Ron H.
This week marks the return of Germany’s longest running fetish festival — the German Fetish Ball Weekend has been stirring up the erotica scene for 16 years and counting. With everything from ‘Kinky Cocktails’ to a fetish cruise, club nights and a mammoth fetish fair kicking off on Friday, the weekend offers everything your most adventurous self could desire. Who better, then, to turn to in celebration of the occasion than American anthropologist, curator and writer Katharine Gates, the author of iconic guide to sexual subcultures, Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge. The book was first published in 1999 and re-editioned last year by PowerHouse Books, with updates to reflect the changing face of fetish and a delectable new format brimming with illicit artworks and photography (think: baked bean baths and cannibal play). Here, we sit down with the kink-curious expert to pick her brains about niche erotica, the softer side of BDSM and the importance of face-to-face meet-ups in the fetish community.
When did you become interested in the realm of deviant desires?
When the desktop publishing revolution happened, and it became possible for anybody to put out a magazine or a book, I began publishing odd little artists’ book projects and I would drive all over the country depositing them at these very small bookstores. And many of these had a shelf in the front with magazines by local people. I noticed at least half of them were devoted to these niche erotic fixations that someone had. They knew that if they put out a magazine devoted to their specific fascination, someone else would be interested and contact them – of course, this was before the internet.
What kind of themes were covered?
There were magazines like Yankee Clipper, which was devoted exclusively to shaving women bald – that has achieved mythic status at this point in the kink community because it was by this mysterious guy who nobody knew anything about. And then there was Equus Eroticus magazine: a much more fancy product devoted to pony play. And Splosh! in England, which was devoted to the messy, fun stuff.
And these caught your attention?
Yes, so I started collecting niche erotica I would say around 1990, ’91? I’d always been interested in odd stuff – I had a lot of friends who were sex workers, professional dominatrixes or fantasy facilitators and I would always pump them for stories of the things that people wanted them to do. I was also inspired by a movie called Eating Raoul about a man and wife who decided to become fantasy facilitators in order to murder and rob people. But it’s a comedy! There are scenes with a dwarf and a German Shepherd involved – things like that – done in a European-style comedy, Benny Hill type way. Very weird but I loved that approach: not fearful or full of attitude, like “I’m cooler or weirder than you”, it was just people doing what they had to do, with a vision of what they wanted to make happen and a capacity to do that with creativity.
So how did the book come about?
Well I was long-time friends with Andrea Juno, who is one of the original publishers of RE/Search Books, and they had become very much a cultural baseline – they really brought a lot of subcultures into the public sphere. They did this book called Modern Primitives, which you can blame for the fact of tattoos and piercings becoming a trend all over the world! Anyway, she and I got talking about my fascinations and said, “You should do a book”, and that’s what happened in around 1997.
And so how did you decide which kinks to include and which to discard?
It’s funny because with the original book, I knew the audience was the RE/Search Books audience – subcultural hipsters, people who were eager to see what was on the cutting edge. And I, being the difficult person that I am, did not want to give them what they expected – which was the most dangerous stuff – knife play, gun play, all the dark stuff. I kind of wanted to mess with their heads, you know? I had a lot of people after the first book came out saying, “Well, where’s the necrophilia or whatever? Were you too scared to go there?” and I’m like, “No, that’s just obvious to me.”
It’s easy for outsiders to think that the purpose of kink is to be weird or scary or break rules, and I think that’s only one very small component. For the people who acquire kinks very early on in life, it’s like somebody knowing they’re gay from a young age: they’re not being gay to be weird, they’re being gay because they’re gay – because that’s who they are. It’s not about being cool and hip and edgy, it’s about being honest about who you are and what’s important to you; what’s meaningful and what makes you feel alive. And so, in a way, this was my slap in the face. And the fact that I incorporated humour was also something that was unexpected and sometimes misunderstood.
So why did you decide to do that, aside for making it entertaining?
Humour, and especially jokes, follow the same pattern as the erotic – the build-up of tension, the pushing of the envelope of what’s acceptable and comfortable, and then the popping of the balloon: the moment of sudden recognition and a release of tension. This is stuff I learnt from the people I interviewed. The connection to humour came from Bill Shipton of Splosh! magazine. I personally don’t like disorder or slapstick humour – it’s always frightened me, clowns and messy stuff – so forcing myself to go and meet these people and play with them was more adventurous, to me, than something like heavy knife play. Anyway, Bill made me see that, for Sploshers it’s not just about mess, it’s about the destruction of social conventions or the discontents of civilisation as Freud would have put it. So, it always has to be somebody who is a little bit uptight, fancily dressed who gets a pie in their face!
And the book is amazingly illustrated. Was that also an important factor to you?
Yes. This book is a lot more visual than a typical book would be. I think had it not had pictures, it might have been taken more seriously in certain worlds. But, I had to show these pictures! Ron H, the creator of Black Giantess magazine, was amazing to me, first and foremost because of the virtuosity of his artwork and also because of the political and social issues that he brought up – on the subject of things like race, desire, stereotypes, power and politics, his approach was so honest and direct.
Who are some of your other favourites?
Piper Pony, the pony girl, makes beautiful art – and she also neighs just like a horse at parties! At the launch party for the re-issue of the book, all of a sudden there was this neighing sound and everyone was like, “Where’s the horse?” but it was just her being her pony self. In the new edition, I was really interested in the work of Mr Muki, the cannibal photographer and artist, and Pablo Green, who writes superhero fetish stories – again people who had refined their vision into an art form.
It’s interesting that the two so often go hand in hand – art and fetish…
These people are artists making art for themselves of course – as most artists truly do – but they have also had to find a way to make their kink accessible to other people who share their interest. Or perhaps to entice those who don’t through their artistry.
So why did last year feel like the right time for an updated edition of the book?
I think that there was a lot of confusion surrounding the question of consent and desire. And so I thought that it was important to bring forward this perhaps slightly utopian picture of a world in which people could get what they want, without harming or harassing. I wanted to acknowledge and explore the dominance of popular culture in the erotic imagination now – something I had somewhat predicted in the first book. For the longest time, when people thought about kinky sex, they thought about master and slave or doctor and patient (which I do talk about in the book) – these antiquated pictures of what power is and can be. Now, more people have realised that things that are closer to our heart can form the catalyst or impetus for eroticism. For example, the relationship between an owner and a pet, which is enlivened by love and care-taking, by comfort and intimacy, in a way that more old-fashioned ideas of what BDSM should be had been lost or deliberately removed in favour of something tougher. Also associations with childhood, which earlier generations of BDSM practitioners generally avoided. By this I mean recovering and re-celebrating childhood play – to be very clear – not anything to do with actual children.
The second edition also looks at the digital revolution and how that has affected the world of kink.
Yes, the first edition really documented the moment when, suddenly, people who had been feeling really alone – thinking, “I’m the only person in the world who gets off bouncing on balloons” or whatever – were starting to find likeminded people online and form communities. In the beginning, there was a lot of safety in finding people who shared your own niche thing. And then, there was a dark period where “regular folks” infiltrated these little communities and mocked or exposed them. The dark ages – between around 2009 and 2010 – were also a time when it wasn’t possible for the people who made this work to make any money off of it. In the beginning, people were able to make and sell their beta-max videos – or whatever it was – online. And then suddenly there was absolutely no respect for intellectual property – people would just take your picture and share it and you couldn’t make a living from it. Now, in the last ten years or so, platforms like Patreon have evolved, and other ways of monetising your artistic ability, as well as a willingness from people to commission art that represents their specific interests.
You also touch on the evolution of real conventions, where those with like-minded desires can meet in person.
Yes, there’s been a realisation that internet communities only go so far; that often there is something missing. One of the touch points of this sort of transformation, which I cover in the book, is SizeCon. There’s a great female artist whose fantasy is to become a tiny person with giant men. She wasn’t satisfied with just meeting people online so she decided to organise a con for people who are interested – more broadly – in size. The first SizeCon was held two years ago, and going to this con, where people had come from all over the world to meet face-to-face with other people who shared their interests, who weren’t going to laugh at them, who totally got it – the level of joy was just amazing, I loved it.
Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge is available here, published by PowerHouse Books.
German Fetish Ball Weekend runs from 29 May through to 2 June in Berlin.
All images courtesy of PowerHouse Books.