Tending the Garden: Growing Kink Communities

If I possess any skill, apart from being able to string words together in a somewhat coherent manner, it's my ability to see connections between various things in life.

One moment I'm experiencing or reading something and then suddenly my brain does an ornate game of Connect the Dots and I'm making new connections between what might otherwise appear to be disparate ideas or facts. Occasionally it spawns one of those 'Ah-ha' moments. That happened this week.

As background, I attended two leather community meetings, one of which was rather contentious. I was developing a marketing plan for a big fundraiser. Someone discussed with me how to produce a successful sex party. I was engaged in some deep discussions online about some meaty leather and kink topics.

I witnessed the sad demise of one of the city's gay sex clubs due to gentrification and then participated in the subsequent churn of discussion with friends on how to save our disappearing spaces. Someone else reached out to me because they were depressed and simply needed to talk. Someone asked me for some advice on how to best navigate the Daddy role. Three producers sent me their event information asking me to promote them. A small group of us leathermen did an ad hoc meetup at a local bar and we hung out for a while.

In some way, all of that is related to building and fostering community within our local kinky ranks. Whether on a big macro city-wide level or smaller micro-personal level, all that stuff was related in some way to encouraging new and ongoing connections between kinksters. They all contribute to keeping connections and the people within them happy, healthy and thriving, or at least attempting to do so.

Being a quote collector, this week I also happened to be scanning quotation repositories and ran across one I really liked by Brian Eno, the English musician, producer and artist best known for his work in ambient and certain other music forms.