It’s a funny thing, being a kinkster. Because the kink scene brings people together who might otherwise never meet. I know people from every walk of life. Baristas who are just graduating from college and still living with their parents. Middle aged doctors, lawyers, executives. Retired small business owners. Everyone in between.
And I’ve reliably found that it’s how many friends I have — and how they all seem to be of different ages, work different places — that gives me away as a kinkster more than anything else.
It’s not “normal” to be in my 30s, have no children, very little traditional extended family life, and have 40 close friends who on the surface don’t have much in common.
But it’s my life. Has been for the last decade.
And it’s always funny when I’m hanging with a group of kinksters in a vanilla setting, and an outsider asks, “So how do you all know each other?”
There are a couple of easy technically true answers. “I met them in a gaming group” is one I’ve said a few times, since there was a gaming kinksters breakout group, and I did technically meet a bunch of my kinky friends for the first time at it.
“Through friends” is another. Since I technically met every kinkster I knew in Cleveland, one way or another, through my ex-boyfriend Rob, who had been going to educational nights and munches with his wife for a while before we started talking. And he was a friend of my ex-girlfriend before we fell into love — or at least desperation.
Sometimes other people flat-out lie before I say anything. Don’t even bother with technical truths.
Pretty much never does someone say, “Oh, we all go to the same dungeon.”
Instead, there’s a scramble until someone lies or tells a technical truth. And the person asking the question says, “Oh,” and still sounds surprised, unconvinced.
Kinksters Are Everywhere #
The truth is that kinksters are everywhere. And they aren’t just people who look overtly counter culture. Bikers. Wearing fetish gear in their everyday life.
No, a lot of them are shuffling into boardrooms in suits, sitting down for meetings on their freshly bruised behinds.