Just Like You and I...Except For Who They Love

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

This Sunday in a Wells Fargo bank parking lot near San Francisco's City Hall, August Knight will demonstrate for any adult who cares to stop by what it's like to be flogged -- and enjoy it.

An Oakland hairstylist by day and co-owner of a South of Market dungeon popular with the whip-cracking crowd by night, Knight, 46, is an ambassador of kink. She and about 70 other volunteers will staff Leather Alley, one of the fastest-growing niches at the annual San Francisco Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade and Celebration.

On a splash of asphalt on Grove Street will bloom a place for what leather aficionados call "vanilla" types -- i.e., everyone else -- to learn about flogging, spanking, boot blacking and other staples of the subculture known as BDSM (a condensed acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sadomasochism). The "ambassadors" will answer all their questions.

...

Since the demonstrations are rated at least PG-13, they are staged behind a curtain that is parted only for those over 18. But they will be miked this year, so demonstrators can tell the audience what they're feeling throughout the experience, and afterward.

Organizers and participants say the growth of Leather Alley since its pride debut a decade ago mirrors the evolution of BDSM culture here and elsewhere. While pride celebrations in other cities offer similar displays, San Francisco's is believed to be among the largest and most diverse.

In 1995, Leather Alley was just a 10-by-10-foot booth run by a few friends -- and most participants were gay men. This year, the Alley will feature two dozen leather and BDSM organizations and a dozen booths and canopies. Now, organizers say, just 60 percent of Leather Alley's visitors are men, and 30 percent are straight.

Though statistics are few and far between, a 1990 Kinsey Report study estimated that between 5 percent and 10 percent of Americans dabble in the leather arts -- everything from lightly restraining their partners to a bedpost to a little fantasy role-playing to building a leather sling in the den. Then there's boot blacking -- where one is sexually titillated by polishing boots and other leatherwear.

Yeah, yeah, I know, there are straight people into this sort of thing, and I would guess that most gay people are not. But tell me, those of you who insist that there is no connection between sexual orientation and childhood sexual abuse: do you suppose that it is just a coincidence that this crowd for whom pain, humiliation, and sexual pleasure are so intimately connected is disproportionately homosexual? Can you see why someone whose first sexual experiences involved force, pain, coercion--and yet might also have experienced some level of sexual arousal (as sometimes happens during rape), might end up identifying sex with pain and humiliation as an adult?