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August 2004: PAUL SMITH’S DEVIANT’S DIARY - Clubbing the BDSM way. Ouch.
July 2nd 2004, 2.30am. It’s my brother’s 35th birthday and I’m wandering the streets of London in the rain, wearing a damp medieval gentleman’s ‘dress’ and being beeped by passing cars. These two facts are quite unconnected - I wasn’t on some sort of obscure fancy-dress pub-crawl to celebrate. Rather I’d decided to walk up to The Tower to freak out any late night Japanese tourists by pretending to be the living embodiment of the spirit of Henry the VIIIth. I had the beard for it after all, and the stomach of a king too. Sadly there was no one to spook and so I sauntered back to my car that was parked up Angel Passage by Swan Pier. I’d left it there hours earlier to take part in an event even more unusual than my urge to frighten hapless foreign visitors to our fine capital. Perhaps I should start at the beginning…
The Firm might sound like a 1993 film staring Tom Cruise or a shady organisation of thickset East End men with the brains as well as the bottle (often smashed over a bar and into someone’s face) to make crime pay. In fact it’s a ‘Politico-criminal organisation (Well, in some countries where SM is illegal and they haven't heard of us) dedicated to the proliferation of SM in all it's safe, sane and consensual forms’, to quote from their very entertaining as well as educational web site; www.the-firm.org. I can recommend an acerbic page called The Media. It left me trembling like a chilly whippet as I reached for the ‘phone to introduce myself.
The key figure in this tale of bauchery, debauchery and rebauchery is a man called Ishmael Skyes. A name to conjure with, I’m sure you’ll agree. Actually he has the look of a magician about him with bright eyes behind his glasses, boundless energy and dapper appearance. When I first met him he was even making black jeans and a leather jacket look smart. He worked for ten years for the world famous Muir Academy as their faux-Scottish cook, Iain McBlain. When he’s not organising BDSM & fetish events and writing a string of books on the subject of wax, thwacks and racks he works in historic re-enactment (something he’s combined with The Firms activities in the past for Medieval fetish fairs) and the theatre. To quote from his web site again: ‘..the above might read as coy and pretentious, but SM is all about pretence, so we’re sticking to our guns… There are many people, who having found a pleasant hobby to occupy them, realise that they are not actually very good at the activity itself, and turn their attention to the other prime interest of hobbyists, which is telling other people what to do. We try to keep this kind of stuff to a minimum.‘
Reassured that I wasn’t going to be patronised and treated like the wide-eyed innocent newbie that I was, I pointed my Jag at central London and hung on tight. I arrived by the banks of the Thames to be met by a throng (and, indeed, thong) of happy pervs in a heady mixture of rubber, PVC and, adding a much-needed splash of colour, flamboyant evening dresses. Dressed in 20kg of crimson crushed velvet I fitted straight in. I’d looked through my wardrobe for something suitable to lose my fetish clubbing cherry in and this was the best thing I could find. Don’t ask. It’s a long story. A few minutes later we were ushered onto a small (guilty) pleasure cruiser by pirates. It was the sort of boat you’d have seen many times plying its business on the river. With a maximum capacity of 200 revellers Ishmael was a little disappointed with a turnout of 140ish (my ticket was number 133) but I detected no shortage of atmosphere as conservatively dressed chaps began turning themselves (with a little help to tighten their corsets) into luscious fantasy femmes around me. Drab coats were cast off to expose acres of flesh and underwear creaking like a galleon under full sail in a gale. As if by magic Gimps appeared. I went to the bar, ordered a diet coke and looked at the nuts.
We started by going against the flow up stream while it was still light. We passed the Eye and under Westminster Bridge while being watched by some interested folks. Some of them took unauthorised photographs, the perverts. Didn’t they know anything of kinky clubbing etiquette? As we went past the Houses of Parliament they turned the lights off and pretended to be out. By the time we’d reached Albert Bridge -which was lit up like a bad day at a nuclear power station- the sky was almost dark and the party was in full swing. Not that there was any actual swinging that I saw. I did bump into a blowjob later, but managed to keep my dignity by backing away with my hands up; the international symbol for ‘I can see you’re busy. I’ll come back later’. We turned here and began our voyage back past Battersea Power Station. I would like to say I saw a massive over-inflated rubber pig, but I’m nothing if not respectful of people different from myself. Actually I was very impressed by the appearance of the other clubbers, particularly the women who’d put more obvious effort into their dramatic outfits. I hear fetishists get a bad press but I have high personal standards and I’d have slept with many of them. In fact…
Passing the site of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre (and here I was surrounded by men in tights) a sign just outside the roofed part of the upper deck caught my eye: Please use your discretion when playing on the open deck, especially if the boat is overlooked or being followed by the river police. I was reminded of it later when a blue-light bedecked launch pulled up along side our vessel and we all waved. I turned and noticed the girl who’d been bent over a horse (no, not a real one! Animal cruelty has no place in The Firms philosophy. Consensual cruelty to people, on the other hand, is positively promoted) had pulled up the top of her dress and covered her boobs. I think she’d made the right decision, even though her nipples were practically burning through the thin, clinging material. There were a few gentlemen’s genitals out and about, but nothing I’ve not seen before on the beaches of Corfu. The deserted, remote beaches of Corfu. I’m saying it was surreal to see a cock in EC4, as opposed to a cockney.
Watching Tower Bridge open to allow a big yacht coming the other way to pass it, I idly chatted to a lady called Vicky who I recognised from her web site. It was her rubber military peeked cap that rang a bell. I discovered that latex has the disadvantage of being sweat-drippingly hot when the weather is warm and yet has the heating properties of an ice bucket when it’s cold. On the up side, she ventured as the rain began to spit, at least it’s waterproof. I drifted off to talk to a nice woman from the valleys of south Wales. She’d been a regular on The Boat since The Firm first ran it in 1994. This was its and her 11th voyage and she was enjoying herself. Clearly it was a liberating experience for her, as wearing heavily buckled PVC in public wasn’t something she could do every day in her Internet security job. When I saw her later, she was beating a chap with a crop downstairs. I’d only nipped into the bar area for a sausage on a stick…
I was up on the open part of the deck again as we slid not so silently from the western hemisphere into the eastern one. There’s a powerful laser set up at Greenwich that divides the world in half. I was practically orgasmic with delight as we passed beneath this vivid green slice into the cloudy night’s sky. I know. I’m a technophile. I just love things like that! I looked around at the upturned faces of other shipmates (none of them actually mating at the time) and noticed some looked positively post-orgasmic. Well, it was fairly late by now.
Later I was talking to a schoolboy in his mid 40’s about a web site of erotic fiction he wrote for. I wish I could say I can remember which one, but a girl receiving some very decorative rope bondage over his shoulder kept distracting me. Lovely big knots. As the night became morning the tempo of life on The Boat became more frantic. The dancing a little dirtier, the beatings more sustained and the flirting less subtle. We turned beyond the Millennium Dome (which would make a great supermarket a fellow traveller suggested. I voted for it to become a roller disco) and gently chugged back past Canary Wharf towards Tower Bridge and our dock. On the final leg of our passage I heard about The Firm’s annual ‘Night of the Cane’, which includes a caning competition scored on accuracy, power and style by a panel of expert judges. You have to respect enthusiasm and commitment like that.
As an absolute beginner I’d felt very welcomed on the Boat and I can say it was probably the most agreeable £18 I’ve ever spent. I even paid the £2 for six hours of central London parking with an out-of-character smile. Not only had I met some fascinating people to talk to (a tiny woman from the Bronx who kept bumming fags was a high point. Like many Boatists she’s in a creative industry. The rest of them were in IT, it seemed) but London from the Thames at night is one of the most beautiful and striking cities in the world. I’ve always thought of it as a crowded, polluted, asylum of a place, but at 2am, just as it started to rain properly, I could see how people fall in love with it. To piss off the ghost of Samuel Johnson for a moment, “When one is tired of fetish clubbing on a boat in London, one is truly tired of life”.
I caught up with Ishmael (40) again on the 17th, at a club called Strict that he’s run every month since February ’03 in Fitzrovia, W1. Since this was my second clubbing adventure, and it wasn’t on a boat, I felt on firmer ground as I sat him down and questioned him about his business.
It turns out his main problem is finding suitable SM-friendly venues in London. He’d like to hold another a big outdoor event (this being England and Macintoshes being a popular fetish it makes sense) but can’t tie-down a location. Another issue is non-scene single blokes (he used the word ‘Dingbats’, which was typical of the man) trying to make a nuisance of themselves but this rarely escalates into a real problem. Only once in ten years of organising events have the police needed to be involved. Promoting his gatherings to like-minded people is done via the web site, that old favourite - word-of-mouth, as well as flyers that get handed-out at other folks events on a reciprocal basis. It’s an arrangement like the man and his business; friendly.
The moral of this story -and in truth it is a morality tale- is that a hobby can be a business without all of the fun going out of it. Ishmael and his close band of cross-dressing waitresses, shaved & pierced DJs and fabulous freaky friends are proof of this. Reading his site, visiting the clubs and meeting the man leave me in no doubt that SM is the ethical, respectable thing he believes it to be. The infamous Spanner case showed that the law was no respecter of certain personal freedoms. There’s legislation in place to protect people from discrimination and intimidation on the grounds of race, sex or sexuality, but whoa betide anyone who likes their sex to leave marks. It’s a case of the law being there to protect people from violence, but who protects fans of consensual violence from the law? The argument that it’s dangerous and harmful for over 17s is nonsense. A well-smacked bottom will do you a lot less harm than a packet of cigarettes. Perhaps the truth is that the VAT on a horse crop or paddle earns the government much less tax than a weeks worth of a 20-a-day habit. In the words of Ben Elton: “A little bit of politics there”.
A final quote from their web site to sum The Firm up in a sentence: We expect even bad behaviour to be exemplary.
Paul Smith is still free to a good home. Kinky Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please.
2200ish words on the spanktastic world of SM clubbing Dale :-D
Paul.