Of human bondage
On January 7, the opening night of the City Fringe festival, a selection of people gathered around the Fringe's bar at 9pm to hear a man and a woman talk about sexual fetishes. The man, actor and comedian Reuben M, explained that he would discuss the mechanical aspects of BDSM (bondage and discipline/sadomasochism); in the course of his exposition, he waved around a pair of thigh-high, lace-up boots, strapped a volunteer into a restraining jacket and held up a leather mask with detachable gag and blindfold. The woman, Decima, who is better known to readers of this newspaper as Brenda Scofield, owner of Fetish Fashion, spoke about the legal and emotional aspects of BDSM. On the forensic front, her knowledge was painfully gained: in August 2001 a party at the Fetish Fashion shop in Cochrane Street, Central, was raided, 26 people were arrested, and Scofield and her shop manager, Loretta Mui Shuk-han, were subsequently charged on one count of keeping a disorderly house and six counts of managing an objectionable performance. A year later, in August 2002, the pair were cleared, as was Laurence Scofield, Brenda's second husband, who had been charged with aiding and abetting the offences.
The audience at the Fringe Club did not find Reuben M and Decima's performance objectionable. No one walked out (unless you count the latecomers to a concurrent show who had to cut through the bar area to reach the Fringe Theatre), and if things looked potentially serious, Reuben M - who makes a living doing voice-overs - assumed a throbbing basso profundo and said things like, 'Sit back, relax and enjoy yourselves' or 'If my wife finds out I've got these [the boots], she'll kill me.'
Similarly, the Welsh Scofield - who looks like a nun who's heard an obscene joke and suddenly realised the infinite possibilities of humour - went out of her way to sound as coyly British (that is, unthreatening) as possible. She told the audience she was menopausal ('I'll get my senior bus pass in two years'). She ascribed her love of BDSM to watching Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 (baffling - it had something to do with the queen disappearing under a canopy to have her breast anointed) and her summation of BDSM was as follows: 'It's not about getting your bum whacked, it's about getting your head somewhere else.'
The punters found this performance funny but possibly a little bewildering. After Decima announced that anything involving needles 'gives me the willies', and that there is no genital nudity, ejaculation or orgasm at Fetish Fashion parties, a man in the audience asked, plaintively, 'What am I missing here?' 'Maybe you shouldn't be at our parties,' replied Decima, crisply. 'So what can I do?' continued the man. 'Nothing!' said Decima, smiling (a little sadistically). 'We don't want to be arrested again, we're not silly.'
Afterwards, while she engaged the questioner in a kindly chat, Reuben M, who is from Georgia in the United States and whose full, unpreferred name is Reuben McDaniel Tuck III, went to the Foreign Correspondents' Club, drank six martinis in Bert's bar (he claims to hold the club record of 16 but 'you must understand the Martinis here are disgracefully minuscule') and talked about fear. 'I feel vulnerable all the time,' he said. 'I'm just not afraid - except of spiders and wheelchairs. I fear ending up in a wheelchair.'
It is a fear upon which he has had cause to brood, and not just while suspended upside down from a ceiling, which was the position he was in when he met Decima in the 1990s, when she was exploring her sexual options ('My experience of the scene is far greater than hers'). In the 1980s, just before he came to Asia, his neck was broken - 'the Christopher Reeve vertebra' - in an accident involving a drunken driver and he was lucky to avoid paralysis. He has also had electric-shock therapy ('for a psychiatric complaint - I'd lost 20kg and couldn't stand up') and necrotising fasciitis, a soft-tissue infection that left him with a chewed-up thumb. You would think, given his medical CV, that being trussed up and apparently helpless would be his worst nightmare but Reuben, who is a large man, said, 'Not only do I not fear it, I crave it. In fact, it's my favourite sexual fantasy. The fear is of not being self-reliant.' There's also, evidently, a fear of being overlooked.
Asked how the evening went, Reuben, who speaks with a strange, courtly pedantry, said, after some consideration, 'Better than I had hoped. I fully expected to have a bar full of people chattering among themselves and ignoring us. No one likes being ignored, not even masochists. I regret, however, that I forgot to show the nipple clamps and the electric unit. Do you want to see them?' It being after midnight and Bert's being fairly deserted, he received grudging assent (Oh, if you must ... ) and swiftly produced some implements from his bag, including a roll of black duct tape, then fiddled with the current on a small electric unit ('I promise this will not be painful'), rattled the nipple-clamps and said cheerfully, 'Am I over-sharing? ... It's because I'm not afraid.'
The following morning though, over coffee she'd carefully checked was decaffeinated ('Otherwise I'll bounce off the walls'), what Scofield shared was fear - the by-product of the raid. 'It's taken a long time to get back to normal life, or what passes for normality in this town,' she said. 'After it first happened, I stopped eating. I was very weepy, my heart was pounding all the time. Then we were charged and I went into a real decline. Oh yes.' After a pause, she said, 'I had a feeling it was easier to die. It sounds crazy but I had thoughts of killing myself. My husband took me to the doctor. I went on Prozac and it was a real life-saver.'
Has the joie de vivre come back? 'In the parties, yes.' And in life? She hesitated. 'It was hard. I'd like to hide somewhere and not be associated with it. But you can't go back - it's like Pandora's Box, it can't go back inside. Thank God, I was out and my predilection was known. And thank God, no one was named.'
Speaking of God ... Scofield nodded, slowly. 'God's important. I prayed a lot, of course. I'm a Christian. I didn't shop for my sexuality in Wellcome. I was born with this. I do believe this is what I'm meant to be doing, to educate. But I envy people who go to a church and are accepted for who they are. I'm frightened of going to church and being rejected.'
She glanced at the lurid photograph in the Fringe programme that had promoted the previous night's talk. 'My first thought when I saw it was, 'What messy bondage', but I suppose it's designed to get bums on seats.' Then she laughed.
