Being Myself

It’s midnight on a Friday. The little girl is sick, so my wife is in bed with her, and occasionally I peek in and watch them both breathe. I’m listening to cult musical soundtracks — Xanadu, Phantom of the Paradise, Bugsy Malone, Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment — while surfing the web.

Last night, I was getting ready for bed next to my wife and she told me to scoot down into her arms so she could hold me. I sighed, because I was comfortable and didn’t feel like rearranging myself, and she said, “Don’t pretend that you think your place is somewhere other than in my arms.”

I moved myself down until she was holding me, her head above mine, me wrapped in her arms, her breasts underneath my chin. A dominant embrace, her owning me. “That’s right, she said. That’s your place.”

“It is.” I sighed as the feeling of being wrapped washed over me.

“You need this. You need to be controlled by a powerful woman. You’ve wanted this your entire life, and here it is: I own you.”

As she talked like that, feelings of submission and powerlessness — of being owned, of being property, but property well-cared for — washed over me. She kept talking, telling me who I was, and what I needed, and what I wanted, and soon I was falling asleep like that, owned, protected, powerless but in the arms of someone powerful.

I’m where I belong.

Twenty years ago, a Friday night like this, at midnight, I’d be at The Rocky Horror Picture Show downtown. It was shown in the gay district of San Diego, and it was…it’s hard to describe to people who came of an age of Internet communities and wired cultures. If you were transgressive, or kinky, or just had doubts about your sexuality, Rocky Horror was the place to go. I remember that even in the wild and hair-sprayed late ’80s, Rocky Horror was a place where you could go and let loose. Guys could drag with no consequences. Gay guys I knew could be out and not get shit. Women could crossdress or play with other girls or be promiscuous and nobody blinked.

And for me, Mr. Closeted Submissive, the whole idea of it — that there was a place you could be yourself if you wanted — was tempting and comforting. The movie itself, with its bisexuality and crossdressing, with its throwbacks to ’70s sex and ’50s horror movies, with its S&M gear and sexually transgressive tones — it created this temporary space where you didn’t worry about what people thought, where you could be you.

I remember seeing a beautiful person dressed as Frank N. Furter one night and not having a clue whether it was a guy or a girl. He/she had to be in her twenties or thirties — much older than me — and had two guys embracing him/her. Her/his eyes bored right into me, and I just remember thinking about how unselfconscious they all were — the men holding each other and the person dressed as Frank, gender and sexuality and place just kind of blurring.

That was the one place where I let myself yearn for what I wanted — to be submissive. To be dominated. To be owned. I had no idea I was a masochist then, but I knew I wanted a woman to control me — to collar me and make me hers until I was just a pet. To be used, to be handed off, to be humiliated and redesigned and made pleasing.

To call someone “Mistress.” To be a “pet.” I don’t know if I had the language then like I do now, but I had the unfulfilled need for it, to be a possession and to be cherished and controlled and trained. To be made perfect in the hands of a stronger person.

I remember my heart leaping out of my chest some nights, with that unfulfilled yearning to be filled and completed by another — by a powerful woman. To find a place — like the place that movie represented — where I could be myself.

And tonight, thinking back to last night, in my wife — in my Mistress’ — arms, I realize that I am complete. I am perfected in her hands. I am owned. I’ve fulfilled the promise that movie held out to me, those years ago, to live my life the way I want to, not just dream it but to be it. She has shown me that I am strong and I am powerful and that even in that strength and power and masculinity, I can be owned and dominated and controlled and still be a man. That I can be myself and still have my dreams fulfilled.

And, I can honestly say, I am happy. Happier than I’ve ever been. But it’s hitting me tonight, just how much I’ve realized the dream that I allowed myself to dream for those two hours every Friday. Maybe you can’t understand if you didn’t go to that scene at that time and place, and felt that sense of yearning like I did to find a place where you could be you, where you could be kinky or gay or trans or drag and still be accepted and loved. How for two hours you got a taste of it.