Sex doc - this time, on really butch black lesbians.

So, last Tuesday I went to the sex doc thing documentary, which was advertised as being about really butch black lesbians, but turned out to be about the young black queer kids in the neighborhood my one friend from college in New York lives in.

The documentary was a little over-long and just okay, but the scenes where some really butch lesbians would duct-tape up their tits before dressing up as thugs, and esp. when the scenes where they would remove the duct tape, made me wince, I can't imagine how it was for the women in the room, though they def. seemed to wince more.

Anyhow, the conversation was pretty much rewarding because the boss of my one friend who works at the rape crisis hotline showed up, this shorter, heavier-built lesbian woman with anarchist tattoos and a bleach-blonde mohawk, who tends to be on the quieter side, but laughs heartily and has a good sense of humor.

Her 1st comment was that she liked how they showed a range of masculinity-femininity among the butch lesbians, and how some of them would date really feminine women, but others more butch ones, and how some even dated femme-y male transvetites.

"I appreciate that," she was like.

At that point, I chimed in that I was disturbed that when they showed a butch dyke glam ball, I was bothered not by how the one rapping lesbian kept calling this pretty woman in the audience she was interested in and rapping to a "cunt" as she free-styled, since that was excusable since each probably found her saying it repeatedly hot, but that the free-style rap about beating her up with a baseball bat was just too much.

"I agree," she was like, "That was a little over the line. But, it is still nice they had a range of partner type. I know, for example, I like to have a man on occasion. If it's a man or a woman, I'm on top, no matter what, I don't care what's between your legs. For me, a 'bitch' can only be a man, I like to say, 'Take that, bitch.'"

Her 2nd comment was that she was surprised that when the one dyke in the documentary joined the military, that they let her keep her head shaved, since when she was in the Navy like 10 years ago, also under "Don't Ask Don't Tell", the Navy mandated that all women keep shoulder-length hair, while men had to have their heads shaved.

She then added that she wasn't surprised that in the course of the film the one lesbian went AWOL during the Iraq War, not only because of the war and the sudden, real risk of death, but because it's easier to be out in bootcamp where everyone is new and you have a 24-7 totally-controlled existence and somehow people are more openly open to having gay people around, but once you're on ship or whatever, people have been there for a while and you have to fit into pre-existing social structures, and then you have a more-or-less 9-to-5 job and you have off-time that you can never talk about, and it's tough.

She also said that she joined to get out of her parents's house and she thought that the Navy would be a good place to find women, and that it was, and she was then like, "And anyways, the military is one of the gayest places in the entire U.S."

I asked her to expand on that, and she was like, "It just is, there's tons of gay people. The gayest branch isn't the Navy, even, or the Army, but the Marines. The men all wear those tight khaki pants and work out a lot and look at each other, and they're all there looking out for one another and they don't need no one else, and they're very suspicious of outsiders. Totally, totally gay. And everyone only sees their wives or girlfriends every 6 months, because that's how it is in the military."

After the discussion and the group broke up, me and my one friend I went with were going to go get a drink, but we get downstairs from the event room to discover that it was totally pouring outside.

"Like piss out of a leather boot, eh?", I was like to the hostess, who was standing outside and is a BDSM activist, and she was like, "Yes, but no, it's totally not my thing!", then she offered that her boyfriend, who's this kind of soft-spoken submissive early-20s nerd guy with tousled hair, could give us a ride over to the bar. We accepted, and as soon as we got in the car's backseat, he was in the driver's seat and she shotgun, and they leaned over right in front of us and deep-Frenched spontaneously for about 30-40 seconds.

We then started talking a bit about the ethics of consent, and I brought up the famous case of the German guy who advertised for a guy on the internet to make him chop off his own dick and eat it, which I didn't think was okay, but the hostess did, and she added that they've done long-term studies about men who've gone through with castration fantasies, and for the vast majority of them, they're still highly-satisfied years later, and only wish that they had done it sooner.

I then asked about guys who get gang-banged without condoms, and the ethics of whether people can consent to pretty much getting AIDS. Her position was that it might be an information problem, and that if they surveyed guys who did this years later when they were in the midst of awful complications from AIDS and most of them regretted it, you would be in a good position to point out that these types of people are consenting to things that their later selves will likely regret, and that anyhow people make poorly-informed decisions to consent to sex all the time.

This whole conversation was, in fact, brought about because she had said she had been on a panel about BDSM and mental/physical health, and that one of the co-panelists had done a survey on gay leather men, and had found out that whereas like with any random group of gay men 10% of the people will have AIDS, 25% of any given group of leather men will.

Interestingly, of risk factors, a leather man who identified with any BDSM role was at much more risk than a man who identified as "leather" in general but not with any BDSM role. As it turns out, leather top guys think it's more masculine not to use protection, and leather bottom guys think of it as greater submission, while everyone else who's not BDSM but is into leather is, the hostess thinks, just masculine guys in general who are into other masculine guys and can't find that general type of guy within other gay venues, and so find themselves drawn into the leather community.