A friend of mine had read this after I had introduced her to Stephen Elliott's writing by giving her a copy of The Adderall Diaries. It was my hope that showing her that a person who has lived through hell and come out okay would perhaps help to rescue her on some level from her chronic alcoholism, bulimia, severe depression and anxiety. It turns out she has bi-polar disorder and is being treated accordingly now, but that's not the point of this. The point is, she told me she had to stop reading this book at night because she had violent, bloody dreams and her main comments when she finished were "that poor, poor man."
I don't get that. I mean, I kind of get that. But there was never a point where I just threw out all the other value of this book and his experiences with finding his way through BDSM in favor of pitying him. I don't pity Stephen Elliott. He's in an alright place, I think. I mean, we're all struggling. It's the human condition. But dramatized or no (as the foreword suggests, that he's neatly wrapped things up in a narrative and that it can't be believed to be 100% true by the reader), he found something really valuable here. He found peace with himself, even if that peace only resides on the page. And with a foreword like that, I have to take every bit of it with a grain of salt. Truthfully, I don't even care to know what's true and what's fiction. To me it's a story of a journey through finding a genuine sexual self and becoming okay with who you are.
He goes a step farther to say that he's not even kinky for wanting what he wants. That what he does is just another shade of normality. And there's something just wonderfully enlightening about that perspective. No, I can't sit here and pity the man for his torturous childhood and adolescence or his early experiences with an uncaring domme who used him as a whipping post in an unloving way. I can't because what he gained from those experiences can not be duplicated without them. Without the hardships he's endured, he couldn't have found this level of comfort with himself.
This is territory we all struggle in navigating. Exploring sexuality in any sort of genuine way is bound to be fraught with tribulations both self-inflicted and imposed on us by others. In my short foray into something people would consider kinkiness, I've found myself in positions where I was in over my head and had chased a rabbit down a hole I never really wanted to go into. And the backpedaling is sometimes very painful. But in the end you learn something about your limits and more importantly you learn something about your wants.
I told someone once that I wouldn't want to swoop in and take away someone's hurts and make everything okay for them because those hurts are just as much a part of the whole as the triumphs they've experienced. I hold a lot of hurts myself and I guard them just as closely as my happiness. I wouldn't let anyone take them away because each one has served a purpose to teach me something valuable about myself or the world at large.
I mean, he's gone on to say in interviews that this moment of clarity at the end of the book is something that was specific to that relationship and wasn't a permanent level of comfort he found or anything. But I think at this point with him, I just have to look at the book as a single entity and anything that comes after it is separate. That's the tricky thing with memoir. The book stands as you as you were when you were writing it. But once it's published and your life goes on, things are going to change and you may find the memoir is not as true as it once was. That doesn't discount it, as long as you look at it as a snapshot.
In spite of that, the fact that he even wrote this book and put it out there with his name on it is kind of a victory for him and for kinky people in general. In the introduction, he challenges kinky people to out themselves to their non-kinky friends. Currently, I find this to be an insurmountable hurdle. I'm not there yet. I'm not ready to be looked at with those uncomfortable stares by my friends and loved ones. The uneasy shifting in their seats as they try to process what they think I'm telling them. I'm not ready to endure judgement by parents who won't let their kids come play at my home because they think I'm some sort of sexual deviant just because I like to be choked in bed. I might not be ready to out myself until my son is grown, quite honestly.
There's a lot more at stake for someone like me than there is for Stephen, perhaps. And I've heard him address that. He's totally aware and fully admits that it's easy for him to be so out about his sexuality. That he doesn't have family to disapprove or wouldn't care if they did, given his relationship with his father. That he doesn't have a typical day job where a company might fire you for the image you portray in public not serving their best interests. I think of Pamela Madsen and her losing her beloved job because of outing herself as kinky. But in the end, she says it was worth it. And he's said the same thing. That you might have to sacrifice some things to be out, but that in the end, the power that the community as a whole gains from your being out is worth it. That we have to be recognized and understood and accepted as a group or else we'll be demonized instead. I understand and respect that and I'll continue to be a cheerleader for that sort of activism. But everyone has their own timing and my worlds are not yet ready to collide.
But ultimately, it was a really fabulous read and there are some very important messages right in the beginning about playing safe and how to go about this in the right way (mostly from his experiences of doing things the wrong way). And I think the way he wrapped it up in a tidy narrative presents an important image of what can be if we let it. Plus there's a really awesomely described anal scene near the end which made me shout, "OH GOD, FUCK YES!" mostly because it is exactly everything I love about anal. That point where you let go and it feels amazingly good for the first time and these astonishing things involuntarily come out of your mouth. But everyone's mileage may vary.
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