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News & ArtsTuesday, November 9, 2010
Sex / Celeb Why Aren't There Any "Out" Kinky Celebrities?
Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 2:39 PM
This bullshit blind item ("Which Celeb Is Into Kinky S&M Sex?"), which was linked today on Gawker, got me to thinking about how some big stars must be into S&M. Some of them have to be, right?
Backing up for a moment: we used to infer that some big stars had to be gay because a small-but-constant percentage of the general population is gay and big stars are a small-but-glamorous population that is drawn from a larger-and-less-glamorous general population that we know to be gay at a small-but-constantly-glamorous percentage. In the early 1980s this was all the proof that amateur/armchair/barstool gay sociologists needed to conclude that Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise and Beetlejuice-vintage Alec Baldwin and every other desirable male celebrity were gayer than a colon full of rodents, conclusions we reached without pausing to control for wishful thinking on our parts because our science seemed so sound what with the math and percentages and the populations and everything.
We no longer need to infer that some big stars have to be gay because now so many big stars are openly gay: Ellen Degeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Wanda Sykes, Ian McKellen. They're not the stars we were all speculating about back before there any openly gay stars, I'm sorry to say, but they'll have to do. (And new daddy NPH will do fine.)
So.
There are currently no openly kinky stars out there. And we know there have to be kinky stars because kinky people are a small-but-constant percentage of the general population and big stars are a small-but-glamorous population that is drawn from the larger-and-less-glamorous general population that we know to be kinky at a small-but-constantly-freaky percentage. But no big female star has given Extra or Access Hollywood a tour of the killer playroom/dungeon she built with the money they made starring in that awful Disney sitcom, and no big male star has opened up to Us Weekly or Vanity Fair about being a submissive adult baby who also enjoys spankings, forced feminization, and catheter play.
Will there ever be openly kinky stars? I doubt it, for two reasons.
First, being kinky isn't the same as being gay. While some kinksters identify strongly with their kinks and are open about their sexual interests, being into baby bonnets or bondage isn't about who you love, it's about how you love. A kinky person has nothing to be ashamed of, of course, and I think kinky people should be just as open about their kinks as they wants to be. But a kinky person doesn't need to be. It's the difference between introducing someone to your wife and introducing someone to your wife and then adding that your dick gets really hard when you drink the wife's piss as an act of erotic submission. That she's your wife is information about your public life: you're publicly a couple, you've taken each other as next of kin, she's the person who should be called if you get hit by a bus. Same goes for your husband if you're married to a man. That you drink your spouse's piss is nice and all, a lovely gesture, and we're happy if you're happy, but that drinking piss stuff is bonus info about your sex life that no needs to know and most people will regard as TMI.
And second... after pointing out how kink differs from gay... I'm going to turn around and pronounce kink the new gay. Gay actors used to be warned against coming out because audiences, according to producers, would never accept them in straight roles. (So producers would never cast gay actors in straight roles and audiences never got a chance to get used to gay actors playing straight.) While no big stars have come out as gay—it's not too late, Keanu—Neil Patrick Harris and Cheyenne Jackson are both out and both play straight men on television (How I Met Your Mother and 30 Rock, respectively, both playing comic roles). Still, I have to concede that audiences might have a difficult time accepting, say, a Jude Law or an Ashton Kutcher or a Sean William Scott as the male lead in a romantic comedy if it turned out that one or all of them enjoyed being fucked in the ass by gay porn stars on the orders of their professional Mistresses in domination studios in Chelsea while singing "Onward Christian Soldier" at the top of their lungs. (I meant to link to that item ages ago—it haunts me. More details here.) You can be openly gay and a working actor these days. I don't think the same would apply to openly kinky—particularly if your kinks were extreme (extremely compelling, extremely fun).
As for the S&M blind item that Gawker linked today...
1. "He like his sex unconventional. Some would call it experimental, certainly vigorous, and definitely physical. Maybe too physical. Mixing pain into his pleasure, and cutting very, very close to a dangerous line is taking its toll on his body. He shows up with strange bruises, the next week it's a minor fracture, his neck has been strained, sometimes there's a knee brace, the shoulder's been f-cked up for a while, and his back is a chronic issue too. The excuse of course is that he's active, that he exercises, he's sporty, and that's true, yes, but the injuries are not sustained while playing pickup."
...I'm calling bullshit. I know a lot of people into "kinky S&M sex" (as opposed to vanilla S&M sex?), some with dungeons of their very own, and none have ever emerged from their playrooms with serious back injuries, fractured bones, wrenched knees, or neck braces. The occasional "strange bruise" I'm willing to concede. But that list of injuries sounds like an S&M sight gag you can see on Broadway right now. (In La Cage aux Folles the stage manager of the nightclub-within-a-play has an affair with the showgirl/Cagelle whose act involves whips, leather, and chains, and every time he steps onstage he has a new injury—first it's "strange bruises," then he comes out on crutches, and finally he comes out wearing... a neck brace.) I agree with the Gawker commenter who writes...
I don't believe [the kinky star] exists at all. What long-term S&M practitioner ever shows up with fractures? Or shoulder/back issues? Who fractures bones? It sounds like prurient S&M fearmongering.
Agreed.
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He shows up with strange bruises, the next week it's a minor fracture, his neck has been strained, sometimes there's a knee brace, the shoulder's been f-cked up for a while, and his back is a chronic issue too. The excuse of course is that he's active, that he exercises, he's sporty, and that's true, yes, but the injuries are not sustained while playing pickup.
...or he's Batman.
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Though if any of them feel like talking about it, I don't see why not.
As for the injuries, oh hell I fell off the bed once during perfectly vanilla activities and limped for a few days after... I'm sure one can get injured while doing anything, but not necessarily because of *what* they were doing, if you catch my drift.
Maybe poly would be the next "new gay", as that still involves who and not so much how... (Hasn't Will Smith hinted that he & his wife have an open relationship?)
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Also, Madonna's SEX book was her way of coming out as a kinky slut, wasn't it? As if we'd have to guess...
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Part of the problem is the vagueness of "kink". I mean, is it *anything* outside of heterosexual missionary position? Does it have to involve other objects -- or is voyeurism a kink, too? I'm not entirely sure that kink is entirely & only equivalant to BDSM -- or is it?
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Not big celebrities. Good for them, anyway.
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Beatles manager Brian Epstein enjoyed rough trade and "cottaging", and was frequently beaten to a pulp by his assorted sailors and workmen pickups.
Theater critic Kenneth Tynan enjoyed beating the shit out of his girlfriends and hookers so hard he frequently blacked their eyes and broke sticks over their backsides.
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Jane Wiedlen of the Go-Gos is well-known as a dominatrix.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_McGeor…
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http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:hvpyw…
George Michael is quite verbose about his penchant for anonymous public toilet sex.
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Also, I can totally see getting all those injuries from sex. I cracked a rib from missionary, and got an infection from a small cut on my knee from from doggy-style in a barn. If I can do it, surely kinksters can too.
Jane Wiedlin!
To wit, "He had gotten into beating, boots, belts, and bondage scenes. Regulars at The Club tagged him with a singular moniker: the Human Ashtray. When stoned, he would bare his chests and beg for his masters to stub out their butts on it. After his fatal crash, the coroner made note of the, 'constellation of keratoid scars" on Jimmy's torso."
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For example: Some folks are hard-wired to be kinky (I know this--I am one). Some are hard-wired to be gay. In either case of hard-wiredness, it is not that person's choice (I didn't choose to have submissive tendencies). It's how they are. And, obviously, it affects how they pursue relationships and who they pursue them with.
For me, part of my kink *is* WHO I love. I am not able to fall in love with a non-dominant man. Ive tried--many, many times. It never worked out too well. I always felt like there was a piece--a BIG piece--missing from the relationship. I felt like such men couldn't understand me no matter how hard they tried. I eventually gave up pursuing non-dominant and/or vanilla men, knowing that no amount of effort would ever make it work for me. I'm not gay, but I have to imagine that if a gay person tried to date someone of the opposite gender, this is exactly how they'd feel, too--completely unfulfilled.
I do not love based on who can spank me the hardest or whose kinks are the most extreme. I love based on who the person is, how his dominant side works with mine. We could be having physically vanilla sex, and yet mentally it's not vanilla at all. The feelings that my current significant other, a dominant man, brings out in me are nothing like what any vanilla or non-dominant man has ever or could ever extract from me. These feelings happen no matter what we're doing--eating dinner, watching TV, or ****ing the hell out of each other. And I know these feelings would not happen were he not dominant--if that hard-wired submissive part of my brain didn't fit perfectly with that hard-wired dominant part of his brain.
In instances like these, I do believe that kinky people and gay people can often love in the same ways--and that in many instances of being kinky, it often IS who you love as opposed to how you love.
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