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Master/slave Conference, 2007
Posted by Tanos on Sat 4 Aug 07, 10:50 PM
I'm still buzzing from the
Master/slave conference and
I've got a bunch of things to say about it, but I'm going to try to give an
overview in this blog and them come back to individual topics later.
As I said last time, we
started the conference by going to registration on the Thursday night,
where we were warmly greeted by
slave nyteMare,
who has
a neatly done TSR barcode tattoo on the back of her neck, and was very helpful
then and during the conference. lili, popi and I had a couple of drinks,
briefly talked to some of the other attendees and did some people
watching of the mixture of definite attendees, definite vanillas, and
maybes in the hotel bar. (Throughout this blog I'm going to use people's
names and titles exactly as they give them, for simplicity.)
Friday morning began the first proper day of the conference. Before coming, we'd sat
down with the workshop programme and pencilled in what we might each go to.
Now in it's fourth year, the Master/slave conference has five workshops
running in parallel and three or four time slots in each of its three days:
so that's about 50 workshops and panel sessions - all dedicated to some
aspect of Master/slave relationships (and none about general BDSM topics like
rope bondage or flogging.) Some of the other US conferences which host
contests for Master/slave pairs have strong M/s tracks in their programme,
but none are entirely M/s in their intent, which makes the M/s Conference
unique.
During Friday daytime, I attended Master Alex Keppeler's "Ritual 101",
Lolita Wolf's "Building Trust" and Sir Eric Pride's "Bonding and Spirituality
in M/s Relationships", and this established the pattern of my choice of
workshops: basically a mixture of choosing speakers based on the longevity of
their experience, and picking out spirituality topics because it appears
vitally important to many people at these events, but I don't get it.
In the evening, we had the
second ever TSR
Meeting, which
was arranged by Carolyn and her owner Steve, with help from
Ou pais and her owner Rogue Despot. This was in a dinner slot of the
programme, and the room was filled with the components of a splendid buffet,
and a dozen TSR members and subscribers during the evening and night - in
fact, it was so good, we came back after the formal opening ceremony to
continue it. As well as meeting so many fine TSR people and putting faces to
names  , it also meant we knew more people during the rest of the
conference (I was acutely aware that I was walking past people I knew at
some level online and only realised who they were once they were involved in
a workshop or evening event, apart from the people who came up and
introduced themselves.)
Friday's opening ceremony included a keynote speech from Master Jack McG,
which I'm going to write more about in another blog, but in short, the title
was "Building Our Community" and he advocated a series of things that M/s
people should be doing to build community ties and cohesion for everyone's
benefit. The evening also included a slave auction, welcoming comments and a
short memorial for people who had passed away in the last year. It was very
unlike anything we have in the UK - with the KinkFest slave auction and
cabaret probably being the closest - but this went on from 7pm to 10:30pm,
without any real gaps or sections that dragged.
Afterwards we carried on the TSR meeting for a couple of hours, and were
joined by some more people, including Carter Stevens.
On Saturday, I went to see Catherine Gross's "Protocol Evolution and
Evaluation" (brought to you by the word "poise" and the phrase "pause for
emphasis"  ); the "Spirituality in M/s relationships" panel with Master Steve
of Butchmann's, Major, slave catherine, and slave Justin; and then participated in
the panel on "Leather Families: the multi-slave household" with Master
Taino, Master Z and moderated by Master Alex Keppeler.
This is the first time I've presented anything at a BDSM-related conference
in the US, and I think it went rather well. I wrote out a series of possible
questions that might come up, and the day before I had a think about what
I'd say if we were asked to do short intros. As it turned out we were, and
during Master Alex Keppeler's own intro, I made some notes on one of those
notepads conference hotels helpfully provide on tables in meeting rooms.
In short, I explained how my house evolved from my relationship with lili
starting in 2000, into a household with an identity of its own, not just with
popi's involvement starting in 2004, but with the events and other projects
we've run. I also tried to explain how I virtually fetishise owning a bricks and mortar house,
and a little of the history of my house as a building, and the parallels
and differences between it at the time of the 1901 census and today (one man
and two women in both cases.) I did touch on Victorian models for households
and D/s, and stressed how they were useful sources of ideas but not complete
blueprints: for example, my M/s household with two slaves isn't the same as
a man and wife with a live-in servant, since slaves do not have the status
of wives, but going out with slaves is socially acceptable in a way it
wasn't with servants. The questions from the audience also gave us the chance to talk more about the dynamics of our four households / families, and it turned up some similarities: such as the usefulness of establishing good relations between slaves and the way additional slaves produce more work for the master, but can do more housekeeping job etc.
Before the panel, I hadn't had a chance to talk to Master Taino who produces
the M/s Conference, and before the conference, I was struck that his name was
everywhere: as its producer, in "Master Taino's Training Academy", as
founder of MAsT Washington DC, and as chair of MTTA Inc that's an umbrella
to all of the above. But at the conference it became obvious this wasn't
empty self-promotion because he really does animate a lot of what happens in
the public M/s scene in that part of the US, and having met him, he is a
very warm and genuine person - who was also brave enough to risk putting me
on a panel sight-unseen too of course
The panel also brought up the one definite instance of the title question that I'd raised on TSR out of curiosity: I never call myself "Master Tanos" but almost all of the masters at the conference use master as a title. Since I just gave my name as "Tanos" on the bio I wrote for the programme, the conference programme ended up with a mixture of "Tanos" and "Master Tanos". So when Master Alex Keppeler introduced me, he was presented with plain "Tanos" on the copy he was working from and by a strange coincidence plumped for "Mr Tanos" first, which is what I would have used if I'd had to (think "Mr Darcy" ),
and then said "Master Tanos" as if correcting himself. In future, I'd probably go for "Mr" to save any confusion or awkwardness on other people's behalf.
Saturday evening was another on-stage affair, with some more speeches and the
Northeast Master/slave Contest, which is for Master-slave pairs and judged
on the basis of presentations, how the pair interacts during the rest of the
conference, and short speeches on the night of the contest. There are four
other regional M/s contests and then a national one, called the
International M/s Contest, in Dallas at Southplains Leather Fest in
February. Each of these contests is attached to a leather convention which
is required to have at least a track of M/s sessions, which helps maintain a
network of M/s conventions in the US, and therefore a pool of speakers.
(TSR has a list of M/s
events including these conventions.)
Again, outside of some contests for gay men based at bars and clubs, we
don't really have anything similar for BDSM or D/s in the UK, and we did
feel like observers rather than participants, both to the contest and the
outgoing winners' speeches, because we didn't know the local personalities
and because, um, we're not used to Southern Baptist style rallying speeches
with audience participation
On Sunday, I went to the "Ask the slaves" panel; Master Bert and slave
nadine's "Growing and celebrating our M/s relationships" round-table
discussion; and finally Master Jack McG's "Roles of selfishness,
leadership, command presence and management skills in the making of a
Master". I think the last one was one of the best of the whole conference,
because he laid out his structure very clearly, defining exactly what
he meant as he went along, and it's certainly got me curious about junior
officer manuals as another source of ideas.
In amongst the market stalls, the conference also had the Leather
Library of Vi Johnson ("Mama Vi"), which is part of her personal archive of
books, magazines, flyers
and badges dating back to the 1970s, and other items from further back which
she has subsequently acquired. After the obligatory hug (which managed to fit
in popi AKA "pretty lady" ), I had
a brief conversation with her about my own collection of UK BDSM flyers
which is patchy some years but goes back to 1998ish, and then a look at some
original London Life magazines from the 1920s.
The conference finished on Sunday, with a lot of people drifting off slowly,
and finding it hard to tear themselves away from the atmosphere. It really
is hard to put into words what it's like to be with 300 other M/s people for
a weekend, but I'm certainly glad we went.
Afterwards we did some vanilla sightseeing, including a cruise down the
Potomac to George Washington's estate at
Mount Vernon, and it brought home just
how pioneer an environment the US was even in the late 18th century, with so
many things still needing to be imported from the Old World. It also
underlined how close to home the issue of historical slavery is, and the
particularly nasty plantation variety at that. Whereas Europeans have the
luxury of choosing which historical models to pick elements from, including
the domestic varieties that I'm always writing about, Americans have one
particular type very much threaded through their national history.
Over the next couple of weeks I'm planning to write some more blogs inspired
by topics brought up at the conference, but at least I've now given an
overview of what we managed to fit in.
Edited Tue 26 Feb 08, 11:43 PM by Tanos
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