 Let's start right at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your family growing up. My family growing up. Born in Chicago, raised in Chicago, lived there until my early 20s. Single, only child, raised by my father essentially because my mother was more or less absent due to mental deficiencies, I'll say that. I wasn't the most pleasant of childhoods with my mother. But my dad walks on water as far as I'm concerned, so he made up for it 10 times over. So born in Chicago, raised in the southern suburb of Chicago, at some point moved back to the north side of Chicago until at some point I moved to New York. And what else would you like to know about the family life? Anything you'd like to share? I am the man I am today because of my father. He absolutely rocks, he accepted me gay, he accepted me tinky, he accepted me when I decided to not become a lawyer and become a dancer. That was quite a conversation. He has always accepted me without question with maybe a few moments of silence as he digested whatever it is he was supposed to digest. And I say that not just because I think I'm the man I am because of him, but I think I'm the kinky man I am because of him. Because I think his ethics and his morality and his sense of righteousness, which he always instilled in me, was a really good foundation upon which to be kinky and alternative generally. So I credit him with an awful lot. Speaking of Chicago at an interesting time, please tell us a bit about the Chicago gay scene as you knew it when you were young. So the time period is 1972. I had just gone off to college with about 100 miles south of Chicago and I decided to go into the city of Chicago on a regular basis. I drove that 100 miles sometimes every weekend and at one point I started to frequent two bars in particular, one called the Glory Hole. It was the name. He claimed it was the gold mine name, not the whole name, but we know better. And the Gold Coast, one of the most famous leather bars ever. And my gay life started directly in the leather kink world. I came right out into it. It was either the sleazy side of gay life or the leather kink side and sometimes they merged significantly. And it was often romanticized. We know about the old guard stuff that you hear about a lot. Much of which is romanticized, if I can be apologized. It was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It really was. And I mean that in the best of sense. I don't mean that in the negative sense that will sometimes be portrayed. But we were out to have fun. There was a modicum of protocols here and there that they were scattered. It was much more free-form than one would want to believe. We didn't use terms, dom and sub. We didn't really use master and slave very much. We used top and bottom. We were versatile, because most were still versatile back then. I contend most are today. And the leather and kink life did not merge too much with the mainstream gay life in Chicago. And I loved to go out dancing. I was a disco kid. I really was. And I would go to the big disco bar, which was one block from the Gold Coast, the Leatherman leather bar. I would dance till a certain hour. I'd run home, which is about 12 blocks away. Change into something like this. And then I would be in the leather bar. And I would close my nights out in the leather bar for obvious reasons. Because that's where I got laid. And that was a large chunk of my life in my youth. Were there any surprises or anything that you found fascinating about the leather life at that time? I think my eyes were opened. I was at a bath house in Chicago. Oh, by the way, I was bartending underage in the glory hall. That was a little pointed and pointed out. So I'm 18 years old. They had lowered the drinking age from 21 to 19. And I got offered this job, said yes. It was a different era. We didn't check things so much back then. And so I was bartending there. I was also at some point, I was a backup bartender at the Gold Coast, because I worked for Chuck Brunslow, another one of his bars, another story. But the glory hall, the owner said to me, I said to him, oh, it's my birthday, wish me happy birthday. And he said, great, how old are you? I said 19. And he just went white. And I said, well, I'm legal now. And he didn't fire me, and he liked me. So I was bartending in the gay bars, in the kind of sleazy gay bars in Chicago underage. And that was a great thing. Well, you studied dance, and you were a professional dancer. Please tell us about that. I was. I always had an affinity for body movement. I was a competitive gymnast from the age of 8 to 19. Actually, 8 to 18, really. 19, theoretically. And I was in college. I was at the University of Illinois championer band. And I was an accounting major with a pre-law designation. It meant that I would become a CPA, eventually become an attorney. My corporate life would be set. And after my first semester, I was there in a partial athletics scholarship. I was a jock. So gymnastics, which was not the big sports, but I was still a jock. And I was very dissolutioned with college athletics. Why are you taking calculus? Take something simpler. Why are you taking theoretical physics? Why don't you take something simpler? And they kept dumbing down my classes. And the coach kept forcing me to do that. And finally, I got very frustrated, and I quit. And to fill in the gap of physical activity, because I had quit the gymnastics team, physical all my life, I took a PE modern dance class. And the instructor pulled me over after the third class and said, why didn't you let go to here? And I said, well, I've been a competitive gymnast all my life. I've coached women's gymnastics for four years, and I've managed gymnastics for six. And she goes, oh, that's why. Would you like to be a dancer? And I said, I've never thought of that. And she said, have you ever thought of maybe auditioning for the dance department? No, let's give that a try. And so I auditioned for the dance department. And again, you have an advantage. Far more women in the business than men. And so I got in and called Dad the next day, said, Dad, I'm switching majors. Oh, son, what? Dance, silence. And all he, through clutched teeth, he said, I love you in whatever it is you want to do in life, go do it. That's really what he said. There was a long pause. It was a big adjustment for my dad, as a big academic and corporate man. And then I, very quickly thereafter, they had a guest instructor came into the college, she was teaching, said, you're pretty good. In fact, you're very good. Do you want to dance professionally? And I said, yes. She said, then get out of college. Now. Because two, two and a half more years you've done. Because you're a man, you have an advantage, you can go do it. Back to the big city, steady your butt off, start dancing right away. I did and I danced professionally for about seven years. What were some of the predictions you did? I did two modern company touring groups. I was with the Chicago LA for the first one. I did a few bus and trucks, which in the business is when you do musicals and things like that, and they bus you around in tours. Gypsy and a bunch of other things. I did a six month gated playboy club or night club act. I did a lot of industrials for people in the business and a lot of commercial industrial films kind of thing. That was the typical actor-dancer center. I was an incredibly good dancer. I was a really good actor and I was a so-so singer. So I was never the soloist. And I did that for seven years and I loved it. When you were young, what did you do for extra cash? I worked in an ice cream shop. I didn't actually have a job until I was 16. My dad had a rule that I never needed to work as long as I kept my grades up. And he said, that's your job as my son is to prepare yourself and I'm here to back you when you go to school and do your thing. And at 16 I wanted a job, so I worked in an ice cream parlor and I worked in a truck that drove the soft ice cream around to various places. In my freshman year of college I was an actor in psychological experience where I was the control and they would hire me for research and I was always the control. I would talk to 50 people this way and 50 people that way and then we'd compare the results. And I made quite a bit of money doing that actually. What else did I do? And then by the time I was 18 I was bartending. So I didn't have a lot of jobs early. That was my early employment. Let's take one step back and let you go back to your bar scenes. How did that impact you as far as fetishes, kinks, anything like that? What things were presented to you today? Well, I'm working in a bar called the Glory Hall. So it was a sleazy neighborhood bar in Chicago. Everybody knew it was sleazy. It had a very butch aesthetic. Many would call it kind of a Levi leather bar. It wasn't a leather bar but it was kind of a butch aesthetic bar. Very sleazy. Back then there weren't a lot of alcohol and beverage control laws that people did much and we paid off the cops, quite frankly. I slid many a bill under a drink to a police officer. And there was a lot of sex that would go on and much of it I was in the middle of. I was highly sexual from the time I was eight years old. So I've been highly sexual all my life and I've been kinky since I was eight years old. I was spanking the next door neighbor weekly for three years when I was eight, nine, and ten. So I used to tie boys to trees and do not so nice things like pull their pants down and run away and leave them alone. They thought they were alone and they weren't. But it was kind of mean but it was fun. And so the early gay bar life really impacted me from the beginning because the leather butch aesthetic, edgier, highly sexual, kinkier aspect was what I was exposed to immediately. So I went, oh, I'm home. When I walked into the Gold Coast, I literally turned to my friend I was with and said, I'm home. That felt more natural to me to be in that space than any place I had been in my life prior to that. And then one other thing happened that I was very young, I was 18. I was in a bath house. Actually, 18, I guess, was legal then. So I'm in a bath house, man's country in Chicago. And I had just moved into the city. I'm bartending this bar. I've sort of begun to explore my kinky self. And a guy walks out of the room at the bath house, limping. And I went, oh, did you hurt yourself? And he goes, no. And his foot was covered in Crisco. And he had stuck his foot off some guy's butt. And I went, whoa, okay. And I just said, you know, that may not be what I want to do right now, but I love the fact that this is going on. And that just plugged into me right away that, okay, kinky is cool, because he talked about it like it was the most natural thing in the world. And that influenced me. So I, from a very early age, 18 on, kinky was normalized for me. I didn't, I never lived closeted in any kind of closeted way. All my corporate life, you name it, I've always been very out. And I think part of it was these initial men that I met who were so comfortable being out in kinky made me feel that way. So that was probably the best influence that that early life had. And then the Gold Coast was just nirvana. It was just leather men, kinky men's nirvana. Fill us in a little bit on that. We hear a lot about the Gold Coast, but very few people actually tell us what went on in it or what they experienced in it. When you walked into the Gold Coast, the walls were covered with these amazing paintings by an artist's name of ATN. That was his artist's name, Dom Herrudus. I'm saying it wrong, and I apologize. What is it? It's Herrudus. I believe you. Yeah, Herrudus, he's correct. I apologize for that. Brilliant artist, wonderful, lovely man. And his art was this twisted, sick, in a wonderful way, paintings all over the bar. So the moment you walk in, that's what you saw. And it was, it set the tone. It really set the tone. And it was not as much leather as you might think. Lots of Levi, lots of Levi jackets. There were leather jackets. Not as much full leather garb. If somebody was in full leather garb, they stood out a little bit because we didn't have as many leather makers back then. And we didn't have it as standardized as it is today. And we were also morphing into that butch aesthetic that we see today because it definitely had a history of evolving over time. And so we kind of went from Levi leather, which is what we used to call the leather bars, sort of, Levi leather, because Levi was a predominant garb. And it was a sea of men. It was definitely men. I could count on one hand the number of women I saw in the Gold Coast in the entire time I was there. And by the way, I believe, and Chuck Recker will probably chastise me if I'm wrong, I think I'm correct, that the bar was actually in the name of a woman. Am I correct? Agnes. Agnes, thank you. And so the Gold Coast was technically owned by a woman, which I thought was awesome. But it was a very gay male space. It definitely did not embrace effeminate men in any way. I won't say it was nasty to effeminate men, but guys from the disco from two blocks away would come in and there was a definite, you don't really belong here. But I never saw anybody really truly rude, but they would just gently let them know, this is probably not your space. There was a downstairs. I can imagine what went on downstairs. Sex went on in bars back then all the time. In Europe, it still happens. Almost every gay bar in Europe has a back room. And I see somebody from Arab Sharks shaking hands. And it's true. It's just normal life there. And it used to be that way here. Every gay bar had a back room, we had sex in the bars, it always happened. It was a little leather shop in the basement of the Gold Coast, and that was the very first leather shop in Chicago, was, I believe, in that basement. And it expanded to something much bigger, street level, eventually, that started in the basement of the Gold Coast. And the basement of the Gold Coast felt very dungeony. So when you went down there, it had a kind of sleazy dungeon feel to it. And you immediately went into that space. Sex didn't happen much on the main level. It was a rectangular bar, men would walk around because gay bars that had that pattern were really welcome because you could keep cruising. And so it had a traffic flow to it that really worked well. So it was a magical place, it really was. What are your fetishes? Okay, you said this was an hour? What are my fetishes? The main thing that trips my trigger when it comes to kink is some aspect of dominance and submission. It could be a little bit, or it could be a lot. But that element trips the trigger and everything that can revolve. I can have vanilla sex, but if the dominance of aspect is in there, it just becomes twisted in my head and it works. So that's kind of the foundation upon which a lot of my fetish kink resides. But bondage, obviously, although I do less of it today than I used to. I used to be kind of known as a rope bondage guy. And now I slap shackles on and clip you up and we're done. It just seemed to have gone there. Flogging, single tails, bow whips, piss, any aspect of fucking, any aspect of whole play, ass play, piercing, close pins, clips, anything like that, hot wax. I do not like to shave ever because I love hair on men. So I never shave men, I just don't. I've done it once because I really like to go. So I never shave anyway. What are some of my other... It's a long list. When people ask me what are you into, I always say, and I mean this, no underage, no non-consensual, pretty much everything else is negotiable. I mean, I have my things I go back to over and over, but it's pretty rare I say no to something. And I've gone into some pretty twisted things. I played with a husband and wife once. That was one of the most twisted scenes I've ever done in my life. And I'm about a Kenzie 5.7. Anybody knows the... So it's like a little smidgen of wiggle room. So, but I'm pretty gay. And it was one of the most twisted scenes I've ever been in. Was this husband and wife, it was... I still... I mean a little heart, sorry. It was a great scene. It was a great scene. What made it so great? And that helped. Because he was truly bi. And I mean there was no filter. I mean he was totally bi. And she loved... He was subbed to me. She was dumbed to him. And she loved seeing him subbed to gay men. And this is... We're talking the 70s. So this is a very progressive kind of thing. And I had played with women in high school, even college, I dated a woman and finally realized this is probably not going to work. And was an avaliable bisexual from the age of about 15. Because I hadn't placed the gay thing on me yet. Because to me if there was even a smidgen of interest then I was bi. And I always say I don't really like homo-flexible and heteroflexible. I don't use it very much. But I just say there's wiggle room and talk to me. But that scene was just magical for some reason. And I think partly I was very young and they were about 20 years older than me. Very experienced. Very stable. Very cool. And they had a dungeon. I had been in some dungeons but not quite that well equipped. I learned later she was a pro-dom. I didn't know that. And I just had this... It was a... We were there a weekend. I met them and we spent a weekend in their dungeon. Wow. It was pretty cool. And they had another slave that served us the whole time. And I wasn't quite plugged into that whole service thing quite yet. And this guy just kept coming and serving us drinks and serving us things. And I kind of said who is this person that did this. And oh that's my slave. It turned out to be one of her clients I believe. But yeah it wasn't new back. It was pretty cool. Well your religious points of view are fascinating. Please tell us a bit about your thoughts on religion. Let me preface anything I say as no disrespect to anyone. Because I really do respect everyone's choices. I was raised Catholic. That tells you a lot. Because my ex-guy and I used to have a theory that Catholicism breeds kinky people. And so I went to Catholic school, raised Roman Catholic. My dad was in the seminary until two months before his vows. That gives you a sense. He left two months before his vows. My first partner when I was 17 had just left the Jesuit seminary. So I had this very Catholic influence very very early on. And to my dad's credit when I was 13 Sunday every day until I was 13 he looked at me at breakfast. Yet another reason you know why I worship my father. He looked at me and he said son you're 13 you're a man. Do you want to keep going to church? And I said dad I really don't. He goes that's your choice. And I never set foot in church again. Thank goodness I had that kind of a father. So and over time my religious views evolved. I would identify myself as an agnostic. Because to me again no disrespect to anybody who identifies a certain way. Atheism on some level feels just as arrogant and know-it-all as God fearing. Because we know somehow and I'm not sure we can. So agnostic feels like that middle ground. And if it seems like I'm equivocating then so be it. But it seems honest to me that I just don't fucking know. So I'm agnostic and I live life by kind of an ethical center that isn't God-based at all. I have no issues with anybody being religious at all as long as they don't try to influence my life based on it. I have many friends that are deeply religious, many friends that are militantly atheist. And I kind of walk that middle ground and I'm okay in that spot. It seems honest to me. Like I said every time I, oh you're an atheist. I said not really because you know if I meet that person's God someday and go sorry. I didn't really realize. You know in a little bit of life that's all that matters and that's what I go by. Well how did the non-profit service kink-aware professionals come about? Kink-aware professionals for those that may not know. There's a referral service that refers kinky folk to professionals in the psychotherapeutic, medical and legal fields. Some others too. That's the main focus. And the original focus was psychotherapeutic. Guy Baldwin, my partner at the time, what is a psychotherapist, many people know that, and has a client base that's entirely comprised of kinky people and always has been. His entire client base is kinky people. And he would keep a little napkin list of people he could refer to around the country. And it was this long. A handful of therapists were willing to come out and say, you can openly refer people to me as someone who is king-friendly. We didn't use that terminology. I made up a king-friendly term. And he published that little list, I believe, in Dungeon Master, which was a magazine that Desmodus published. It was Tony Goodloss' magazine. And they published that little list. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. That is Sabotopia Guardian, one of the two. And I said, you know, we need to take this bigger. And so inspired by Guy, who I absolutely was the original brainchild of this referral concept, an organizer that I am, I sort of took it by the horns and decided that I would start reaching out to therapists. And I started creating this list. People would send a self-adgressive draft envelope. This is pre-internet. And they would, I would print it out on my own printer and send them back to the list of therapists. And we grew from 10 to 20 to 30. And the last paper-based version that I thought I think had almost 200 therapists on it. And I would literally make calls and say, were you be okay with this? And then we went net and it became a website. And then about 10, 12 years into it, I was tired. And it's a lot of maintenance. And I turned it over to the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. And they maintain the website to this day. Some of us are actually talking about maybe doing a slightly different version of it in a much more robust database, easily searchable form. Sorry, NCSF, if this is the first you're hearing about this. But we're starting to make overtures about doing something like it again, but in a very robust database way. So it's very searchable and very granular to the point where you can say, this is the code, it gives you those five therapists within a 10 mile radius or whatever. We need something like that. It needs to be a little bit more granular. So that's the history of CAP, K-A-P, think-of-work professionals. Fantastic. But speaking of Guy Baldwin, you and he worked together to influence the American Psychiatric Association to deep apologize Kinky Sacks and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Say that five times faster. How did that happen? When you're partnered with a psychotherapist who has a kink population for their clientele, you talk about this kind of stuff a lot. And so I was very, I'm not a therapist. People to this day come up to me and say, could I be your client? Because they think I'm a therapist because of my roots with CAP. It happens all the time. And we began to discuss that the DSM was part of the problem. The DSM is what codifies pathologies. Psychotherapeutic pathologies. And if it's in the DSM, it's sick. Well, I could have earlier played it. And their view on BDSM and kink generally was very archaic. Still is, in my opinion. But it's better. And well, so I began to do some research. And the research was that this body of people that sits on the DSM Paraphilia Board, which is the Sexual Disorders Board, is this kind of throwback group that's been entrenched for a long time, very old school thinking. The demographic is significantly older. They're very entrenched in their thinking. And what we knew was that we couldn't lobby them directly. So we very quietly never announced this project, but I started contact therapists all over the country and said, do you have any research whatsoever? Do you have case studies? Do you have anything that you can quietly send them with a covered letter saying, please reconsider. Please reconsider your diagnostic criteria and the Paraphilia section generally. And we had, I think at last count, I want to say 225 therapists submitting to that board. And for those that don't know the DSM process, that's an avalanche. People don't take the time to do this. And they never announce what they're going to do. They do, oh, now they have drafts that come out, but that didn't happen back then. Now they actually publish a DSM draft and you can kind of look at it and comment on it. But that didn't happen back then. So we waited, we waited. The book came out and we opened it up and they had changed the diagnostic criteria, which is what we had asked them to do. Previously, by default, if you were into what we're into, you were sick. The new diagnostic criteria said, if you're into this and it negatively impacts your life, you have a problem. Huge, which is exactly what we wanted. So we succeeded. And it's since been taken, the math has been taken up by other people and they have taken it even farther. It still needs to go farther. We have brave people like Dr. Charles Mosier who are still fighting that fight, but it's so much better than it used to be. Fantastic. Well, tell us a little bit about the, is it Daedalus Publishing Company? Is that the correct pronunciation? Daedalus. Daedalus? Please tell us about it. Daedalus was a company I founded. We published nonfiction books about alternate sexuality, primarily BDSM, leather, fetish. And it started because I wanted to write a book, a gentle, intro kind of book that was reality-based, reality-based, I say it again because a lot of it wasn't in the beginning, the stuff that was written, that was applicable to anyone of any gender, any orientation, that would gently introduce them to BDSM. Which back then I referred to just as SNL. I've since changed the name of the book to BDSM. But anyway, so I decided to write Learning the Ropes and in 1992 I published Learning the Ropes. And said, well you need a publishing company so I created my own little publishing company, Daedalus Publishing Company, that had one book, man. That's what you did back then as a self-publisher. Today it's very different. They accept self-publishers in a way now that they did back then. And then I was with Guy and I said, Guy, you've written all these essays, Guy Baldwin, you've written all these essays, he should be a book. And so I convinced him to put them all together in a book that's now called Guys That Bind. And I published that. And then there was a mistress nan in Los Angeles who was writing a book. And I said, I'll publish that. And William Henkin in Civil Holiday wanted to write a book and I said, I'll publish that. And I ended up with a publishing company. And kind of by accident. And then Janet Hardy, is she here? I don't think she's at this conference. But shortly thereafter she started Greenery Press. I believe she started after me. I apologize if it was concurrent but I think it was a little after I started Daedalus. And we used to collaborate quite a bit because we published different people and we published with different slants and we kind of had a collaboration going on. I'm going to publish this or not. Okay, cool. And at the time we were the only publishing companies publishing nonfiction books for people. And then some years ago I sold it and it is now at other hands. Fantastic. Well, what are your thoughts about the contest circuit? Ooh, that's a dicey one here especially. Okay, I'm going to... Somebody in this room outed me as a title holder. I love him to be able to... I'm just laughing over here. So I'm a title holder. Most of them know that I'm Southern California master in 1992. And my slave at the time was Southern California slave in 1992. Gabrielle was there, I think. I'm supposed to point to people in the audience, I probably shouldn't. She's out. The reason I buried it for so long because for years nobody knew I was a title holder because my partner and I buried it. We didn't talk about it at all intentionally because we said listen, we were in a bar and they talked us into entering the contest five minutes before it started. And come on, if anyone should begin a usual blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And we were a fairly well-known master's slave couple. He's still my partner to this day, 23 years later. Not my slave, but he's my partner. And we said okay. And there were like six, seven groups of contestants and we won. And we looked at each other and said, oh fuck. This really wasn't our intention. And luckily back then titles didn't have any obligations whatsoever. You got a picture taken, people went, oh, you were a title holder. Awesome, and we were done. That was it. And that eventually got morphed into international master's slave, which is what it is today. So Southern California was the precursor to what became international eventually. With that said, so I am not anti-contest at all. I think we place a preponderance of importance and money and time and effort on them. I think that we make the mistaken assumption that contests are good ways to pick leaders. Now don't get me wrong. Some contests have winners and contestants who are awesome leaders. I think Tenet has nothing to do with them being a contestant in a contest. You're an awesome leader or you're not. It has zero to do with whether you're a title holder or not. You can come into a title with being a great leader and lead. You can win a title and decide you're going to let the leader even come out. I contend the title does virtually nothing for that. That's my stance. I think, and I remember I go back to the very first IML, the very first real leather contest that existed, that happened in the Gold Coast Bar as a bar contest. It wasn't called IML then. It was Mr. Gold Coast. But it's what became international history of leather, Mr. Leather, the kind of the grand kahuna of contests. And it was fun. Semi-naked guys and jockstraps that were hot that we all wanted to fuck. And oh good, you're Mr. Gold Coast now. Great, you're the guy I want to fuck the most. And that's how you won. There were no judges. The audience applauded. What do you think? Wow. Okay, you win. The audience picked people. It was a very different era. And so that's the contest that I came out of, was it was about a hot guy, gay male in particular at the time, the contest circuit started primarily in the gay male community. And you were good looking, could put words together without stumbling, and we're a nice guy. That was it. And everybody was kinky that was up there to some extent. That was just a given. So I think what's happened is over time it's morphed into this hyper fundraising mechanism, this de facto assumption that we're picking our leaders by having all these contests. I contest we're not. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of title holder friends and there are many today that are great leaders. But again, I don't think that has anything to do with the contest circuit itself. And I would love to see some of the money and effort and time and resources that goes into contests be consolidated for more, maybe fewer contests and put into other projects that I think are seen to do. The other thing is that because it's become this hyper fundraising focus, and Guy Ball won't be happy I'm mentioning this because it's one of these things, is we raise a shitload of money for everyone else but ourselves. We have raised millions and millions and millions of dollars and we go across all fundraisers and the vast majority of time we're doing it for someone outside the scene. Okay, that's nice. But how often have our clubs and organizations and events reached poor? What about saying, okay, what about those 50 people who can't come to this event? We could have scholarships for them if we just raised enough damn money. What if we were able to pay presenters? What if we were able to fly presenters in and put them up? And presenters as corporate presenters, if you will, because this is a corporate model. We have templated the corporate model and adapted it to King America. And I would love to see the contest circuit raising more money for its own and I'd probably be a little bit more of a cheerleader for the contest circuit as a result. One more thing. I think that there's an assumption that the contest scene and the leather kink perc scene are one and the same. I contend they're not. I contend they are two separate ecosystems that intersect. So there are people that literally live in the contest circuit. They go city to city to city. They're at all the contests. They're waving from stages. They're wearing their sashes. Whatever it might be, great. That's its own ecosystem and it's kind of become the self-sustaining ecosystem. And over here, I'm doing a fend diagram in the air. And over here is the kinky, perv, BDSM, whatever scene. And there's an intersection, but it's only an intersection. They don't overlap. So I think when you see it that way, you realize that when a lot of kinksters say, you know, the title doesn't represent me. Don't say you represent me. You're a title. It's great. Awesome. I'll support you. I assume that because you're one of the titles that you represent me. Because I can only really point to a handful of title holders ever that I thought truly represented me. So I think that's a good thing to understand. And that way, you don't become anti-contest. You know, you don't become pro-contest. You just say, contests are what they are and that's great. The scene is here. They intersect. That's great. But let's approach it from kind of a realistic standpoint not this Pollyanna view that the contest circuit necessarily completely mirrors the kink scene. I can tell you in the gay men scene, the vast majority of gay men do not feel that title holders represent them at all. It's almost to the point of, they're almost a little angry about it. It's all over. They just don't, you know. But with that said, I think as long as everybody stayed realistic about it, nobody would really get it in. But it's when it's presented as something that it's not that I think people get upset. A question that's formulated in my head goes back a few moments ago. When you alluded to a lot of misrepresentations, misunderstandings of Old Guard, would you visit that a moment more and kill that in a little bit? Sure. Most of us in this room have heard the term Old Guard. I actually have an online spat with Andy Mengels, who I believe is the first person to use that term in print. It was in a drummer magazine op-ed piece, opinion piece, that I believe Tony Floss had asked him to write. And I had said something on Facebook about I would like to go back in time and stop the person who used that term from using the term. Because I think it's been so misappropriated and mythologized that it doesn't resemble anything like what it was supposed to be. And he got into offense, and Andy and I are friends, and we're okay. But the reason is that when you hear the term Old Guard, and I'm often supposed to be part of that group, that's what's really weird. They made me as part of this group, right? I said, that's not what it looked like at all. Was there a tiny little subset of people that followed really rigid protocols? And that had leather families, as we talk about them, and had ceremonial things happen? Yeah, there was a tiny little subset. Were they all codified into some sort of templated version of each other? No, they all grew up independently. And remember, no internet back then. I mean, we're talking about a scene where on the west coast, he's on the left man top, but on the east coast, he's on the left man bottom. We couldn't even get our signal straight. So that codification is a lot of mythology. But there's always a smidgen of truth to all mythology. And so that smidgen has been expanded and morphed into something that doesn't really resemble reality. And I'm not quite sure why. But I mean, maybe we like our stories and we like to mythologize and enhance our stories. So when somebody says, I'm old guard and I just look at them and say, what does that mean? And then you ask 10 people and it means 10 different things to 10 people. And so I don't use the term myself except to reference it. I don't like people that co-opt it as I'm old guard. No, you're you and be you and fuck what people did 40 years ago. That's really not that important. Don't disrespect them, but don't base your life on them. And that's the part that annoys me is when people built their lives on the past. And it's like, I mean, truthfully, if we were old guard, gay men leave the room because you wouldn't be with any women here. If we were really old guard, you know, heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, bi, in-betweens, whatever, you would not all be mixing right now. Old guard didn't mix back then. So we're not old guard now. Nobody's old guard now. We're a very different scene now. And I respect individuality. I really believe people need to be themselves. It doesn't mean you disrespect the past. It's no disrespect history. None. They were trailblazers. Let's be trailblazers now and not try to worship of the altar of what they did, because they didn't want you to move on. They wouldn't want you to live back then. What's the biggest misconception about you? That I live in a dungeon with hot and cold running slaves. Sorry about that. It's funny. We were at a big event in San Francisco, a Leatherman's discussion group, and Brian Dawson was talking about the first time he met me, which, unfortunately, he's told the story so many times that people think that's my life. So he walked into my house, and I had a throne in the house. I did have a throne. I really did. I had a slave on this side, and one of them was Guy Baldwin. And I had a slave on this side named West Lockwood. And to this day, two of the most amazing men on the face of the earth. And that's how Brian met me. And that's the assumption many people have, is that's how I live my life. Oh, only. That was a little slice of my life at that time. I was living kind of a 24-7 BDSM kink life back then. I still am, but not in the same way. So that's the biggest misconception, is that I live this incredibly entrenched 24-7 playing... I'm going to whip you here, and I've got to move over to this room to whip this one. I mean, that just doesn't... It's just not my life. I work in corporate America. We're a very large corporation. I'm a director, so I'm pretty high up, openly kinky, out. I'm out as a game. I'm not going to name the company, but they're very cool, and it's a big company. And so I live in a world that I just have to function on a daily basis just like everyone else does. So that's probably the biggest misconception about this. Grace Gannon, I would like to thank you for your contribution to the fireside chats. Thank you very much.