On shopping for chains and being out about kink

What being out about kink means today – and where playing with darkness lands us in the era of hypervisibility. 

When I think of BDSM, I often think of chains you can buy at hardware stores. In my local Leyland, they’re on the first floor, just after the bathroom fixtures, in thick heavy rolls. To buy some, you need to get a guy with bolt cutters to cut an appropriate length (one meter minimum). For quite some time, I’ve thought about a good wholesome excuse to buy some for myself, how “I need to hang a shelf”, although I’m not even entirely sure that’s a thing. The truth is that no one ever asks — shop assistants have more important things to think about — but I still felt like the truth is written all over my face.

There is something undeniably queer about hardware store chains. Maybe it’s nothing but a reference which exists entirely in my own mind, traces of images and encounters: all the dykes with carabiners on their belts, all the queers who wore too heavy chains as delicate jewellery.  I don’t even know if those people in my memory are real, or something from a 1990s section of the UK Leather and Fetish Archive. But hardware store chains are not nice. They’re too heavy and smell of metal. The smell lingers on your hands for some time.

BDSM and kink not wholesome. They’re filthy and obscene. They’re not for everyone. That’s why it’s a subculture, a community, a movement defined by (and often punished for) its difference. It’s also why the visual culture that surrounds it often focuses on particular settings: dungeons, basements, or abandoned warehouses.

My own experiences with pain and control, however, have hardly ever taken place in a dungeon. Most of them have taken place in my bedroom, the same space where I write, workout and eat ice cream; on sofas in random living rooms, in cars or, occasionally, in hotel rooms. These spaces are very “normal” spaces. They are as mundane, as is the fact that any BDSM experience is integrated into my daily life, with its before and after. There is that quiet moment before someone puts their hands on you, when there is nothing but blood and electricity beneath my skin. Then there is eating dark chocolate Kit Kats in bed and taking a long post-scene shower, working fingers through my tangled hair.

Part of the beauty of kink is that it can exist in the same reality as everything else, completely unnoticed. In the cult 1995 documentary Bloodsisters by Michelle Handelman, there is a scene which shows a couple of leatherdykes teaching a workshop on how to use household objects in a scene: clothing pegs, plastic forks. These tricks are good for any era, but they also exposes something about the leatherdyke and queer BDSM community back then — its openness and resourcefulness. 

There’s also the fact that the past, even though the best gear and toy manufacturers were always aimed at the gay audience, gay people rarely had their own dungeons, possibly because they rarely owned a family home with a spare room. But if there is no dungeon, then everything is a dungeon. There is a choice in making kink a part of your life and identity — and it is always a question of both resources and personal politics.

Being publicly out about practicing BDSM can be difficult, or it can come as second nature. Either way, there is one subtle consequence: somehow, in the eyes of society, it becomes a central element to your personality. Suddenly, in any narrative, you’re a badly-written latex-clad side character whose purpose is to be a handy shortcut for kink. It is a terrifying singularity similar to what comes with a marginalised identity. If you are gay, trans, a person of colour, a sex worker; society suddenly insists that this is the only thing that you’re allowed to be, the only thing which defines you.

Being an out kinkster generates energies which bring change into your life. With your sexual identity condensed into three words of your instagram bio, you might suddenly get recognised for exactly what you are by someone who has never in fact met you. There is an instant character to this recognition which is almost addictive. But it doesn't preclude alienation which the kink community had faced for decades. Suddenly, there is something you will never tell your family. Suddenly, friends who are not into kink seem more distant. Sometimes, losing things is part of becoming who you are – but sometimes we're left with little choice because we have no say in how the world sees us. 

In today’s economy, we are supposed to have multiple skills and professions. But we are hardly ever allowed to change or show the fluidity and multitudes of our personalities. You can be into kink and be a world-renowned composer (like Georg Friedrich Haas). You can be a domme and a climate scientist; a sadomasochist, a kitten, a furniture designer and a parent; a daddy, a woman and a queer. When we define ourselves, we’re free from the othering gaze. Chains are just chains. The rest is all perspective.

Photo by Anya Gorkova