Here’s a segment from the article by Kitty McConnell in Ohio’s “The Other Paper” about the persecution faced by kinky folk living in the Midwestern USA:
“Nearly a century and a half after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published the erotic novel that led to the psychiatric definition of masochism, fetish sexuality remains mostly under the radar of vanilla society. While David Ives’s Venus in Fur, a play based on the novel, debuted off-Broadway last month to rave reviews (“90 minutes of good, kinky fun,” said The New York Times), local kinksters remain a guarded, discreet community out of necessity.
Is there still moral harassment of such sexual activity in the 21st century Midwest?
“Absolutely. There’s a monster-ization of what we do,” said Barak, co-founder of Columbus’s most prominent fetish group, Adventures in Sexuality (AIS). AIS members include everybody from the person “who brings handcuffs out once a month and says ‘honey it’s time’ to 24/7 lifestylers,” said Barak. The group has nearly 1,400 members in Central Ohio and hosts the annual Winter Wickedness Festival in Columbus. Barak said AIS serves an important educational function for those interested in exploring the kind of sexuality that falls under the acronym BDSM (standing for bondage, discipline and sado-masochism).
“When this isn’t available in the mainstream, they’ll find some information that isn’t necessarily safe. Then you have people experimenting without any mentorship. They may hurt themselves,” said Barak. “What we’re trying to do is allow the mainstream more access. We’re not recruiting, but we’re making ourselves more available.”
Indeed, finding local BDSM/fetish groups or events is work. Lifestylers don’t send out invitations on Facebook. The social networking site fetlife caters to the national BDSM community and has 1,518 Columbus members. Even so, information is often hard to come by. For security reasons, organizers generally withhold the details of gatherings until previously vetted group members buy tickets. That’s because even in larger metro areas, private fetish parties sometimes are broken up under the guise of zoning restrictions. As reported earlier this month by the local ABC news affiliate, a man throwing private sex parties in his suburban Washington, D.C. home was shut down and threatened with fines by zoning officials…”
Read more here.