Chainmale: 3SM--A Unique View of Leather Culture by Don Bastian
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've often wondered what makes a good Dominant. Are they just sadistic control freaks? Most BDSM m/m books that delve into the psychology and not just the mechanics are told from the perspective of the sub, with a few notable exceptions like Syd McGinley's Dr Fell series.

Hence, when I discovered that there was a non-fiction book written by a well known Dom in the Leather scene I was intrigued and then ultimately satisfied. "Chainmale" is written as a stream of consciousness and in it I found the answers to a lot of my questions. It's a book that you have to stop and think about as sometimes just two paragraphs may contain a whole strand of thought which needs consideration.

As many readers don't have access to a Kindle, I'm including some quotes to give you an idea of the sorts of things I'm talking about that put the whole thing into perspective. There is a hard copy version, and you can get Kindle as a free download to your PC.

(The Dungeon Master)becomes director, psychologist, props manager, and scriptwriter, all in one. This fully rounded individual enables the bottom to explore a full range of experiences, emotions, and fears with total support and confidence. Mentor and student. And maybe that is why I feel that my education as a Top is never complete. There is always some applicable piece of information cropping up to spark new approaches and explanation
.....
The fact that I actually cared about my bottom's well-being and acknowledged it drew various negative responses from the audience. To some, I became 'too-real', meaning that my ability to 'feel' got in the way of their fantasy. Some wanted truly sadistic scenes in which the bottom viewed the Top as an uncaring power figure. A valid point too. These fantasies are needed by some and, I admit, there are times when I enjoy them also.
.....
A "mean, tough, cream-puff" is a rough exterior with a marshmallow center and a great analogy of most Leatherfolk in my opinion. I have never met more passionate and caring people in my life.
I could provide a safe and trustworthy place to explore their fantasies, within the confines of their submission. A place to let go knowing they might trip but I would catch their fall.
.....
I value a bottom who is creative, spontaneous, and objective. I do not wish a doormat. After all, someone who can think for themselves also pushes my creativity and limits. It is the respect shown me as a Top that carries weight and has the most value emotionally, in or out of the playroom.
It is the respect shown me as a Top that carries weight and has the most value emotionally, in or out of the playroom. Not time out, but just a toned down period that allows readjustment or re-evaluation of the contractual needs.
....
For example, a weekend of intense bondage and the ability to play for a lengthy period, for me, requires tremendous focus.
....
Even through clenched teeth, a difference can be intimated just by volume. The exception to this being if the bottom displays a "this-is-a-test" attitude to discover what it takes to make a Top abandon the scene. The 'you-couldn't-get-a-response-so-I-win' attitude that some bottoms exhibit. Well, they usually get a response from the Top they were not expecting. Translate that anyway you wish. I have two words for pushy bottoms - duct tape.
Some of the boys I have played with repetitively use this tactic to see what my limits are. Well, boys, it’s not nice to test Daddy's patience. And to be fair, if I am not getting the responses I expect, maybe our needs just aren't meshing. Mood swings and expectations are influenced by many factors both before and during a scene. The trick is to know when it is not working and call it off rather than perform a mercy-fuck just to save face.
There are times when the bottom just puts out and shuts-up, especially if Daddy is in the mood to mete out some long-remembered act of retribution. "Forgive but never forget" is my motto, and it comes in very handy.

Then the classic story he describes when he comes home unexpectedly and finds his boy curled up in bed instead of doing chores. He made up an excuse for being there, left without acknowledging he’d seen the boy and then lets him stew for days before he brings it up in a scene.

“Ah, sweet fate. I'll let him squirm for a while. He'll relax eventually. I’ll bet he tip toes around his duties and the conversation for a few days though. Besides, time is on my side and I never forget.
....
I know better now. I know what to ask, how to ask it, and how to deduce the subtle answer about what was not said as opposed to what actually was said.
Mistakes generally occur because of eagerness to be part of a scene. In this case, I had been thinking with my dick instead of my head. Experience is the best lesson.
The language we all use to communicate is borrowed, adapted, and labeled with special meaning to become applicable to the Leather culture. Words are still words, but some have dual meanings and carry more power under circumstances for which the original meanings were not designed.
My Leather taught me one very important fact: communication is not just talking, it is also observing.
....
Good communications skills - more to the point, good listening skills - allow me to disseminate information and express ideas that ultimately lead to my objective, whether that objective is buying a car or negotiating my way into someone's pants. I remember scolding a bottom and telling him that there was a reason he had two ears and one mouth. His wrong reply was, so that I had something to hold onto while he gave me a blowjob. He was difficult, but he got over it - with a little help from the welts on his back.

The book also shows that there’s a lot of philosophy as well as psychology at play. At one stage, Don the Dom discusses the concept of listening:

Too many people like to hear themselves talk because it makes them feel important. Listening allows me to change my mind about a willingness, or unwillingness, to advance the conversation with someone to whom I am attracted.
....
Many scenes have gone awry because of misinterpretation. For this reason, the ability to listen, as well as the ability to ask the right questions without tipping your hand are crucial to success.

I could list more examples.
Despite the weighty thoughts behind it, the writing is lyrical and easy to read. This is a good example of the bits that lift the book from the mundane to the extraordinary:

The looks on those faces swirling around the bar are enough to entertain me all night. The music seems to increase in volume, rhythms guiding the gyrating masses, the din of conversation lowering under the weight of the music, communication becoming eye contact only. The hunt has started. Needy eyes, glazed eyes, come-fuck-me eyes, eyes that were begging just for that masculine touch against their skin at any cost. The want was so evident that it scares off most with its pleading and eagerness. Few eyes make contact with mine. It is the honesty in my eyes, I think, that is intimidating to most. Nothing superficial about the questions in my eyes, "What are you really looking for?" and, "Are you prepared to be honest in return?" No hidden agendas here. Naked trust questioned at a glance. "Are you willing? Will you bare your throat to the wolf with the red roses?" They glance away.

I am indebted to Teddy Pig for leading me to this book. He mentioned it in a blog he did back in 2005 http://www.leatherflog.com/2005/11/leath... and then repeated part of it in his current "Naughty Bits" blog. I'll leave it up to his experience to comment on the validity of the content, I'm happy just to share and recommend it to those looking for a fuller picture of the scene.

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The All Trilogy: All Together by Dirk Vanden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kudos to loveyoudivine Alterotica for re-releasing Dirk Vanden's "All" trilogy: "I Want It All", "All Or Nothing" and "All is Well" in one combined book. The three stories stand alone, each told from the first person viewpoint of a different character, however common characters and a couple of common events link them together.

The first version was released before the Stonewall Riots, and to quote Dirk: "My books weren't considered worthy of editing when they were first published.... We were lucky just to get the books published and to get a few bucks for an outright sale."

Drugs feature unapologetically strongly throughout. Both the upside - the euphoric feeling that you had all the answers, understood the essence of life and the universe and then the downside as reality stabbed euphoria in the back and painted black shadows around everything.

Apparently, one publisher wanted Dirk to "apologise" for all the drug use in his books, but as he explained it to me in an email: "We were illegal, immoral perverts in those days and anything we could do to our heads to keep from thinking how terrible we were just to have sex with each other and how even more terrible we were to write about it. As a result, I tried marijuana, mescaline and LSD and discovered that they "opened doors in my mind. Drug use in Gay bars in the 60s and 70s was as common as beer and cigarettes, and, of course, like nicotine, and alcohol, the drugs were addictive."

The books are set solidly in the late sixties, early seventies, an era famous for its music, its hippies and its drug taking, but still a time when homosexuality was illegal in most States. The times they were a-changing though. Chuck, the son of the last book's protagonist, sees it as a time when sex was not a big deal, and who you did it with was almost irrelevant.

In each story, a man who always thought of himself as straight, discovers he is happier being gay. Remember that in those days, this was a fate considered far worse than death. Those who identified as such were hounded by the law, consigned to the depths of hell by religion, rejected by family and rebuffed by their peers.

Making an apology is another theme in common. The viewpoint character has to acknowledge and seek forgiveness for a hurtful act. Until this is done, the character can never find peace within himself.

So let's get into the stories themselves. If the concept of golden showers and other such things turns you off, don't read this trilogy.

If you don't like learning about what it was like to be gay back in the 1970's, don't read this trilogy.

If politically incorrect sections like this:

"Gay guys are the most bewildering people on earth! One minute they can be so damned pleasant--and then turn right around and be the bitchiest bastards you've ever seen. It's like they all had split-personalities! (I kept remembering that kid I'd picked up in Nevada, and the Jekyl-Hyde thing that happened to him.) I don't know--it's like gay guys live on a tightrope or something; you never know what's going to set them off! Like--a guy would come in and order his drink, and usually he'd be smiling and happy, saying "hi" to everyone--and he'd pick out a spot to stand and display himself and cruise; but then, maybe half an hour later, you'd hear him snapping at people, swearing--or go storming out, shoving people out of his way! And who knows what the hell happened? Maybe he cruised someone and got turned down--or maybe he thought things weren't happening fast enough--or got hungup thinking nobody wanted him! Or, you're down at one end of the bar and a guy wants to talk--and someone else goes down to the other end, wanting a drink--and no matter what you do then, you're wrong; they act like you're insulting them both by not being in two places at once! Or if you're out of the one kind of beer a guy likes, it's like you've said something against his mother!"

offends your sensibilities don't read these stories.

If reading about rape upsets you - again don't start reading.

While there is a "Happy Ever After" for each, if you're looking for a sweet m/m romance, don't read "All Together".

Are you getting the picture, yet?

However, if you want an honest, no-holds-barred look at the scene back then, check it out. The background is painted around a basic plot of what happens to three different "straight" men involved in the rape of a gay man passing through town.

The second story, "All or Nothing", runs in parallel to "I Want it All". The first chapters cover the same territory but it's seen from a different point of view.

Being a painter himself, Dirk has a very observant eye. He remarked to me in an email: "My head works differently somehow. I see "more" than other people. I don't know what that means. I've always thought of it as "paying attention."

Here's an example:

"They were all fascinating to watch--the way most of them tried to look so casual; they really worked at it, leaning against the wall, or the bar, or the pool table in the alcove, in just the right stray gleam of light to show off their "baskets." (I learned many new words that night.) They were posing in every sense of the word--some of them not just for a possible "trick" but for themselves; I got the feeling that if anything happened to disturb the pose, they wouldn't be able to function until they got back into it."

Once again, he is also not afraid to make some statements about being gay and what it means:

"At any rate, I learned that night that there were almost as many "types" as there were gay men. Apparently something had changed since I'd first heard about "fairies.""

and remember this was written back in the seventies.

Dirk, via his character, has some interesting takes on marriage too:

"Maybe someday the laws and ideas about marriage will change also, and when that happens, maybe it won't be impossible to have both a wife and a family and a male lover-friend, all at the same time."

and earlier in a description that parallels his own relationship with his partner who died in the AIDS epidemic.

"Gay marriages just don't work, Bill. The only ones that do are where they're not really lovers, you know? Not in the sense of a husband and wife at least. They're friends. Each one does his own thing for sex, but they live together as friends."

This is backed up by his thoughts about why the character's marriage didn't work:

"(the) part of the female personality that, to me, made females unattractive--a blind preoccupation with two people getting together in a "marriage" and devoting their entire lives to it."

In his recent interview on Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/0... Dirk commented that he wrote the stories to say: "It's okay to be Gay!" "There are those who believe that Gay Liberation started at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969. That is like believing that a flower can blossom without having been planted." Most of Richard (Amory)'s and my books were published before Stonewall. I would like to think that all those Gay dirty books were the fertilizer to make the Gay flowers grow."

"All is Well", the final story in the trilogy is different. It's a lot more cerebral for a start. A lot of the "action" takes place inside the hero, Bob's, head.

Being the son of a Mormon Minister, for Bob, religion played a large part in his upbringing. I've read two other books that use this religion as part of the plot: James Buchanan's "Hard Fall" and Z.A.Maxfield's "The Pharaoh's Concubine". While these two authors may have done meticulous research, they don't capture that overwhelming feeling of guilt and stultifying constriction of attitudes and beliefs that Dirk conveys so well, having been brought up a Mormon himself.

The trilogy as a whole is uncompromising; "All Together" is by no means an easy read, but worth it in the end. Dirk's writing makes you care even when the guys are at their worst, wallowing in their misery (particularly the last story). You just want Bob to break out of his funk. I'm not a fan of paranormal, and this is a good example of what you can do without resorting to that level of fantasy. We all have the capacity to do these things ourselves. Be the strong invincible vampire, the werewolf that can change to a form that can vanquish its enemies and we can all harbor the demon from hell within.

In some ways, "All is Well" covers the steps of the archetypal hero's journey, complete with the wrong goal, the black moment and the mentor (in this case drugs). As in all such journeys, the hero has to reach deep inside himself to find the solution to his predicament and confront his worst fears in doing so:

"I had created the problems myself, however childish or ill-advised I had been, and now I had to solve those problems myself."

I don't know whether this was intentional on Dirk's part - to follow Joseph Campbell's prescription, but there are definitely elements there. There's even the symbolism of the epiphany happening on Easter Sunday when the hero leaves his past behind and is reborn, complete with the biblically significant three day turnaround from the time he leaves San Francisco and returns.

None of these literary elements intrude on the narrative. Many readers may not even see the story at this level, but I enjoyed "All is Well" that much more after I recognised what had happened.

Another theme that ran through this story was:

"I had to keep an open mind, adjust myself to the changes in the world."

The world was definitely a-changing. Another book that came to mind as I read was Andrew Holleran's The Beauty of Men. Set in the nineties, after AIDS had decimated the gay population, the different scenes in steam baths bear comparison. Although there are two very different establishments in "All is Well" neither have that pathetic lost quality that imbues Holleran's classic.

In Dirk Vanden's time:

"Here there were dozens of men wandering around, most of them young, and many of them very attractive, manly-looking, well-muscled, with white towels narrowly wrapped around trim tanned waists. One or two I saw were clean-shaven and short haired, but most of them had long hair, moustaches, sideburns, many with full luxuriant beards.

While in Holleran's book, the middle-aged Lark describes it thus:

Driving to the baths in 1983 was like going to Valhalla, he thinks as he walks down the hall. Going to the baths in 1995 is like driving to have his tires rotated and oil changed.

In the end, the title of the last segment of the trilogy takes on a new triple-edged meaning as the different worlds collide and become one. Not only do the three characters come together, but for Bob, the hero of "All is Well", "all" the facets of his personality converge as well. Very neatly done.

There is almost a messianic fervor in the closing pages. The certainty hippies had in the seventies that a New Age was coming: The Age of Aquarius. Forty years on we can see that unfortunately the Roberts of the world didn't quite lose their grip. And while the Bobs may no longer be jailed for their sexuality, there is still room for more change to happen.

Dirk's writing style is fluid, his dialogue natural and his characters are vivid. It's great to see the trilogy, re-edited to tidy up a few problems and published with a great new cover based on one of Dirk's own paintings. Again, congrats to loveyoudivine Alterotica for recognising what should be seen as one of the building blocks of gay fiction.

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Hard as Teak by Margie Church
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hard core m/m readers may be put off by the fact that Hard as Teak opens with a couple of (very short) traditional male/female sex scenes. Don’t be. These are crucial to the plot as they immediately show that while Kevin Mark’s body might be performing, his mind and heart aren’t in it.

What follows is an exploration of self as he heads for the northern part of Minnesota to see if he can recapture the magic that is lacking in both his love life and his other passion -- photography.

Once there, he meets a man who reignites his interest in both spheres, acting as both his muse and initiating him into the pleasure of sex which for him had become a chore.

This story isn’t a “gay for you” or even an “out for you”, it’s a story about a man finding the courage to explore his sexuality.

If Teak had been exclusively gay, the story might have been different, but Margie, by having her second protagonist bi gives him the confidence and experience to know what Kevin is going through.

Reader expectations are going to play a large part in their enjoyment of this book. Personally, I believe in accepting whatever characters a writer wants to use in their story and see how they grow. I don't care if the characters are a hundred percent likeable at the start or not. I don’t even care if I don’t “approve” of the choices they make as long as they learn from those choices.

While some readers may have their buttons pushed with the notion of a man being unfaithful to their girlfriend, Margie Church has been at pains to limit this reaction. They haven’t been living together and while expectations may have been there on Chiyo’s side, Kevin has warned her that he is having difficulties, and she hasn’t exactly been supportive of him working through these before or after he goes away.

I mentioned this to Margie in a conversation and her comment was: “I've yet to write a book that doesn't have characters with warts.”

Margie writes hot, sizzling sex scenes and these need to be seen as such, because it’s their raw, viscerality that demonstrate the difference for Kevin once he gets together with Teak. Sex is no longer a chore, it’s something he can’t get enough of.

But apart from the sex, Margie has a great knack of showing scenes so you feel like you’re in them. I especially liked the one where Kevin’s fishing with Drew, another gay guy, and the depictions of his photo shoots with Teak. You can feel the easy camaraderie of their interaction as distinct from the on-edge confrontations of his dealings with Chiyo and his manager, Gail.

Other secondary characters jump off the page: Maddy, the redhead who was more Teak’s fuck buddy than a girlfriend and Lucien, Kevin’s agent.

While some people might query the likelihood of a local paper being interested in exposing Kevin’s sexuality, for me if the author says it’s so, it’s so. The plot didn’t hang on this aspect, more it showed another stage in Kevin’s growth. In the end, this was the main point of the story to me. Kevin learning to recognise who he is and working out how to fit in with other people, then once he accepted the truth, taking control of his life and rediscovering his passion.

Infidelity and a character suddenly finding they are gay or bisexual are difficult subjects to write about, but I believe Margie has done a great job. Any marks I may have deducted for the occasional typo and formatting problem (if this is an issue for you, contact Margie) are balanced by her bravery on tackling these subjects head on and giving us real characters in a setting not often visited. You can just feel the ice and cold jumping off the page.

As a sort of disclaimer, Margie asked for some feedback from me early on in Hard as Teak's incarnation. The book has almost doubled in size since with changes throughout, so I feel quite justified in rating and reviewing it as a regular reader. Like Kevin, it grew.....

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