Shiny Trosuers, Shattered Dreams

I’ve been attracted to women in fetish attire pretty much since I knew there was such a thing as fetish attire, but in my early life, there was no Internet, and no way of knowing either that so very many share my taste, or that it’s quite permissible to like the look without having any interest either in beating or being beaten, in being tied up or tying up.

Sometime in the late 1970s I got wind of a big fetish party in the San Fernando Valley, but was too repressed actually to attend. Instead, I parked outside and ogled the gleaming gals as they sauntered in on their wonderfully high heels. Well before Malcolm McLaren started selling fetish gear in the Kings Road boutique in which the idea of the Sex Pistols was born, I bought my girlfriend some PVC attire at the legendary She-n-Me, also in London. Oh, how it gleamed!

Ten years ago, when I started up with my second wife, we attended Torture Garden in London, a recurring mega-event much beloved by British pervs. I bought myself some skintight shiny PVC trousers at Hot Topic for the occasion, which I wound up not enjoying very much at all. A lot of people were spectacularly dressed — the English commonly play Dress-up with greater gusto and panache than we — but it was too crowded to move, infernally hot because so crowded, and infernally smoky (smoking indoors in public buildings hadn’t yet been banned in the UK), and you couldn’t hear yourself think over the deafening industrial music. Thud! Thud! Thud!

While living on the outskirts of London, we attended a couple of private parties that I just hated because the missus, very much in demand, left me to make small talk in the living room, and I have neither talent for nor interest in small talk even in ideal circumstances. On one occasion, I had to try to think of something to talk about with a submissive (East) Indian guy who was waiting naked for one of the dominant women to summon him to the house’s little dungeon. What I was able to ascertain from my verbal intercourse with others is that the kinky are generally pretty nice people. Every woman I spoke to, sub as well as dom, assured me that she was treated very much more respectfully in a fetish context than in an ordinary breeder bar.

Back in the USA, we went to Bondage a-Go-Go in San Francisco, where the future missus was appalled to see guys in Hawaiian shirts. I put my shiny trousers in mothballs for a number of years, until wearing them to investigate the Midwest fetish scene when I briefly lived in Wisconsin three years ago. Hawaiian shirts would have been a considerable improvement over what some of the fellows were wearing.

My shiny trousers reappeared in the spring of 2009, when we decided to investigate the Hudson Valley kink scene. Upstairs at a gay bar in Highland, New York. a small group of misshapen, cellulite-laden submissive women were being spanked or fondled by leering, snaggle-toothed Joe Sixpack types in black T-shirts. It was almost enough to put one off kink forever. I have never denied being a frightful snob.

I note now that I missed Montreal Fetish Weekend again this year, as I have every year since its inception, and will apparently have to content myself with Dutchess County Fetish Afternoon, which, as the name suggests, is very much less grand.