Not Going "Public"

I am torn.

This afternoon, we will pack up the car with some snacks and the toy bag and whatever luggage we need to make it through a couple of days and head off to the Central Ohio Perversion Excursion for a couple of days of kinky workshops, vendor shopping, and play parties. It will be for us and opportunity to socialize and play with other people who are "like us" for a couple of days -- to drop the facade we maintain and relax into being among like-minded folks.

It will most likely for me, be a trip that is both pleasure and challenge. I have, as long as I've followed this path, felt affirmed and supported in the public scene. I have also struggled with my ability to "perform" well within that environment. It is always a concern in my mind that my actions in public bring honor to Master, and that I not act or react in ways that create disappointment or embarrasment. I worry. Still, we will go and interact and play and learn and socialize. For a few days, we will behave as if "OUR" way is "THE" way -- as if our lifestyle were perfectly normal and entirely within the realm of the everyday and the ordinary. We'll pretend that we are the "norm."


When it is all over with, we will pack it all up, get back into our "civilian" costumes, and head back into the life we live during all the rest of the year. We'll go back to hiding in plain sight.

And all of that will occur against the backdrop of the current buzz about Idaho Senator Larry Craig's escapade in the airport bathroom...

To be honest, I've taken my share of gleeful pleasure in the oh-so-public fall from grace of one of the self-righteous "family values" crowd, but there is that niggling sense of uneasiness about it all in the back of my mind. Whatever the truth of Senator Craig's conduct, the reality is that it is the perceived need for the "hiddeness" of his behavior that created the issue in the first place. And on that level, he and I are kindred somehow. That bothers me. Because, I too, hide my truth. I too, "sneak" off to second rate hotels to have stolen weekends away so that I can be (for just a little while) my true self. Part of me justifies that as the necessity forced by a judgemental and unfair society, and part of me cringes at the fact that I don't act to change the injustice. It is true that there is unfairness here. It is also true that I am too afraid, too attached to my comforts to act affirmatively to change it.

Perhaps I shouldn't be quite so quick to laugh at the Senator.

swan