiliating. I realized that it doesn’t feel that way at all—it gets me very excited and feels more like worship than anything else, which startled me a bit.

  He cuffed my hands behind me, put me over the edge of the bed, and used a switch on my ass. He took my jeans down after a while and used a cat on me. He didn’t use it very hard, but hard enough for me to know what it felt like and to enjoy it. And although I’d had my arms cuffed a couple of times before, in my marriage, this felt quite different. For a start, he knew what he was doing. That was very good. Then he got me up on the bed and cuffed me and laid me on my back with my arms and legs spread out. He used a snakebite kit—suction cups on my nipples. And then some tit clamps after that. That was about all we did. One thing that’s relevant is that he has chronic fatigue syndrome, which means that he can’t do a real long scene physically or mentally. He’s getting better.

  He’s been a leather top for about 10 years, but always to gay men. He’d never done it with a female. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking, Am I male or female? I was just getting into the physical feeling. He said afterwards that it felt much more like doing it with a guy, in spite of the physical differences. He was married for a while, so women do not freak him out, as they do some gay men. But he says it feels like gay sex to him—that I react like a guy. There are ways of touching which are different. If a guy who’s looking at me as a female wants to play with my tits, he will enjoy the fullness of them, not just the nipples. When Ray and I are together, he’s paying attention to the nipples. [But] we do have to take it into account that my skin is more tender than a guy’s. He now has a picture in his mind
and in his hands of what I feel like and how I respond to things. I don’t usually come while we’re playing, because that directly involves my female plumbing. Usually he’ll hold me and I’ll use a vibrator to come afterwards. At the moment we’ve only done that afterwards because we’ve had such a limited amount of time together. I always write to him in detail about what worked and why and what didn’t. Three years ago I used to fake it when there was something I couldn’t do or didn’t want to do or was scared to do. I don’t ever do that now! Ray has said that he does more with me than he would normally with someone at my level of experience, because I seem to be able to accept it very easily. I think that’s partly because we talk so much about it that I’m not scared.

  I would like to [live with my master]. As a female, we could get married. But after hormone treatment and surgery, I’ll turn into a male, and that would make the marriage null and void. At the moment it’s possible that he might move about a three-hour drive away from me. Compared to being miles away across the continent, that would be great. We could see each other every weekend. But, ideally, I would like to live with him. Both of us write stories: They are basically extended love letters to each other. They are how we would like to be. They’re about Ray and Kelly, living together and doing things together and including leather S&M in their daily life.

  I’ve visited Ray several times. I really turned a corner recently: I spent the weekend as Kelly [at Ray’s house]. But my period arrived on Sunday. It felt like my body had turned around and bit me! I’d never really felt it like that before. Normally I spend a lot of time as [my female identity]. But I’m not [her]! The opportunity to be Kelly for that long a time was great, and then this kicked me in the face. It was emotionally difficult for me. Up to that time I had been saying, “All right, I’m a TS, but I don’t actually have to do anything about it right now.” That’s changed: I am going to have to do something; I can’t continue physically like this. This change in attitude has made everything else look different. Along with the separation, it feels like I’ve climbed out of a trap. Although the road ahead has got a hell of a lot of bumps in it, there is at least a road.

  RAY

  I have been active sexually with both sexes since I was about 11. I made a jump two years ago that put me square down on the gay side of things. I was looking at my life history and what’s happened with the partners that I’ve had. I discovered that I had more rewarding relationships with men then with women. I just decided that that would guide my life from now on.

  I’d been cast in the dominant roles in childhood. I can remember kids playing their games, and I somehow always got cast as the authority figure. The thing I can tell you is that while some people involved in this world seem to have a component of their personality structure or fantasy life that made them react positively to depictions of cruelty, I never did, and in fact I’ve always found it a turn-off. For instance, whipping scenes and torture scenes [in movies]: the more graphic and detailed, the more repellent I found them.

  I’ve known very healthy people who give up an enormous amount of power consensually, and those relationships work, and they’re very out front about it. Maybe that’s where the dividing line comes: I also know other people who do not say out front that they’re willing to give up power consensually in a relationship. But it turns out that they are potentially masochistic personalities—particularly with enormous codependency problems that lead to acting out. The gay world is different from the straight world, because everybody who lives in the gay world knows immediately that they were subject to psychological abuse. There’s no home for gay people. I could go on and on about this. The rate of alcoholism among gay men is enormous, and the rate of gay-teen suicide is triple the national average for teens. [Anyway], in my 20 years of involvement in this world, codependency leading toward acting out is a miserable way to try to carry out a relationship, even if it’s only a casual dating one.

  I was always a fairly dominant partner, I think: strong. I don’t just mean emotionally strong, because most of the women I went out with were very strong people. I was only attracted to strong people—still am. I had one fairly lengthy relationship with a woman. There were two important reasons [why] she was attractive to me. One was that she knew I was “bisexual,” and two, she indicated to me that she was interested in a leather dimension to our relationship. I remember we were having sex in a van parked in the middle of a [state park]. I think it was the first thing she said to me along these lines: “I’ll be good. You don’t have to spank me.” At which point I spanked her, and she got really quite incandescent! We did a lot of tying up—very mild things, belt around the wrists, things of that sort. But that ended badly because the political dimension (she was a feminist) and the personal dimension ultimately got involved. She seemed to feel, ultimately, that being submissive in a sexual relationship was a betrayal of feminist principles. That got to be a very hot issue between us because I sensed there was a conflict in her, but I couldn’t solve the conflict, and I didn’t enjoy being treated as though I were antifeminist. I’m not and never have been.

  Kelly and I met on the computer about three years ago. Computer sex was an important part of my life at that point, because I was quite ill with what used to be called Epstein-Barr Syndrome and is now being called Chronic Fatigue and Immunological Dysfunction syndrome. [The changed label] doesn’t seem to help matters much. I was partly bedridden and mostly housebound. The computer became an important link between me and the world. I met Kelly, and the first time we did a scene on the computer, the chemistry was absolutely fantastic. He was an almost ideal partner: If I could have brought him to life across the wires, I would have. He presented himself as a 19-year-old gay male living with a lover, a shadowy figure whom I disliked intensely. He seemed quite bloodless and distant. He seemed oppressive, in that Kelly seemed to be carrying a major weight of household duties and emotional support. I took an enormous dislike to this lover.

  Kelly and I had long, elaborate, and quite stimulating conversations. [There was] sexiness on the computer; however, it very quickly branched out into other matters, and we became friends. Kelly has qualities that are essential for me in any relationship that I have. I like sweet people. I like people who are kind and generous and thoughtful and emotionally open: inquiring people, people who have intelligence and some kind of quickness about them. Kelly was all those things. It wasn’t very long before he became very important to my emotional life. And I grew to love him.

  There was a year and a half of virtually daily contact and multiple contacts most days. We arranged to meet for on-line chats at a specific time each day, [sometimes] twice a day. Then we moved to regular phone calls. We did leather scenes, and we talked about a lot of other things and shared ourselves pretty completely. And then Kelly had an emergency hospitalization, and I found out that Kelly was biologically female. I’m not sure that “biological” is a good term; “legally female” may be a better one. [I felt an] enormous sense of disorientation. I didn’t know what any of it meant in terms of me. I had already committed myself to relationships with men only. And here I was involved with somebody female. Yet all my experience of Kelly had been experience of a male. There was a lot of conflict about that; I worked very closely with my therapist on it. Kelly and I decided we were people who were connected to each other. [Our relationship is] of enormous value—crucial in a way, because I was so ill. For a very long time Kelly didn’t know that I was severely ill, including a brain infection and other complications. We didn’t know where it would lead, or how it would lead there, but we decided we would take it one day at a time and see what happened. And that’s what we’ve done.

  Kelly’s very turned on by spankings. My reaction—and I think that’s true of most tops—is that what ignites my fire is whatever is getting my partner going at the time. The consequence is that spanking is one of the most important activities, and I think [it] would be if we lived together on a day-to-day basis. There are some glitches there
because of the physical difficulties. I remember I went on a club run one summer, and, as I usually do at those things, I visited the local leather shop, the toy shop. I remember going through about 25 cock-and-ball harnesses—this was before I knew that Kelly was plumbed differently—and picked out a very nice one and sent it as a present. It’s now a joke between us. We both enjoy [tit play], but I’m a little tentative about it now, because that’s different tissue. I’m very familiar with the way the female tissue is and how sensitive it is. In tying up [men], for instance, you don’t pay particular attention to where it’s going on the pecs so long as it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, but with breast tissue you have to deal with [it] differently. I don’t know what will happen in the future, because I don’t know whether Kelly’s going to have the breast reduction and, if so, when. The nipples are wonderful; the nipples are extraordinarily responsive to touch, which makes it good. That’s good stuff.

  A transsexual who was on a talk show recently said, “My gender is in my head and in my heart and not between my legs,” and that’s true. Kelly’s got to make the decision about what happens to that body. I can live with almost any results [including no surgery at all]. Just in terms of the physical, I think it would be neater, easier, and in a lot of ways more rewarding for there to be a breast reduction, so that what you’re dealing with is not a full-grown breast but actually the pectoral muscles. [But] transsexual reassignment, from what I can tell, is awkward, expensive, not very satisfactory. The making of a phallus is complicated and not at a very high level, partly because the surgeons who are doing it don’t understand the wiring very well. I’m a little different, too, from a lot of gay men. That was part of the confusion in my self-identification, because I was never particularly aroused by male genitalia. That’s not an essential focus of my erotic life.