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A flag flies in the first week of August in front of Hamburg City Hall. It hangs higher than the Hamburger Stadtwappen, colorful and self-confident: the rainbow flag of Pride Week. She is pretty. But besides the bright colors of the LGBT community, I miss something: a black band for us sadomasochists. They stand with their white information tent at the Jungfernstieg rather off the beaten track between hundreds of visitors with rainbow socks, caps, and -schlipsen.
At first glance, it could be one of those unobtrusive stalls at a miniature summer festival where Bibles are given away. If it were not for the sheep made of plush on the plastic table: It is gagged and has a pretty dashing breastplate. There are flyers on the stand, you can win on the wheel of fortune: blindfolds, breast braces. My arrow points to licorice. Above all lies the happy confetti of festival sexuality, perhaps the most prevalent sexual orientation in my filter bubble: everyone is kind of a bit kinky , you're fluid, flexible, free.
In a corner, next to the sheep, sits the Marquis de Sade and smiles tightly to me. He was put into a millennial rose-colored compulsory jacket, a Coachella-Marquis, everyone is allowed to touch them. Bye-bye, bourgeois sadomasochism. We are not taboo here. Instead: connectable, a bit cute. And invisible. "But we are ... meant," says an acquaintance days later, and I just look at him and raise my eyebrow and point with one hand in the room in which we sit.
Mitgemeint in the back room
It is well filled and quite dodgy, a back room in a bar somewhere on the outskirts of Hamburg, ironically sitting in the back room three times more people than in the bar itself. It is a BDSM Stammtisch. Once a week, they meet here for a few years, and never left the back room.
"Do you agree?", I say, thinking that the flag that stands for diversity is as silent as the public space where most of us are still incognito. He mentions the Leather Pride flag. Since we are but really really mitgemeint. I'm not a pirate, not a country and not a football club, I do not need a pennant for anything I do, I can hang over the door; Nevertheless, I would be irritated if you were in the Hamburg district of Barmbek-Süd, where I live, suddenly in the Berlin bear mitmeinen. Nothing against Berlin (or against leather gays, or even Berlin leather gay!) But I do not really want to be incorporated there. We are too many for a backroom.
Current figures from Canada make up an estimated 15.9 percent of the total population. Remarkably, corresponding German studies are missing; With the GeSiD study, the Institute for Sexual Research is only now working on a comprehensive study of the sexual behavior of Germans. There are still reports in major newspapers that make no distinction between BDSM sexuality and violent criminals. Political careers are ruined when politicians are associated with BDSM. Turn the page and replace BDSM - through homosexuality: unthinkable in Germany today.
One of the reasons for this imbalance is that BDSM does not have a strong lobby. BDSM is not recognized as a sexual identity, although that suggests a 2019 study. I often hear that BDSM is about HOW to love, not WEN. In the same way, being gay could be narrowed to penis-in-anus.
My sexuality is not negotiable
Of course, there are many who experiment with BDSM at one stage of their lives. Then stop it again. Or take a few practices. But there are those who can not vote. For the BDSM is not an "enrichment of the sexual spectrum", but a commitment with exclusion for everything else. I belong to that. I did not choose my sexuality. She has failed many attempts at partnership with so-called "vanillas", not BDSM learners, she is non-negotiable.
I do not feel attracted to partners because they have penises or vaginas - but to determine attributes that I associate with their sexual identity as tops (dominant people). These attributes are superior to sex. I find them in men and women alike. Nevertheless, I would not call myself a bisexual.
A lesbian acquaintance told of an experience with a trans woman who had not had surgery, "perhaps the most lesbian night of my life," she says. She read man beyond the physical as a woman. In my sexuality this is similar: my orientation is the ciphers of dominance and submission. Not body parts.
No term that I like to use
BDSM is also a sexual identity for me because it is innate. At the age of three, I knew about it without having any terms for it. At seven, a dictionary saved me. I still have it. In it I have painted the terms whose auratic glow I did not understand at that time, several times and thick with pen, perhaps to carry my messy interior out in alphabetical order, to be rid of it or even to see it in front of me, black on white: The words "discipline", "punishment" and "submission" are encircled four or five times, annual rings.
Words have saved and validated me, and today I'm a writer, maybe not a coincidence. Nevertheless, there is no term for my sexual identity that I like to use. "Kinky" say many who I know. That may mean experimenting. But it can also mean: My specific fetish is so fulfilling that I do not want classic sex. So: sexual identity versus buffet sexuality (a little bit of it, a little bit of it). Both and everything in between can be meant with kinky , this plushy and cuddly art word.
The collective term BDSM breaks down my love form to a depressing technicity (Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism). Sadomasochism, on the other hand, is stale in its stiff binary nature. At this point, the Marquis jerks uncomfortably in his pink straitjacket and gives me bitter looks.
In the American scene, the word "ancestral sexuality" is circulating: a sexuality centered on something other than pure sexual intercourse. The Marquis feels narcissistic hurt, but the time of the white men's elite with eponymous claim is over anyway. He groans in agony on his compulsive jacket. Well. I think he enjoys it a bit.