6. Coming-Out-as-SM-to-HR
I was in my mid-30’s when I identified as being a Masochistic transvestite. This realization did not come via SM activities, or by mixing with people from the kink-community. It came from reading an article in a US science magazine I regularly buy. The articles in this publication sometimes strayed from the “hard-sciences” plus maths plus philosophy that I had been “raised-on” (physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy etc.) into the “softer-sciences” (economics, sociology, anthropology, psychiatry-and-psychology etc.).
The article concerned explored many things, including paraphilias, which to you-and-me, are kinks-and-fetishes. I’m always wary of things with imposing Greek-or-Latin names, as to me, it smacks of exclusionism where the experts-are-experts who understand this stuff, and you are “pond-life” who should know who your intellectual betters are, and supplicate to them.
A gay-consultant friend who studied philosophy at Oxford university and described it as “clean-thinking”, characterized both psychiatry-and-psychology as “total-bollocks” (apparently this is a technical-term often used in philosophy!), a sentiment I fully agreed with. He also taught me the “pixie-dust” trick; if your “total-bollocks” detector is semi-tripping when reading an article, replace the key-concept in it with the combo-word “pixie-dust”. If it still makes sense, then it most probably is total-bollocks.
By-the-way, I had previously come to a similar conclusion when as a teenager I tried to remember all the most extreme facts in the Guinness-Book-of-Records. The record for most effective-ever treatment was when twenty-million homosexuals in the US were “cured” overnight when the scope of pathological disorders was narrowed by psychiatrists-and-psychologists in 1973. Wow!
So, when I read the article, it did pass the pixie-dust test, and so was indeed total-bollocks, but what it did do was describe the sexual-fantasies of people with kinks-and-fetishes. It was revelatory; a total match! I had always thought about S&M as being about whips and chains and stuff like that (which it is), but it’s also about so-much-more. By the end of the article, I had come to the realization that I, to use a modern phrase, “was not the only gay-in-the-village”; there were millions of us out there! It wasn’t something pathological that I needed to be “treating” for by a pseudo-medical practitioner (a shrink), or worse, something I needed to be “saved” from by a religious/Christian practitioner (a priest), but just something normal-and-natural-and-healthy, to be “respected”; part of being a human-being (or was Heinrich Himmler right, and I and all the perverts needed gassing!).
Having identified as being a “subby-tranny” (Masochistic transvestite), things moved quickly. I discovered the fetish press; not those magazines for dirty-old-men (though what’s wrong with that? – each-to-their-own!), but glossy ones like Skin-Two, aimed at the younger generation, for females, males, gays and straights. These were almost fashion magazines; with a self-confident and campaigning “in-your-face” message, proud, and most definitely “OUT”. Then followed that fateful, long-weekend break Marvella and I took in Amsterdam in the early 90’s.
I had recently joined my new company, a large and quickly growing US IT company in the supply-chain space, who were opening-up in Europe. I was riding that wave and had lots of opportunities to travel, and often engineered stays in various cities. I’d been to Amsterdam on my travels before and availed myself to the usual bars and coffee-shops. This time, Marvella brought the Time-Out magazine which happened to be featuring Amsterdam as a destination, and amongst other venues, it briefly mentioned DSM4 in the red-area as being a fetish-bar. We had-to visit, and our lives changed forever, and for the better.
I won’t go into detail here as this would take far too long, but via DSM4 we were introduced that Saturday night to the Crypt SM-club, and things were never the same again. I was experiencing sex for the first time; not just an approximation of it, but the real thing with real people. It was as if I had been experiencing sex through a filter for all these years, and the filter was suddenly removed. I asked myself “is this what sex is like then?”, and yes, it was! All the straights and gays and “normal” people had never had this filter, and enjoyed sex to the extent-and-fullness I was now experiencing now. I had been missing-out for twenty years, but was now determined to catch up, and Marvella was a very willing accomplice.
We began taking more-and=more trips to Amsterdam, and this was getting noticed, both at work and where we lived, in Barnes in London. Once while in the “posh-side” of the Bulls-Head pub we were making good inroads with two of the local residents, one of who was someone-of-influence with the crown-bowling-green there. We were beginning to climb the local social-ladder, and no doubt would soon be mixing with all the “luvvies” that chose Barnes as their London base.
As the conversation continued one of them asked Marvella why we were always going on holiday to Amsterdam? Marvella instantly replied “how much do you know about S&M, and how much do you want to know?”, a typical Marvella-ism. There was a chilling silence, followed by him continuing with a hint of a cough, followed by “there’s a new format Tesco just been opened in Putney”. We were centimetres away from respectability, and we’d “blown-it”. Needless to say, we were never invited to join the sodding crown-bowling-club. We got to the point where we decided to move to Amsterdam, join “The-Scene”, and damn-the-consequences.
At work heads were turning as well. I had decided to be open with my colleagues who I knew the best, and they’d pass on the message, and that-would-be-that, I would be “out”. How naïve! I’ve heard the same from gay people in a similar situation. What actually happens is you get islands-of-people who know and are OK with it, islands-of-people who know and have issues with it, and the others who just don’t know. To complicate things, there is no way to be certain who’s in what camp, and you end-up having to “come-out” over-and-over again, though you do get better at it!
This was the background of me going to HR. Previously I’ve not had that much to do with HR. The one time I had got close to HR was when I was working at the HQ of a construction company, and HR was just down the corridor. The head of HR used to lament that the main part of his job was to hire-and-fire staff, all within the current legislation. I saw his point; HR should be so much more as any organization can be thought as being of composed of two “things”; whatever the organisation does (e.g. construction, IT, saving-the-planet, etc.), and the people who make that happen (human-workers). HR should have a vital role in managing this second “thing”.
I arranged a meeting with HR, so there was no going-back now! I was nervous, and practiced my “pitch”, which was that I loved working for the company, which I did, but could I transfer to the Dutch office to allow Marvella and I to follow our chosen path? I had lots of good arguments lined-up, including that they would get an even-better, happier consultant, based in the heart of the EU and exactly where they were wanting to expand. All rational stuff.
When I went through the door for the arranged meeting, all those well-rehearsed lines flew-out-of-the-window. Twenty years of “living-in-the-shadows” had propelled a tsunami of emotion that threatened to flood outwards. This was only kept in-check by the damaging influence of a private-school, where you kept emotions to yourself, you never cry or complain, you “man-up”. This is what I had learnt to do, but it’s no good for you; humans need emotions and need to express them. Janice, the head of HR, then took over the conversation in such a natural way. She had rehearsed too, and so was obviously part of the islands-of-people who knew and were OK with it. For me all I had to do is follow the old, tongue-in-cheek adage “when all else fails, tell the truth”.
She did a little probing, which was fine, asking how Marvella was with-it, etc. She had it all planned and wasn’t fazed by anything. She actually seemed to be enjoying this most difficult of conversations; something to get right; something that was never likely to be repeated. After twenty minutes it was all done; a transfer to our new Dutch office, which was in Utrecht, the IT hot-spot of the Netherlands, a mere forty kilometres from Amsterdam. Not only that, freebie flights for Marvella to find us a flat, and begin setting-things-up (our first apartment was on the Prinsengracht). People can be so nice; organizations can be so nice, and this only added to my emotional state. My eyes went a little watery, as did hers, and that was it; done! What also helped was I was bloody good at my job, so they didn’t want to lose me.
As a final wrap-up to this account, the big-boss of the whole of Europe gave me a ring to see how things were going, which was very nice. He also suggested that perhaps I was having a mid-life crisis, and it would have been churlish for me not to accept that may have been a small part of events. Later I thought even if it had been a mid-life crisis, I’d still far prefer to get “stuck-into” Amsterdam’s SM-scene (both figuratively and literally), rather than buying a 750cc motorbike and crashing it on the M4. Wouldn’t you?