Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia Page B

even more abnormal. This dearth of images will make it more difficult for novices and beginners to realize there are folks who share their scary fantasies and know how to act them out with care and safety. If you don’t know that there’s a whole group of people who engage in a particular sexual behavior, it makes it much more difficult to imagine yourself ever being able to do it. And porn is one of the most common ways that people discover there are other folks out there who like to do cunnilingus, anal sex, gay sex, get tied up, have threesomes—in short, that there are others who want more than awkward and guilty sex in the dark, bare skin only, no birth control or safe sex, no dirty talking, no artificial lube, no shifting to another, more comfortable position, no toys, no special requests, and usually no orgasm for the woman and a pretty unsatisfactory one for the man.
    S/M fantasies are usually much more lurid and perilous than the games of real-life sadomasochists. Standard Mafia bondage porn doesn’t instruct people in the finer points of S/M technique, but it at least shows the reader that this is a sexual deviation, not an elaborate form of suicide, because the models who do these things appear to be enjoying them, and survive to pose for more pictures in another magazine. Before this crackdown, the genre was marginally improving because leather and S/M people were starting to make sexually explicit material for our own consumption. Legal hassles and the risk of public exposure will discourage that. And more people will remain convinced there is something terribly wrong with them because they have these awful fantasies about being restrained, dominated, or punished, and if they ever dare to look for someone who will do any of those wicked things, they will “get what they deserve”—i.e., snuffed.
    Two distributors of S/M videos—a small business in Florida that sold wooden bondage devices and a handful of movie titles, and Centurions in Los Angeles—have been busted. The LAPD has reportedly visited gay video companies and warned them to stop distributing S/M movies.
    Vice cops in Grand Rapids, Michigan, went on a campaign against kiddy porn early in 1987. When they couldn’t find any, they went outside their own city limits into another town to arrest an S/M couple who frequently entertain folks in the scene and market movies they’ve made of themselves and some of their friends. In the process, Faye Marie (“Marquise Marie”) Bond and Gerald Bond reported that their home was trashed, all their business records and personal address books were confiscated, and their bank accounts were frozen. This has made it difficult for them to organize support and impossible for them to continue to make a living. Until the police killed all of her fish by emptying ashtrays into the tanks, Mrs Bond had raised and sold tropical fish. Her husband ran a straight video production company. They are charged with obscenity and running a house of ill-fame. They may succeed in getting acquitted, but the arrest alone has punished them in a way that having their charges dismissed will not repair.
    In 1986, local police raided an S/M party held in the home of a heterosexual couple in a small town in Pennsylvania, and arrested nearly thirty people. Marie Morrell and her husband had to endure sensationalistic publicity and high legal costs to fight the resulting prostitution charges. They were acquitted, but many of their belongings have not been returned, and their privacy, happiness, and livelihood (they ran an Italian restaurant) are irreparably damaged.
    Drummer , a gay male S/M magazine, has run into so many distribution problems, they have decided to remove most bondage photos so they can keep the magazine on newsstands. The venerable S/M contact publication, SMAds , has ceased publication, reportedly because the producer feared prosecution for obscenity.
    A federal grand jury in