EXPLORING THE DEMOCRACY OF FETISH AND FANTASY AT THE SEATTLE EROTIC ARTS FESTIVAL

It was nearly impossible to contemplate the art exhibit at this year’s Seattle Erotic Arts Festival Gala. The spectacle of the evening was so titillating – leather and vinyl costumes endlessly parading by; a trapeze artist swinging expertly, her satin plumage spot lit in darkness; the R-rated slide show continuously projecting giant images on a wall high above the coat check line – these events along with various drag queen and tango acts all made it extremely difficult to focus on anything static.

Which was fine, because contemporary erotic art is usually corny and cannot hold a Hot Wax Play candle to, say, the erotic heights of ancient Greek vases, Picasso’s cunnilingus drawings, Japanese and East Indian erotica, Robert Crumb or Robert Maplethorpe. Maplethorpe even died for his art, it was that important for the world.

The Gala seemed really to be about clothes. It was Halloween with a no-host bar instead of candy, it was a place to dress up not to become someone else but instead to flaunt your sexual self. The hall became a microcosm of New York City where you can do absolutely anything expressive and nobody even notices unless they’ re entertained.

This year the Gala was held at Seattle Center’s Exhibition Hall which now must be changed to the Exhibitionist Hall. Hell, it’s the same place we always went to Sniagrab! Instead of skis and boots, one could find crocheted pillow covers that read “Homo, Sweet Homo.” I wish I had bought one of these because they were funny and came in ice cream color combinations.

There was enough leather at the Gala to outfit a legion of cattle rustlers. And folks were dang creative. Rob the handsome had an Ozzy Osborne doll emerging from his shirt. A middle aged woman wore what can only be described as a backwards thong – she had a five-o’clock shadow but not on her chin! A balding man wearing only a mesh tee shirt and a Speedo grind-danced to the loud, live music against any woman in his vicinity. A pregnant woman looked spectacular in a full-length, metallic bodysuit worn with high-heeled stiletto boots.

Many women showed up in these densely embroidered, floor length coatdresses that opened like theater curtains over the course of the evening to reveal bustiers, corsets, teddiettes, garters and stockings. My girlfriend and I called these ‘Victorian dusters’.

When I saw the information table for the Gala’s flagship Foundation for Sex Positive Culture set up in the hall I at first thought it was about people living with a positive diagnosis for HIV or AIDS. But I soon realized that the FSPC is actually based at the Center for Sex Positive Culture, a non-descript building tucked beneath the base of the Magnolia Bridge on 15th Avenue west that is also referred to as ‘the Wet Spot’. Since I live in Magnolia I drive by it a lot. I never cease to be curious and always look to see what brand of and how many cars are in the parking lot. I am thrilled enough to veer into my neighboring lane whenever I see someone enter or exit the door.

The CSPC is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “. . .fuel the ongoing growth and development of sex-positive culture through community building, research and education, and outreach.” They “. . .create opportunities to explore and enhance the joy and intimacy of the full range and potential of human sexuality.”

If you donate to the CSPC you will actually be funding mini-bondage weekends, workshops on how to manage your Ponies and Pups animal role headspace (“Don’t forget the leash!”), and gatherings of Goreans of Reality who discuss how to live the Gorean master-slave relationship here on earth. This wantonness-cum- education recalls George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” video that transforms into a PSA for monogamy.

Stuff such as this can make a crotch confused.

I can’t believe that the suggestion of sex still has such power in our culture. It has to be a damn strong force to keep its strength in world where kinky has become blasé, where free magazines like Conscious Living sport articles on polyamory. A lot of recent ratcheting down of taboo stems, I think, from the conservative’s abstinence movement – kids who were told not to have intercourse began engaging in every other sexual act with the belief that anything other than intercourse wasn’t really sex. Or, maybe it stems from Bill Clinton. Who knows – our culture is so sex-weird.

At the Gala, black Utilikilts were worn by all of the staff, including the man who asked where my press pass was. Nobody was allowed to take photographs unless they had a press pass and will call hadn’t given me one and here I was snapping photographs left and right like the hungriest eyeball on earth. When I told the staff member my story he was so friendly! He simply told me to follow him, whereupon he helped me find the press-pass man who promptly fished me one out of a basket.

Maybe the Gala was highly produced foreplay. No wonder the event thinned out what seemed to be a bit soon – people had to get home to flog, top, push, negotiate, own desire, role play, pick up, bond, suspend, torment, weight, tie, videotape, spank, fire play, electrocute, dominate and whip. Or maybe they just wanted to kick back and watch TV.

Everyone at the Gala seemed nice. They were relaxed. They’d paid twenty-five dollars to be in a place where they could express themselves and feel safe and appreciated versus the way they would be judged on the streets of Seattle. Robyn, a woman with short dark hair and a shirt of woven metal told me when I asked her what her favorite part of the Gala was: “There is so much positive energy coming off everyone! Everybody is smiling and not judgmental. They are facing their own fears.”

But really, the scariest part of the event was the art. The tired state of contemporary erotic art may be tied to Freud’s belief that creative activities are sublimations. He believed that folks with powerful sexual desires often become artists, photographers or novelists because such ventures are a place to flesh out intense, culturally inappropriate feelings and desires. If so, maybe contemporary erotic art is crippled because for members of the Foundation for Sex Positive Culture and their ilk there is no sublimation. People who have erased culture’s shame by having sex in front of one another may not have a substantial amount of submerged iceberg below the tip of their id. Perhaps those who have brought their secret desires to the surface, who act out desires in ‘public’, have caused their art to be of a surface quality too.

But it’s only a theory. It wasn’t that way for Henry Miller. I am ecstatic that something is still sacred, that there is still a boundary line in some arenas between private and public. I am glad we aren’t just having sex out in the open everywhere together, making the entire enterprise passé. If we don’t keep some sort of boundary line sex could go the way art did after Andy Warhol. Warhol broke through the boundary line of modern art by making art that was no longer about personal expression, by having his art produced by others at his factory. After Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were exhibited in New York in 1964, art and the commercially made object became indistinguishable.

I adore art after Warhol. But sex is a different thing altogether. If we break through our culture’s boundary lines with regard to sex, lines that we keep in place via laws, everything about sex could become ironic. Sex would no longer be able to be an accessory to deeper emotions. Sex might become a wisecrack, an intellectual exercise, and a footnote with no room for sentimentality.

And sentiment is where the heart holds on, in this case maybe for dear life.

Inside of the privacy of the Wet Spot, a place for members only, there is no boundary between public and private. Inside of the Wet Spot, experiences are not culturally mediated. It’s a private place to be public. Even the spectacular is reduced: inside of the Wet Spot, no longer is the space between performer and audience so wide that people become separated from their humanity until all that they are good for is to become an ideal consumer. In the current crisis of Late Capitalism, the public quality of private acts practiced by Wet Spot members creates a space outside of culture’s determinations. Where there is little specialization of roles, hierarchy is overturned.

Freud talked about a democracy of sexuality, that there is a democracy of instinctual and biological life. He said that perversions are innate in everyone and wrote “. . .though as a disposition [perversion] may vary in intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life.” (My adult perversions, though short-lived, were influenced by my actual childhood – and wow, were they fun while they lasted!)

One conclusion, now that the United States is an Empire, is that the Wet Spot could be the last democracy.