 The Dossy Easton Fireside Chat is sponsored by a gift from the Carter-Johnson Library. Never again landfill, never again flames. Hello everyone and welcome to Inside Leather History of Fireside Chat. I'm Doug O'Keefe, the host and producer of the chats, which are a program of the Leather Archives and Museum. Today I have the honor of being able to interview Dossy Easton. Dossy, you're in San Francisco today, right? In the mountains north of San Francisco, yes. Oh, okay, okay, and you said you're getting a bit of rain today. Yep, it's going on right outside that window there. I guess California is always sort of desperate for a little moisture, isn't it? Well, it's supposed to rain all week and we're really hoping that it might be the end of the fire season for us. This is in northern California, northern coastal California. It doesn't cover everywhere. Ah, good. And Oregon and Washington as well, but some of the big fire areas are now being rained upon, which is a real blessing. Yes, absolutely. Okay, Dossy is a psychotherapist and an author and comes very highly recommended by mistress Joanne Gaddy, who is Leather family to me. Ah, Joanne once took me to Inferno. I was so excited. It was delightful. Tell me a little bit about your thoughts on that. How was that for you? Well, I would have liked to have been able to play, but I respect the space just like I expect people to respect moment space. I can respect men's space. And I've played, I couldn't get into my old vest that has my catacombs patch on it, but I came out at the old catacombs and I was very used to, there was nowhere to go except when it's game in spaces. The lesbian spaces were all very, very questionable. They're very anti-sexual. They thought something was really wrong with us. And there just wasn't any room there. The straight places were full of, well, straight men. And then back in 1973, because when this was happening, there was, that was a little bit catacombs from 1977 or something, but feminism wasn't really, hadn't really taken hold as it has now, which I'm very pleased about. But so if you went into a sexual space with straight men in it, we're just about sure to have the boundaries trampled. We have people coming on too strong and, you know, and saying really stupid things, following them over your tits or something. For the benefit of the audience, would you tell us what Inferno is? Inferno is a fabulous party that takes place in a country resort in the state of Michigan, near the shores of Lake Michigan. Every year for about 10 days, is it still 10 days? I'm not sure, honestly. There is a huge festival of gay men celebrating BDSM. My friends who have been able to attend the whole thing, I was able to attend it partially. I was able to attend the banquet on Saturday night, which is a great honor because women are not particularly welcome there. And I want to respect that. Just like there are many straight men who don't fit my description, there are many women who fit the description, women who should not be at Inferno. So we or other, you know, that that would be a problem in gay men's spaces. And so the, I'm honored to have been invited that Joanne, who's been one of the producers for a long time, of IML, of International Mr. Leather, but it's just this gigantic BDSM party. All of my friends who go there tell me, oh my God, Basi, play the play. You wouldn't believe what the people do there. And it's a marvelous place. It's got a wonderful history in BDSM. People are playing who are magnificent players. You have to be invited. You can't just go. You have to be sponsored if you're new. You know, all this kind of thing. They're very careful about the guest list. And it's still a huge event that goes on for days. They build, they put up tents and build dungeons in them with all kinds of furniture and equipment. And it's like SM Paradise, I guess, for 10 days. Well, I know that Joanne was the on-site secretary for International Mr. Leather for at least 10 years. What made you special, the special woman who was able to go and attend the dinner? Well, we've met at various events and things, you know. And, but every year she brings one woman, a different one every year. So I'm one of the sort of grandmothers in the SM scene, right? I was in my 20s in 1973 when I started out with this. We met almost 50 years ago now. And so that's half a century, right? And so I see that. I was part of a very early history of, I was on the first board of directors of the Society of Janus. I had the privilege of being others with Cynthia Slater back at the beginning of all that. It was a marvelous time in the 70s, it really was. And then we went through AIDS. And you know, it was a piece of history that people, a lot of people I don't know weren't even born in. You mentioned a moment ago that you were unhappy. You could not fit into your vest that had the catacombs patch. Tell us about the catacombs. Catacombs was a revolutionary club in San Francisco. It was in the basement of an old Victorian house on a tree-lined street in the Michigan, San Francisco. And again, you had to be on a guest list to get in. And the owners of the place, and the people who were running Steven Fred, had made friends with Cynthia and started inviting a few select women to come to the parties there that they had. And it was an amazing space. It was a basement, but it was beautifully put together. They had put in part with floors. There was a huge water bed, which was fashionable back then. I mean, I don't know if you've ever actually tried to fuck on a water bed, but you need a little traction. You really do. You can't just float. There's gotta be something to push back on. But the, and a room full of slings and a cage, which was still in use very recently at the Dench Dungeon in San Francisco. There probably is still in use. And eventually Cynthia's old bondage table. And there were just a lot of things that I reckon toys in the furniture. I don't know if your listeners know that BDSM has an art form of furniture that makes it possible to do interesting things. Yes. But we have a whole, we have a whole sort of architectural arm that designs fancy furniture for sex and play. Who has the arm to do that? The arm? You mentioned that. The arm in the sense of a BDSM world has its own craftspeople. I was honored to be one of them back in the 80s. I had a business called high down leather wear where I made up where I created toys. At that time you couldn't buy a flogger if you didn't know somebody. But I was one of the people you could know and get a flogger. So I was learning to do all these leather. It was wonderful fun. And I called it high down leather wear, high tech toys. What was it? Handcrafted toys for high tech sex. And sometimes a lady is known by her restraints. And so setting up to make quality SM toys. My greatest review was from Gil Rubin who said, these toys are built from the bottom up which is true. They start from how they feel when they land. Now they feel with the person who is restrained in them. And it goes on from there. So they were built with regard to safety. And even some people may be surprised but even comfort. Yeah. Because the first principle of tying somebody up for a relatively long period of time is that they should be comfortable. Yes, yes. They should not be dealing with cramps and full tendons and things briefly if you want to play with the stress but not if you want to have a long time. There's a few people I know who are in distress wanted for long periods of time but I'm not one of them. Let's take a step back. You've made numerous references to Cynthia Slater. Tell the audience who Cynthia Slater was. Cynthia Slater. And along with her partner at the time, Larry Olson but mostly Cynthia since they broke up early on in this proceedings was the founder of the Society of Janice which was the second essence support group in the country the first being till oil and sugar in New York. And I don't know where Hellfire comes in there. I don't know where Chicago comes in because I know that. The Chicago Hellfire Club. Yeah, Chuck was active very early back to the late 50s. But they was one of the very early SM support groups anyway and she worked on a principle that was really interesting. She used to put it like this when she spoke. People say, how can I say I'm a feminist and I'm a masochist. And she would say, well, if I come home from work and my collar is on the table next to a glass of wine I know that I'm supposed to go and get into the bathtub and get ready and start calming myself down and get ready to play. Maybe the rack is set up in the living room. I also know that the house has been cleaned and vacuumed and dinner has been handled. That was her notion of so if she was going to bottom somebody else had to fix dinner. This made perfect sense. And she was a professional dominatrix and the marvelous woman, brilliant, brilliant woman. Difficult at times, but otherwise I could make a club of a support group of people who have broken up with Cynthia. It's not a pleasant experience. But we miss her. She died of AIDS in 89. Oh, I see. And she was the person who opened up the catacombs to a handful of women myself. Patrick and Lydia, you know, the few of us. Let's come back to the catacombs. Tell us more about it, because although I think some of the viewers will know the name and they may know that it existed, I wonder whether a lot of people will really know what kind of a place it was. What was it like? Well, it was very well set up for a play party space, actually. It wasn't a lot of the other places were converted basements, but they were raunchy. They had cement floors and, you know, you could see the pipes along the walls and things like that. And a lot of people like raunch, and that's fine and dandy. I don't mind that. But this place had been fixed nicely. It was, as I said, they put in nice floors. You came in and there was somebody at a table checking off the guest list. Good SM parties have guest lists. You can't just walk in. You have to have somebody who knows what they're doing say that you're an okay person to be there. And that's real important. And because a lot of people have weird ideas about what BDSM is about. And you don't want that in your play party space where people are vulnerable. And you walk in and there's a place with cubby holes for where you can put your clothes. And that's the first thing. You take your clothes off and put your clothes in the cubby home. I used to wear heels actually at the parties because those parties because I kept, people kept sort of tripping over me because they weren't used to finding a human down at the five foot three level. I knew a gay man there who was also a five foot three. He had the same problem. Here we were down at sort of tit level. These people who are a foot taller than us. So I wore heels so that people would notice me in the crowd and not knock me over so much. But and then there was a place the room, the first room you were in was also the socializing room. There were places to sit and a bar and cards on the bar that said, here I am madly in love with you and I don't even know your name, phone number. If we didn't even have email addresses back then. But it was sort of the socializing places where you talk, where you're negotiating scenes. I recall one time when a lovely gay man who was visiting from out of town decided he had never played with a woman before and he ought to try that. So we talked, we negotiated. We found things that we both like to do and we were ready to play. And then he said, you know, there's one thing I don't know anything about. Can you show me this clitoris? So I sat on a bar stool and did a little anatomical exam. This is this here. This is what I like and what I don't like. And other people might be different. And I next thing I know had a crowd of gay men peering in to see what these women's works were like. Oh my gosh. One of my favorite moments at the catacombs. It was just like that. It was like we were there to play. We were there to play with our bodies. People were curious. They were interested. Oh, look, a new kind of body was the response to having women in the space. That's really interesting. How do you do that? What do you do to make it work? And it was just lovely being there. I mean, the first person I ever fisted was a man I fisted kind of by accident. I was sort of, you know, simulating asshole nicely. And I gather he'd been criss-code up before and my hand just kind of slipped in. I was like, Pete, what do I do now? My gosh. It was a time of great adventures. And I know I'm speaking very explicitly. That's fine. Okay. Because I think sexual language should be okay. You mentioned that Cynthia Slater introduced you to attending the catacombs. How did that come about? What were you bringing to the situation that she felt you should be included? Well, we were lovers at the time. And it was more of a situation of being a wingman. It was like if there was one woman in the place, that became really conspicuous and odd and strange because who was she going to play with and how people who might have negative feelings about playing with women felt better if there were at least two of us. So we used to go to the catacombs. We would play a scene with each other, prove that we could do it. Girls, girls can do it with each other. And then go on about, well, usually at that point, we had a bunch of people who were really, really curious and interested and so we didn't have any trouble filling our dance cards for the rest of the evening because we would do a show off scene because why not? And we felt we had to earn our place. And I would sometimes open my eyes and see people looking and say, I thought it was actual. What did they have there? It was just delightful. We had a wonderful time. How was Cynthia able to attend these? She made friends with Steve. We both were kind of... Tell us who Steve was. I don't think the audience would know that. I'm trying to remember his last name properly. He began with an L. Do you know it? I'm sorry, I don't. Okay. He had bought this building and built the club. He died in something like 81, 82 of a heart attack, sadly. And he had not... This is before AIDS got organized around AIDS. And so the house and the dungeon went to his family. There were no provisions made. There was no will. Oh no. The furniture was rescue. The team of people ran in and moved everything that could be moved out of the dungeon out. Another dungeon was established called the Catacombs II. And there was a Catacombs III. And then Fred gave it up when the AIDS epidemic made it really scary. So Cynthia's friendship with Steve enabled her attendance and then she was able to bring you as well. I still want... Cynthia wanted to get in there. I mean, she was going to do whichever she had to do to get in that door. I was lucky to be her wingman because I wouldn't have been anywhere near as pushy about getting inside of things. But we went to clubs all over the place and clubs where women didn't go and... Such as? Well, the old... I remember being in the ambush once, the old ambush, and somebody was complaining about our being there and the guy didn't want to let us in. He wanted three pieces of ID with our birthdays and photographs on them, which back in 1974, 75 was kind of unlikely. And a bunch of people came in from an early Janice meeting and skipped, skipped Jason. No, it wasn't skipped. It was Guy Baldwin came in while these people were hassling us and saying they couldn't let us in because we didn't have enough ID. And I'm sitting there standing there saying, did you have three pieces of ID with your picture on it? To which the person arguing with me obviously did not. And Guy comes in, he storms in, he says, compared to all of the men, most of the men in this bar, compared to these women, most of the men in this bar are fluff, defending us loudly. Then we got in because Guy Baldwin said, here we are. Cynthia had actually taken care of Guy Baldwin when he had hepatitis. We didn't know about hepatitis C, but he was very sick with hepatitis for a while. I remember him as this very, very emaciated, skinny man from back then. I thought he was much taller than he actually is because he was so ill that he'd gotten very thin. And he came back later to being an international Mr. Leather and a wonderful force in the Leather community and to publish marvelous articles and so on. Yes, I interviewed him several years ago. Yeah. So let's come back even further in your world. You were from Massachusetts, if I'm correctly remembering here from your biography. And you said that you, and I'm going to quote this because I found it fascinating, I immigrated to San Francisco in the great migration of 1967, a happy flower child, the summer of love and have lived in this magical region ever since. So what prompted the move West? Oh, we all did. It was the great migration. That's why I called it that. New York was a wonderful place, but it was very status oriented. And as a woman, your status was kind of attached to your male partner and not to what you did. And if you had your own status, people would complain. I mean, they used to say about a woman artist I know. They say, I see her coming. She's coming with the scissors. People really said things like that back in the 60s. This is exactly the 60s we're talking about. And I'm like, why do you think she's doing her art to give you a hard time? I mean, this doesn't make any sense at all. She's doing her art for the same reason any other artist does. And so it was kind of hard being a woman there. And it was also the time of Andy Warhol in the factory. And there were a lot of people on speed. And it wasn't my scene. I was psychedelics and spiritual practice and sex. To me, those were all one thing. And so I moved out west. And it was the first time I was in a place where the whole society valued me for what I did. And even though I was operating, I very shortly decided I would never be monogamous again. That was in 1969. And it was like I got valued for the thinking I put into that, the work I put into it. But what I did was what important. And I started becoming a person who was listened to and treated with respect, which was unusual before that. I don't know if that makes sense, but most of the people now who will see this weren't alive when it before feminism changed a lot of things. And at the time, the fact that I didn't take my status from having some old man, as they called it, who was good at something or other, made me not, made me dismissible, I guess. What were your first impressions of San Francisco in 1967? Oh, the summer of love was dynamite. It was just amazing. I tried, I crossed the country in a driveway car with my male partner at the time. And we got into San Francisco, went to Golden Gate Park out to Hippie Hill. Someone immediately came by and gave us some acid that was on vitamin C pills. We're tripping. We went into the aquarium, which at the time was free. And I'm sitting there with a tough standing, looking into this fish tank with a total stranger. And I'm seeing individual scales on these fish that are fascinating in their variety. And he's seeing the same thing where they're like, wow, look at that one. We really weren't looking at the same scales, trust me on this, but we thought we were and we were enjoying it enormously. It was a great time. It was a time of tremendous opening. The men growing their hair long was a big deal because it was during the Vietnam War. And every young man at that time was subject to a draft. Yes. And being sent to Vietnam and was presumably killed and being required to kill other people. This was like not a good thing. So my generation of men had a real problem on their hands. If they had long hair, we could tell that they were definitely not in the military. Because they wouldn't have been allowed to. And so long hair became this kind of sign of hippie demand of being a safe person, probably a pacifist, you know, go on peace marches and so on and so forth. We did in many ways. I think we had a very ferocious voice in ending the Vietnam War. And I think that was really important. And I also think that psychedelics were a big part of that. How did tell me more about the summer of love in San Francisco at that time? I do know the ideal of it is probably infinitely more extrapolated than it really was. How did you what things did you experience and people who did you meet? Well, it was an odd time because I was with a partner who eventually became violent and I had to leave because of physical violence and abuse. And so that part was like not good. I mean, it wasn't. He had his first psychotic episodes. I believe he had schizophrenia. I think he still has it. And I had to leave for my own safety. I was pregnant at the time of the child that we were looking forward to having. But it had gotten extremely crazy and extremely violent. For all that I left by fighting my way out the door, promising I would go call my parents and hit them up for more money. I left with $10 in my pocket that closed on my back in a baby and six months pregnant, a baby in my belly. And we are here now. My daughter has been incredibly helpful. She's 52 years old now. And incredibly helpful with me being sick and all this. She shows up with two weeks worth of soup in individual containers or wonderful salads and things to take care of very much. We are close. We are very close. And she's starting graduate school. There has her own music group and is basically chip off the old block. Good. As an artist, she illustrates people of science fiction books. And she's a marvellously creative person. There I was. So this was bad. Okay. And there was bad stuff. There were people into hard drugs. We talked then about mind drugs and body drugs. Mind drugs were grass and acid and so on. And body drugs were well alcohol and opiates and barbiturates and pediments. Cocaine wasn't widely available at that time. Oh, yeah. And horrible old TCP. So they were kind of like destructive stuff in the effort to love everybody. Connections had been made with Ken Kesey with the Hells Angels. So we had Hells Angels amongst us. We're rather odd people to be in that group but it was interesting. Nothing bad ever happened to be in that regard. Yet there was this whole bunch of utopian idealism that was going on. It was very serious. That we should be open to all kinds of diversity. That there was a lot of the open-mindedness and treasuring of diversity that was coming from the civil rights movement but also extended into women's liberation and gay liberation. So it was a lot of the roots of what we see now in terms of accepting lots of different kinds of people in the world. We're planted back then. I never expected to be owning my own house now and retiring with inadequate income from my royalties and some things like that. I thought that I was just voluntary poor forever and there you go. And lilies of the field and all that good stuff. We sow not neither do we weep. Yet we are arrayed with all the glories. And that was what I was living in. I did my own tie-dying and loved to make things. We had free stores and we had food handouts and we had our own music. And it was like this whole wonderful idealistic culture that really did exist in even though there were bad things and people who came into the community because they could have used that freedom. I think BDSM always has to protect ourselves from that as well. What people did you know? I mean, I think the audience, of course, would know of Harvey Milk. Did you know him? I interviewed him on my radio show, yeah. Tell us about that. He was amazing. He was just... You had to love him. You could not not love him. His enthusiasm. You know the etymology of the word enthusiasm? It comes from the Greek entheos, which means infused with the gods. Enthusiasm means divine. And he was. He was just so enthusiastic and he was... He did change the world. You see, he did change the world. Pardon? What did you see him do? Well, he was the first... I don't know exactly which of the first, but he was one of the first gay men to be elected to any major office in government anywhere in the country. I don't know if you know that Jose Serrano helped him out with his campaigns and stuff. Yeah. Jose Serrano, excuse me. I get names from him these days, who was the famous female impersonator of the time, who had also run for supervisor in 1959. Right around when Chuck Renfrew was founding things. And there was... It was just a marvelous time in the 60s of challenging barriers and people say, you can't do that. And you say, what do you mean? I can, too. And I'm going to do this, and I'm going to have sex with anybody I want to, and I'm going to require them to behave ethically. And, you know, this is it. AIDS comes. We're going to do safer sex. I was right in the middle. I lived with gay men for about 15 years, from 74 to 89. So I was right in the middle of the plague. Let's visit that in a moment. Coming back to Harvey Milk. Yeah, Harvey Milk was just... He just had the force of personality. He did a lot of work, and I don't think people paid that much attention to with the labor unions and such. He was one of the people who consciously made links with the labor unions as was. I will never forget that you can get away with shooting an elected mayor of a major city if you also kill a gay man. I will never forget that. I was right in the middle of it, and it was horrible. It was just horrible. Tell us more about what you saw. What you experienced with all that. Well, we were living on 18th Street between Castro and Hartford. My daughter and I, for the last couple of years before we moved out of the city to the country, and it was beautiful. The neighborhood was very safe for us because there weren't a lot of people around, you know, trying to oppress women, frankly. I always said back in those days in the early years of feminism that I could... There were a lot of people in the straight world who thought they knew how I should be as a woman, and that meant I should be second fiddle to somebody. And there were a lot of people in the lesbian women's movement who thought they knew how I should be, which was not a spot. And then there were gay men who didn't give a shit. If they liked me, they liked me, and that was fine. And if they didn't like me, they didn't have to, you know. But nobody was around telling me that I wasn't the right kind of woman because they had no ideal of what kind of a right kind of woman would be. Okay, but let's come back to Harvey Milk again. How was he to be interviewed? He was magnificent. I mean, he's just, as I said, his enthusiasm was contagious for everything. And he saw, particularly in the labor union movement, he saw a lot of possibilities of making good connections between people who you would think were normally not going to manage that. By being out and gay, one of the things he was doing was representing us to a whole bunch of communities who thought they knew things about us that weren't true. Such as? In queer community. Oh, that we were child molesters and that we were evil and that we didn't respect our partners, that we were all kind of like filled with lust and kind of in a dirty kind of way. And they thought we were dirty, you know. And so by putting himself out there and making the sacrifice of cutting his hair and starting to wear suits and ties and such like, because that's what he had to do to be seen, he started making these connections, these unlikely connections and finding out, figuring out what we had in common with people who originally might have said, oh, I don't want to be around them again. I considered myself part of that community even though I'm a woman because I was living there and living with roommates and housemates communally with people who raised my daughter with me and when she was a little kid and it was wonderful. When Harvey Milk was assassinated, San Francisco was in complete uproar. Tell us about that. What did you see and experience with all of that? Oh, God, I was there for white Monday. That was the worst of it. I mean, the March. Yes, we went on the March. My daughter was nine. She remembers it. She remembers. We went to see the movie of milk and she remembers all the marches. They used to be like parties for her. We would sing things and the guys would pick her up and put them on her shoulder so she could see everything. And there was always like, she loved the marches and then there was the candle at March. We did it at night and she was, she remembers wondering about why everybody was so serious and what was happening. Tried to explain it to her, but it was very difficult. But she really, for a little kid, she really picked up on the seriousness of the occasion and she wasn't insisting on making it playful. She was, she was, you know, she joined the seriousness. She knew something was going on that was serious. And so she remembers it very strongly. How did the community change following that? Well, in many ways, kind of the next thing that happens within a couple of years is AIDS. Now, I was out there on White Monday. White Monday was the day they came down with this measly little sentence for Dan White. And there was a march and I had, I had big time plans for dinner. So my partner and I decided to go down after dinner and join the protest at Civic Center. We got to Civic Center. And I saw a police car get torched and blow up. It was quite a dramatic sight, I'll tell you. Friend of mine comes running across the plaza and I'm like this friend and I'm named Michael. And Michael, Michael, what's going on? Michael says, we are torching police cars. I'm like, what do you mean? We White man. But it was, it was a very scary time. My daughter was, I sent my daughter off to a friend's house out of the neighborhood, out of the Castro and I spent the night after leaving Civic Center. We sort of drove around and saw the periphery of it. And most of the police were working really hard to keep it peaceful. They really were. It was impressive. They were there. They would show up on a street corner with their plastic shields that transparent plastic shields and the helmets and all their riot gear. And they would immediately, they would be four inches of broken glass from beer bottles being thrown at them. And it was, and they would stay there and they would say, look, our orders are to move from this corner to that corner in five minutes. We're going to move. We don't want to fight. We don't want to engage. We're just moving and hoping to calm things down. And so they kept doing that. And so something like four in the morning when Jeremiah Taylor, the dreadful police captain, decided that they would box in both ends of Castro between 18th and 17th and then push the crowd in and beat people up. That happened at something like four in the morning. Two in the morning, I was sitting on a police car with all every piece of glass on it broken outside of the hardware store saying, we don't want to, we don't want to torch this car. This one is in our neighborhood. These are wooden buildings. So I was sitting with a couple of Leathermen that I knew on this police car pruning people from torture, torching it. And looking around going, oh, my God, what has happened? I do believe the things I saw. There were a couple of, my bay window in my living room overlooked the corner of 18th and Castro. I saw what I believe were two national provocateur. One of them was wearing bright orange, had red hair and a beard that was probably a wig and was marching around goose stepping, making Nazi salutes and blowing on a police whistle. And the other one that was with him is jeans didn't fit right. You didn't see many men on the corner of 18th and Castro's who's jeans did not fit right. It was not done. So there was a, they were, I'm pretty convinced that because I saw too many riots that these guys had incited deliberately. I was fairly sure that it was, but I also knew people who blew up police cars. How long did the, I found that shocking. I found that really shocking. It was, it was scary to me that that happened. How long did the protest last? Oh wait, there were still Castro street was still crowded at four in the morning. Did it go on for another couple of days or was it over by the next day? Oh, the next day was amazing. Okay. So Monday night, a stage was hastily erected at the Plaza in front of what used to be the bank at 17th and Castro. And everybody was up there speaking. Obviously not Harvey, he was no longer alive, but people were up there speaking and making music and so on and trying to calm the crowd down and so on. And then Jeremiah Taylor, the police by now were exhausted. He got a contingent of police who did not want to continue the nonviolent work they were doing on quieting this protest that it turned violent. And but property destruction violent. I make that point. I mean, I know police cars are expensive, but there you go. Yeah. And then they had gone and they had gone into what is now, I think, is it called Harvey's the bar at 18th and Castro and they have a magnificent trivia night mind you these days and beat up the bartenders and things like that. It was horrible. It was just a nightmare. And then the next day, it was a planned event for her to celebrate Harvey Milt's birthday. We all hit the streets with the intention of making sure that this was a peaceful protest, that this was a peaceful community event. I will never forget the marching band coming through the crowd that gave Freedom Day marching band and twirling whore. And there was this guy who was this amazing baton twirler. I swear he threw that baton three stories up on I counted the windows on the buildings in this incredible mass crowd on Castro Street. And we had a party. We had a party. We had music and dancing. We had a band and we had talk about peace and love and all that good stuff. We managed to have a peaceful party to celebrate the life of Harvey Milt the day after White Monday. And then this was, you know, I don't know, Pink Tuesday or something. But it was, it was, it was a little solemn that it was, it was also a thing that we were very determined. A lot of people came because if those of us who were serious about all this didn't show up, then we would be outnumbered by people who would think it would be really, really nifty if there was another riot on Castro Street. Let's take a step back. You mentioned that in 1973, you met a group of fellow seekers in sexuality at the San Francisco Sex Information Center? Tell us about that. It's a switchboard, isn't it? It's not a center in the sense that they're not a place you can go to. They still exist. They train volunteers to answer the phones and any questions you may have around sexuality, they are prepared to answer they now have massive computer programs with information so they can even look up things. What are you supposed to take if you have warts or something like that? And at the time was founded by three amazing women, Maggie Rubinstein, Caroline Smith and Tony Ayers and who were early sex therapists out of the human sexuality program at UCSF University of California in San Francisco and they had a grant to do it. And the switchboard was just amazing. I joined it because I was lovers with Maggie at the time and this is by my community basically we had this interesting way of creating intimacy intimacy and connecting and making connections familial connections everywhere because we get it on with everybody but it was marvelous it was marvelous to get together with a bunch of people who really talked about sex. You know when I was 17 my first kind of revelation about sex the first sort of vision of what my path was going to be was when I said how can a word be dirty? And we think about that for a minute we're going to have to cut out my use of four letter words. How can a word be dirty? How can the why is it the words that are sex about dirty and elimination which we all do every day? You're going to have to cut this but we all piss and shit every day. Why are we not allowed to talk about it? Why are we not allowed to talk about sex? You know fuck is one of the only active verbs we have about sex. You can get laid you can get some nooky you can have sex as if it were a commodity but the only bird that says you're doing it is to fuck. It's an old old word in old old English and I think we should bring it back into some respectable use thank you very much about pleasure and sharing and lovely good stuff. I wrote a thesis from my bachelor's degree and honors thesis that turned out to be quite long 140 pages called sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. How was that received? Very well I mean it was a formal thing academically because you're supposed to choose a hypothesis and defend it right? So that was my hypothesis sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. How did you get involved in the leather community? Well it was through San Francisco sex information really at that time we were sissy volunteers were being invited to like everybody's sex parties because we actually knew how to do sex parties without making people uncomfortable or unhappy or trampling people's boundaries and so we were very popular where we were and even if we didn't go there and then we play with each other but we had it was a marvelous place of having friendships sexual friendships and connections that were just honored and it was a community of people who shared sex you weren't required to have sex with everybody in the community it wasn't like that at all but widely sharing sex was associated and there were kind of two ways in or this was in the early days of what I can you know this is now called polyamory when we started accepting that there were lifestyles that might involve sex with a lot of different partners or a number of different partners doesn't even have to be a lot but so there was it's the word I want sorry I'm 77 years old and I've walked on words these days pushing we were talking about how you got involved with the leather community and yeah yeah yeah okay with the leather community eventually became a logical extension of sexual freedom frankly I'd say 80% of our Sphysi volunteers the people who were really active with Sphysi came out into leather once Cynthia had formed Janice and we had a place where we could go Jim Kane said this very nicely he was one of our early members he just loved it he said I can go I can tell you places I visit this there's a dozen clubs down on Folsom Street where I can go and do SN play and have sex and meet people to do it with and he even had a van that was equipped that he would bring down on Saturday night to Folsom Street he was a marvelous man and marvelous to be supportive of us and women in the community he and Guy were two very essential people and uh and uh what but this was Janice was the only place he could go and talk about what we did and this was important this was the place you went Janice is the place you can go now there's Leatherman's discussion group frankly taking that same place and we've got splinter groups for different groups of people I don't know if the Mahogany munch is still going on but that was one of my favorites um people of color munch but the the the idea that you'd go somewhere with the other people who wanted to talk about what we do not go into some bar where the music's too loud to have a conversation but and all it's about you know is picking up some stranger but to come back to the Leather community yeah so telling people who were very open and talking about sex thought Leather was great and so we came out lots of us but how did how did you first know about the Leather community we had a person who was teaching at Svisi originally who was perfectly dreadful frankly he said horrible things he said terrible things about bottoms and submissives he didn't respect his partners and he taught some of the safety you don't leave a person in bondage alone you only hit the body with impact play in certain places you don't hit him in the kidneys it's like boxing you know but he had and he had terrible terrible things he said about women I mean it was just awful I can't believe I don't like it like it but he called himself a gay man right there was nothing gay about this man and he was the only person we could find who would teach a piece about SM for a volunteer training right so when Cynthia came on the scene we had a person who was making sense who was thoughtful who thought about the politics of what we were doing who thought about the societal impacts what is this about sexism what is this about gay liberation we fought every year for gay pride parade we had the great do we show up in leather or I would see somebody I had always seen in leather in a suit and tie because much to my surprise he's walking in gay physicians for human rights and and and he wears a suit and tie to support that or else he was the one of our leaders was the founder of the gay fathers union the gay fathers union yes okay and he had a little kid that the same age as my kid they used to play together but your first exposure to leather did you see Leatherman in San Francisco or did you already know of this from New York oh I read the story of oh years before that you know I was I was I knew my fantasies were there I just had met like this disgusting person that I just spoke about I had just never met any place where it was safe for me to think about doing what was in my fantasies until Cynthia founded Janice and all of a sudden I had people who were talking about consent and they were talking about what they were you know what they were going to do they were making plans they they they got together and talked about safety and what you had to be careful for I remember being at a play party with the aforementioned cage and someone was tying up her girlfriend like this in the clip and the person who was running the party I didn't know this I wouldn't have thought it myself it was news to me told her that she had to use different things because if her partner fainted which happens sometimes because standing bondage is difficult on the on the on the circulatory system then she would break her wrists if her full weight suddenly fell on them so we had to be out here and we lent her some cups that were padded and would protect the body if the woman fainted just in case you know she didn't faint it's a fairly rare occurrence but the fact that we take these precautions is really important that we know what we're doing we seek out the information we share that information we're looking at how do we do I'm not that fond of the risk aware consensual kink definition here because I think safe-saving consensuals are really good model and my standards that we have a respect for safety that we have a respect for the sanity of what we do we have a respect for consent this makes sense to me no that we say we're oh it's risky but we're aware so it's okay that doesn't make sense to me at all I know other people like it but I don't people I respect like it but I don't tell us about the Abbot Young Female Seminary at my parents I'm a first generation American I know that doesn't show my parents were desperate to build some respectability here I mean my grandparents in this country were domestics my mother grew up on an estate in Long Island where her mother was the cook housekeeper and her father was the chauffeur handyman she spoke German for the first five years of her life until her parents suddenly realized oh my god we've got to teach the girls English they have to go to school so a lot of their desire in life was to see that we got a good education and that we became respectable like worthy of respect you know take that as a serious concept much like the dilemmas opposed to immigrants and for that matter people of color today in terms of entering mainstream society there was a lot of focus when I was a kid on how I speak enunciate speak right ain't in the dictionary you know all that kind of you need to speak right or and people will not respect you so I had a scholarship we moved to Andover because there's a huge prep school there called Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts right and at the time it was not co-educational so we were the girl's school down the hill that was Abbott Young Female Seminary and it was a private high school okay and I got a scholarship there as a day student my family could not have afforded to send me as a border and then I got the scholarship to a women's equivalent again women were not welcome at Harvard or Yale or Princeton in those days they were not co-educational so the seven sisters were the sort of equivalent of the Ivy League among women's schools and I went to a place called Bryn Maw yes which I was sorely disappointed with why thought well I had thought that one was highly subjective I had thought that I wouldn't be singled out as the brain that everybody else they would have been the brain in their high school and so it would be okay for me to be a person who was good at things and good at thinking and so on that I wouldn't be exceptional because I would be among people who were all like me the worst thing that happened to me at Bryn Maw was the first paper we did Bryn Maw the short paper two-page paper but our teacher stormed up and down the front of the room I see you girls have a lot to learn you can stay girls back then and these were terrible only one paper in the class was worth reading and I got my paper back and said excellent and I didn't turn in another paper for the rest of the semester in any class I was terrible I'm sorry you didn't I was terrified absolutely terrified my paper was singled out as the only one worth reading and I didn't want that I didn't want to be isolated like that I wanted to be a member of something among peers I was very lucky in grad school that in my cohort in grad school there were two of us who were the quote unquote brains that we weren't stuck with this that I wasn't stuck with this label I don't like it let's move up to your psychotherapy you by all accounts are very accomplished in that arena how did that come about well I think it came about when I was younger I was my father was violent he was abusive the worst thing he ever did was kick me down the back stairs that was when I realized that I could actually die will be permanently injured in this what was going on in his rages so it was not a good thing in a sense the relationship with the man who turned abusive because of his illness was an opportunity for me to start a healing process about the abuse that I had experienced as a child and what I had learned from that so I was really into how what what do people do to heal and a lot of what was going on then there was a still the big split between Freudians and young ins and the Freudians were really kind of impossible and it was very difficult and I wanted there to be something better than what was available to me is how the other place but I was really interesting what are the human past I specializing with trauma survivors and I've studied a lot with the recent work in neurophysiology in brain science around how trauma affects particularly how children grow up but people who spend a long time whether they're adults or children war zones are typical for this in a very unsafe environment that that how that how does that affect the brain how does it affect how does it affect the brain well does terrible things to your memory because the hormone cortisol that is our stress hormone that gives us the energy to run away from tigers you know turns off the hippocampus which is essential to the sort of what I think it is the movie memory to where you can sort of rerun the film of what happened I have a lot of memories with my father and with this party that that turned to that sort of fade to black I don't even fade the curtain comes down they just go black my father my father's punishments and things like that I don't remember them very well when my sister is upset when she talks about the one she witnessed so it's not hard I can't my big sister I can't really reconstruct that history I ran into someone a few years ago that had known me when I was with my daughter's father and I he was the boyfriend of of a woman I know who lived around the corner and I wouldn't run there when when Harvey got violent he said he remembered this really powerful woman sitting at the kitchen table with bruises on her face that was me but how I don't remember looking in a mirror and ever seeing bruises and this here is not a line it's a scar from something I hit when I was thrown across the room so obviously there have been bruises on my face I know there have been I just can't remember them they've disappeared so we have we have a built-in system that removes memory of extremely stressful events or doesn't even it doesn't even remove them it actually never returns the camera off yes never records them they're not in there that's one thing actually it does really weird things to we go insulin insensitive so that we can build up extra blood sugar this is crazy but this is why they call them glucocorticoids they are cortisone is a glucocorticoid our cells in times of great stress release all the sugars in them and put them in the blood street to make energy to run away from the aforementioned tiger and and we have a system that allows us to become insensitive to insulin so it won't interrupt the process and some forms of diabetes and there are beliefs to be caused by long-term stressful experiences what we learn about self-esteem well we don't learn self-esteem people treat you like shit after a while you believe your shit yes that's true that's the saddest piece of it I think when they've been coming down with the up with the brain science about this and plenty of things happen to the immune system there's a lot of physiological stuff that goes on but I remember a friend of mine who's also a therapist and and also an abuse survivor when these new revelations would come out in brain science and we'd be on the phone with each other going oh my god that's me so there's a lot of things that we learn or we don't learn from a traumatic environment and learn to be afraid all the time frankly I don't trust people very well it seems funny because I'm very open about something that most people are very private about so it seems like I'm a super trusting person but I've actually not it's it's it's shaped my life I mean I was the first time my sister remembers my father beating me with a belt and not being able to stop was when I was five that's really young where did you earn your degree I earned it a place called new college which was I was in an independent study you're gonna laugh at me well one of my lovers was the dean okay yeah this has been my life especially when I look back at this part of it and they were looking for an independent study student at that time there were no courses on human sexuality in colleges anywhere and and so I did a program an independent studies program and that's why I wrote that great long honors paper to finish my I had some credits from Bryn Maw I had dropped out of Bryn Maw whom met two people who I knew very slightly but who had great influences on the Christmas vacation and myself a more year I met Tim Leary and Dick Alpert when they were still at Harvard Dick Alpert now known as Ramdas and and then after that I visited a house in New York where a man named Bob Thurman was staying right before his first visit to Nepal he goes to Nepal and becomes the dollar along his translator and raises a daughter named after the Tibetan earth goddess Uma you've heard of Uma Thurman I think yes yes well she grew up with the Dalai Lama oh wow okay probably was the Dalai Lama's translator isn't that cute I love that story I don't know Uma Thurman at all but I met Bob Thurman and just that one time I was so impressed who he was and how he was and I started learning about Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism and like that and that was very important to me that there was a spirituality that was embodied that I could learn and practice so but coming back to your studies how did you then take that and apply it to your community well I was already applying it to my community because I was already a specific volunteer my radio show was my weekly seminar where I interviewed people who were publishing books and doing research and such like and starting clinics and you know various things like that and so it was I was in I was already doing those things when I was invited to be their independent study student and given a scholarship to do that I see okay so for how long or are you still practicing I am in a very small way I'm semi-retired now okay I've recently had a rather large surgery on my spine which I'm recovering from yes and it's taking I'm going into my third month now and I will at the end of well anyway yeah they say it will be better but there's a lot of things that still still are happening there's a lot of the pain medicine and stuff like that so I've been a little out of commission but I'm very happy to report that the navigating consent classes which was my kind of retirement project turned out to be way too much work for a retired person to do but my my project of the navigating consent classes that I wrote is now ably run by a teaching team who have really stepped up to the plate since I am no longer able to participate actively and haven't been for two sessions yeah very limited I've been quite sick for the last two years and so I will go back to the chore of turning our syllabus into a book tell us about the books you've written because some of them are simply fascinating the ethical slot you know that I'm responsible for the title I love that title that's such an amazing title that immediately grabs attention tell us about your writing well I got very lucky again my life is is full of connections with wonderful people because I was very shy and and unable to do things like myself apply for work that I thought was somebody might think I wasn't good enough for and then you know blah blah blah and so I had a lot of really hard time with that and I met Janet because we were doing lecture demo for the Society of Janus in the 90s the early 90s it would have been around 92 93 and she had volunteered to be my my demo bunny and my stunt bunny for the a talk on pain processing that I was doing and I was using I'm sorry a talk on pain processing in BDSM I was using impact play as examples and using breath stuff from yoga and hot yoga and prana yoga and things like that to see say how how we can move pain through the body and turn it into ecstasy like we all like to do and how do we go about doing that and what are the things we could learn so I did a my lecture demos are a little different from some of the conference lecture demos because I always do the lecturing first and then I do the demo so I don't have to interrupt it I don't take questions during the demo I think it's if I'm if I'm the person who's beating somebody up I think it's bad to ask us up to put up with being constantly interrupted during the scene and if I have found somebody there who had somebody come up to be in the conference world and say I hear you actually bottom for some of your own workshops and it's true if it's somebody around I think it's competent enough to give me a good time I will bottom for my pain processing workshop I've done that many times and I love it and it usually works out pretty well I tend to be a little well we can do a scene that actually goes somewhere in the kind of 45 minutes that's half of the 90 minutes of the workshop at a conference you know so you can actually get somewhere and it's fun and and the audience really appreciates it and they really get it tell us about your writing tell us about the ethical slut and your other okay so I met Janet and Janet said you should write a book called the bottoming book because I'm sorry about it you should write a book called the bottoming book that was Janet my co-author okay and uh Janet Hardy Janet Hardy okay yes and I said I'm too anxious to write a book by myself I get too upset I wouldn't be able to do it alone I'd have to do it with somebody else and she said okay and a great writing partnership was born and we started writing books together and we wrote first one was the bottoming book and then the topping book now the new bottoming book they're both in second editions now and then we wrote ethical slut ethical slut was born in a very interesting way we have been invited to speak about BDSM at a Mensa conference you know what Mensa is yes yes the theme of which was wine women and song and the wine was in boxes I really was wondering about Mensa at this point so so anyway we did it there and because it was at this marvelous resort and by Monterey we had our partners with us and we were in these kind of motel room cabins and so our partners were there we introduced them now they said a few words we always respect or honor our partners at these things and then Janet and I did a role modeled doing a flirtation and consent negotiation and safety negotiation all in one it's all swoop right and you know started turning up the heat a little bit in the room and after we got through we came outside and overheard this woman saying oh my god do you believe it those two women they were boarding together and her husband was sitting right there how could this be and I was like okay okay now we know what the next book is the next book and then as we were writing it we affectionately started calling it the ethical slut it was something I came up with and then when it came time to actually do a title for the book we brought about you know polyamory for the 21st century blah blah blah and that was all the book was led to us and will always be slept to us so we published it as the ethical slut and it has been received very warmly yes we are very lucky and we wrote a book in the kind of voice the conversational voice that we write in which is very important to me a lot of times people write about sexuality as if they were as if sexuality having more syllables is somehow cleaner than sex and and as if they're wearing white coats and have a stethoscope hanging around their neck you know they're supposed to prove that it's okay for them to talk about sex because they're doctors or they they're you know they're whatever somebody has given them the some social license to explore their bodies and sharing their bodies with other people how weird and so people sometimes take an excessively formal voice to feel like they're being credible writing about sex and we don't do that we just write whatever in whatever voice works for whatever we're trying to say but mostly in a conversational voice we write a lot of it in a kind of IU conversation or Wii U conversation we think that we think that it works to do it like so and if you want to learn that the first step might be XYZ you know and it's been wonderful writing books there are five of them now our favorite is the last one it doesn't sell very well because it's pretty obscure radical ecstasy SM Journeys to Transcendence but it was very personal to us and very very important to us we journaled for like two years writing that book every scene we played we journaled ourselves with other people and fascinating where they went and what we learned from them and who we got to be in that scene because we did a lot of role playing and it was wonderful it was just wonderful it's our favorite of the books but slut is a good book I've done the narration on the audible books so far most of it Jenna's done some Jenna has more and more participated a friend of mine who is not my lover but a dear dear friend runs has built up a company that does audible books it does audio you know audio books in the voices of the people who wrote them but she's a magnificent voice coach she's a marvelous singer and musician as well and so and a great recording artist and she really knows how to she really knows how to oh she keeps taking another course in new microphones and you know that kind of stuff the technical stuff she's building a studio in her backyard right now they bought a house finally but there's so we've had a lot of success and slut in particular has kind of you know when people say to me you can't change the world I get to say oh yeah because I think we did a little bit me and Janet when we wrote slut we did we made a lot of changes and when we wrote bottoming and topping books because they were very immediately popular within the within the leather movement less among gay men because you guys have had more of your own society in your own literature that that the community has been was the first to be really highly developed I think as a community and and that was why it was so important for us to make those connections in that community and be able to participate wherever we welcome enough because without access to that we didn't have access to what a fully functioning leather community might look like yes what do you think how do you see your legacy in the community well I'm very proud when I was told that that slut is required reading a crystal methanonomous wow why is that well because a lot of people get believe get strung on on meth because they believe that methadrine right yeah they get they they believe that they can't have good sex without the drugs they believe that they need those drugs to have good sex and and to be brave enough to go to party spaces and fuck with strangers and so on and so and so the book is very important because it teaches you how to do all of that without taking drugs wow fascinating that is absolutely fascinating I'm very proud of that one so the book has been useful to a lot of people I get letters all the time in a lot of different circumstances a very sad one I wrote another piece for the book and possibly a handout for the classes a woman wrote me to say how can I be safe picking up partners on Tinder what do I need to do and I wrote some about the sign-on alarms the safety precautions what you might consider a limit like don't use a gag on a first date so that you could call for help if you need to you know things like that and and she said the thing she said that was the feedback I got from her was that was wonderful except she thought that if she insisted on talking about safer sex before meeting with a partner on Tinder they would be angry with her that's what she said that's really sad yeah odd yeah and this is in the middle of an epidemic which is much harder AIDS is easy to prevent the transmission of really easy you know I always say I do what comes naturally I have a close thumb I use tools tools can be sterilized only body parts and we can you know we can find ways workarounds where as in people we managed to bring really unworkable fantasies into reality Janet said if she really lived according to her one of her central fantasies she'd be in jail my gosh and what is this difference sanity is sometimes defined as the difference between knowing the difference between fantasy and reality and that's what we do so well in SF we know how to make bring fantasy into reality by proper regard for safety and safety and consensual aspects of it and then we find a way to do it we find a way to make it up I love it one example I use is the first scene I use that played directly into the child abuse but we picked a teenager I played a teenage character not the really young child because that was too scary to start with so already we're looking in one of the emotional minutes here and my friend played the headmistress of a Swiss finishing school that was attempting to turn me into a proper young lady and failing miserably as indeed the actual school did but you know there you are but so so I was getting a caning as a punishment and and we had talked my partner in this was also an abuse survivor so we had talked a long time about how this was and what would we do if we had to stop and in the middle and what was planned was there a plan B if you're going to play a deep emotional scene you not only you know I know it's fun to fantasize some extent enchanted evening you won't meet a stranger but I strongly suggest that you get somebody you really trust and know well to pretend to be a stranger because that will work better really and and so this is the sort of thing about that intersection of fantasy and reality so we played that scene and it really went there I mean I went there emotionally I went over and over again I'm sorry I'm sorry I didn't even know what I was sorry for and it was very cleansing it was a chance to there was a lot of physical contact the top thought that the nurturing was getting in by the back door right and and we went on from it to a very nurturing happy orgasm and so on and so forth I have an article coming up in the journal of humanistic psychology you know Richard Sprote I do not he's the founder of Charis which is a consortium of something about research and alternative sexualities and he's editing an edition of the journal of humanistic psychology I wrote an article called shadow play for a British academic anthology and which we had to invent footnotes for because you have to have footnotes when they asked me for footnotes I pointed out that I didn't learn this stuff in a library but experiential is my epistemology here but but anyway they're going to publish shadow play which is about just this kind of thing how do we take our fantasies and look at that Jungian theory about how we bury or freeze away deep conflicts that we feel powerless about into what he thought of as an area of the mind or a part of the mind or a function of the mind called the shadow when we put it away and we don't pay attention to it so we feel safe from childhood trauma things like that times when we felt terribly humanly so when we did things when we don't approve of us for doing ourselves for doing you know that sort of thing and we put them away and so there's a part of us who who sees that as split off parts and yearns to have them back because we're missing something we've taken our difficult parts the mentally difficult parts this is my explanation for why we are so fond of dark fantasies like little red writing with a big devil right I actually made myself a little red writing a writing a red hooded cape once I believe it yep and they had and so we looked at this as a healing path saying where okay so I want to play into a scene I get to write the strip I decided to be older than five years old for that first adventure into child abuse I made myself 15 I decided for this limit that limit and we also decided the outcome would be arousing happy orgasm for everybody so that we can check choose the ending as well yeah and it's an ending in loving and sharing and and happy sex and all good stuff like that and so we get to write the story we also get to figure out how it ends it's good idea to have a backup thing so that if you plan if you get in the middle of the scene which has happened to me and something goes where you didn't expect it to go and it's awful and you have to you have to say for it and stop what do you do next yeah yeah and what I believe I believe a safe word is very vulnerable for both parties or all participants tops and bottoms doesn't matter it's everybody feels very vulnerable in that moment in time and that the only real proper response to a safe word is mutual support yeah we support everybody we support the top as well as the bottom we support everybody and so um so we have these elements you know of how do we put the scene together so we can explore these split off parts of ourselves and come back in a higher level of integrity yeah I've written often about a scene that Janet and I shared where I was a Victorian orphan failing to make my living in as a as a whore in the streets and uh if you're actually 13 years old and she was the sadistic matron of the Victorian workhouse and um she she knows I don't do punishment scenes she loves punishment scenes but because all of my father's violence was because I was fresher I was talking back or something like that I don't do punishment scenes in the direct sense they have to be very fictional to me so she rather than imagining me doing something wrong and getting punished for it she showed me what would happen to be if I should break any of her new rules and get a lovely scene which felt very luxurious in the next morning I woke up you know after I left my daughter's father I was going to this ecumenical ministry in the hate because they had food okay they would feed me and I know that I looked very pathetic to them I was 24 at the time and um but I didn't feel pathetic I was angry I was really pissed off I was pissed off him I was pissed off it's a society that says if you're a man and you feel really shitty about yourself and out of control and scared what do you do to feel big and solid while you beat up somebody smaller than you that's one way you're supposed to be able to feel big and you know we beat each other up all the time but I'm not with that kind of dynamic in mind when I bought him to a good impact scene I feel very powerful yes as you should yeah and I feel like my power is part of the power that we are exchanging big time and uh and so I woke up and I realized that in that they thought I was pathetic I resented it I was just angry I was angry at the whole society that supports this kind of one-up one-downness and um that anger got me through I had that child and she's 52 now polishing her own work and things like that good stuff and uh it all worked we did it me and her and and that is just amazing but at that time I was pathetic I mean I didn't have enough food to eat literally yeah six months pregnant and all I owned was the clothes on my back and um that morning after that Victorian Warth and Seen I um I realized that I had missed something which was in rejecting this kind of pathetic victim identity which I had to do if I'd stayed in it it would have been dreadful but I had not made room for a time for I have some compassion for myself in what really was a terrible situation yeah yeah that's true and um and so I kind of woke up to that and woke up with some compassion and understanding why feeling pathetic was such a luxury because you're not supposed to be pathetic is just as forbidden as being a villain you know and uh so I was able to kind of satisfy that part of myself and start treating myself with compassion around some the more dreadful experiences in my life and this is also where my interest in therapy and spirituality comes from this openheartedness starting with opening our hearts to ourselves so that we can indeed become so I don't know the most successful ourselves that we can be ourselves that we want to be and have freedom for that Dawsey Easton thank you for an amazing interview with inside leather history of fireside chat the Dawsey Easton fireside chat is sponsored by a gift from the Carter Johnson library never again landfill never again flames thank you