Addendum.

I forgot -

I was telling the one (straight) grad student I know who's into BDSM about this book I was reading, Kate Bornstein's "A Queer and Pleasant Danger", a tell-all by a higher-up in Scientology who eventually left and became a transexual.

Towards the end of the book, she ends up in the Seattle leather dyke scene, and this dom couple takes her for a night and she ends up getting marks like on a cello's baseboard carved into her back, then a picture of a wolf razored on her chest, and then choked almost to the point of unconsciousness (though she won't take a breath again until they tell her to).

"Yeah," my friend was like, "That sounds like Seattle.  People say that about the scene in the Pacific Northwest, that unless there's blood everywhere and everything's really intense, it doesn't count for them."