Love in Dark Settings

"No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape [an officer's] attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate."

--John Paul Jones.

Topics in this post: Regency etiquette, long-distance relationships, protocol, leather history, schedule, training, military discipline, leather clubs, spirituality, versatility, feudalism, medieval hierarchy, my writings, memories.

Background to my Mentoring Life entries (please read this first).

*** 12 February 2008

Half a dozen phone conversations between me and my apprentice yesterday, covering his report on the final day at the run, his assistance with various computer problems I was having (when you go hunting for a boy, sirs, be sure that he's a techie), and me doing my best to help him with a problem he was having with some friends. I know I'm a mentor, because the last conversation meant the most to me.

*** 13 February 2008

On the phone tonight, I mentioned to my apprentice a passage in Naomi Novik's Empire of Ivory, which I'm reading for the first time and which Jo/e read when it was published last fall. The passage occurs when the characters are about to make a last-ditch stand against some deadly enemies.

* * *

The order of emergence was settled upon, in haste; they agreed upon a rendezvous point in the woods, consulting their compasses. Laurence felt his neckcloth, to be sure it was tied, and shrugged back into his coat in the dark, adjusting the gold bars upon his shoulders; his hat was gone. "Warren, Chenery; your servant, Harcourt," he said, shaking their hands. Ferris and Riggs were crouched by the opening, ready; his own pistols were loaded. "Gentlemen," he said, and drawing his sword went through the cavern exit, a roar of God and King George behind him.

* * *

"Well," said my apprentice, "there's no doubt that the Age of Sail had a certain gallantry we lack."

"I know," I replied, "but there they are at a later passage in the book, with cannon-balls whizzing past them, and Laurence shouts an order to one of his men, ending his order with 'if you please.'"

We both fell into paroxysms of laughter, amidst which my apprentice said, "Even if you're about to die, that's no reason not to be polite."

"I feel," I said, "as though I should set every leatherboy to work reading Age of Sail fiction."

I might have said "every sir" as well, except that I'm not taking my lessons on politeness from fiction. I learn how to be polite by following the example of my apprentice.

*** 14 February 2008

A few days ago, my apprentice asked whether he could have my permission to wear a black tee-shirt to an upcoming event that some leather friends of his would be attending.

"Why on earth not?" I responded.

"Well, Sir, I know that you prefer that I wear white tee-shirts . . ."

These are the sorts of remarks that make my day. I'd spoken to my apprentice about white tee-shirts exactly twice, as I recall - once when he sought my advice last June on what to wear on his first visit to a leather bar, and the second time in August when he asked my advice on what clothes to bring with him on his visit to D.C., when we'd be going to leather events together. I'd told him on both occasions that the traditional color of tee-shirt for a leatherboy (at least in the social circles I hang out in) was white, but that it was a tradition often honored in the breech these days.

From this, he'd picked up on the fact that I liked the tradition, and he's been wearing white tee-shirts ever since then. Keep in mind that I didn't order him to do this; it doesn't matter. He's been determined to wear clothing that would honor me.

I remember a post at a leather forum in which someone asked the sirs who had long-distance relationships, "But how can you enforce your orders?" I didn't bother to post a reply; I was too busy laughing.

*** 15 February 2008

Jo/e: "Who really likes to be fisted?"

Me: "I don't know, who really likes to be fisted?"

Jo/e: "Hand puppets!"

Our daily phone calls continue, as they have ever since I got a flat-rate calling plan last fall, but I'm realizing that, in allowing our correspondence to lapse on both sides, we've been missing out on an important element that was present earlier in our relationship. Quite simply, both my apprentice and I find it easier to go deeply into our hierarchy through writing than through talking on the phone. That's something I'd allowed myself to forget, and then couldn't figure out why that element of deep hierarchy hadn't been present as often these days as it was in the first months of our relationship.

The daily phone calls are a great blessing; they allow me to know quickly when my apprentice has troubles in his life, and it allows us to communicate quickly about solutions. It also allows us to have wonderfully long discussions on leather history, slash fiction, Age of Sail, etc. But after looking over our recently revived correspondence with each other, I've resolved to write to my apprentice more often.

Of course, once I'd resolved this, I immediately realized that it's hard to figure out what to write to a person whom you're telephoning daily. There's nothing like assigning yourself the same task as you've assigned your boy to alert you to barriers he's likely encountering in completing his task.

*** 16 February 2008

Last weekend, my apprentice was quizzed at the run by various folks trying to determine whether his sir was Old Guard or New Guard.

(A pause at this point in the conversation between my apprentice and me, as we agreed that there was no single Old Guard.)

"I suppose they must have concluded that I was New Guard," I told my apprentice.

"That's the odd thing, Sir. Some of them thought you were New Guard because our relationship didn't fit the traditional leather patterns. But others thought you were Old Guard because of your interest in protocol and leather history."

I wonder what those folks would think if they knew that I was drawing tips on protocol from such writings as "A Generall Rule to teche every man that is willynge for to lerne, to serve a lorde or mayster in every thyng to his plesure" (circa 1400). It's true, though, that our protocol is mainly based on leather protocol. This is partly because leather protocol overlaps so heavily with traditional vanilla protocol, and partly because I thought it would be good to have a protocol that my apprentice and I could practice alongside other people without having to hire a time machine to send us back to eras when other hierarchical protocols existed.

This begs the question, however, of how old current leather protocol actually is. The folks that my apprentice was talking to, who identified protocol with Old Guard, must have been thinking of 1950s and 1960s leather. Looking at the pages of the early issues of early leather magazines, I don't get the impression that protocol was uppermost in the minds of most leathermen in the late seventies and early eighties. It may be, of course, that those magazines simply weren't aimed at the sort of audiences that were practicing protocol, but given that the magazines' editors and staff writers were often long-time leathermen, I can't help but wonder whether there is actually more interest now in protocol than there ever was in the past (with the obvious exception of the dress code, which seems to have consumed the minds of leathermen from the start).

I'm basing this speculation purely on what I know of past leather literature. This is dangerous. So what do you folks think who have been in the leather community for some years? How old is the protocol that you know about? Have you witnessed a steady interest in protocol in the community, or has interest gone up and down?

*** 20 February 2008

Some time back, when my apprentice and I were discussing his difficulties with keeping to his schedule, I asked him what he thought he could do to improve the situation. He tentatively offered the comment that he felt rather lost without having any practical support in learning how to keep to his schedule.

(To those of you who don't know the background of this already, I should explain: Jo/e works at home, and I discovered last summer that he was having a difficult time keeping to a schedule. So I offered to help him with this - a case of a first-grader offering to help a kindergartener, since I'm only one step ahead of him in schedule-keeping - and he happily threw the matter into my lap.)

At the same time, I've been unhappy about how differently his schedule training has been going from his protocol training. In his protocol training, I was constantly letting him know whenever he strayed from protocol. As a result, he was putting in quite a fine performance in protocol by the end of his week's visit to see me last year.

The schedule problem has been dragging on for months. I've finally decided, for both of the above reasons, to be as anal-retentive about his schedule-keeping as I am about my own. So, since he's having a hard time remembering to record his own schedule, I'm quizzing him each day about the previous day's activities and then recording his schedule for him. Hopefully, after I've sent him this sort of schedule record a few weeks in a row, he'll be able to start keeping one on his own. And in the meantime, we may be able to resolve the problem of me asking him, "How much time did you spend on your artwork yesterday?" and his only response being, "Um . . . an hour, maybe? I don't remember."

In fact, I'm almost certain we'll be able to resolve this problem, because the day after I got that response from him, he triumphantly told me that he'd figured out how much time it took to do a particular aspect of his artwork, and so he could present me with the exact figure for how much time he'd spent on artwork the previous day. Quite often, I don't even have to point out a problem to him; he'll figure out on his own that something was lacking in his response to me and will set out to resolve the problem.

The biggest problem he's facing is seeing schedule-keeping as constructive rather than destructive. When he keeps ninety percent of his schedule, all he can think about is the ten percent that he failed to keep. For me, schedule-keeping is fun; it's a way to see gradual progress, and the set-backs, when they occur (as they do quite often in my case, what with my Internet addiction still strangling me), are simply impetuses to do better next time. So I'm hoping that I can somehow find a way to inculcate him with this positive mindset.

*** 21 February 2008

Yet more progress: When I asked my apprentice today what he'd done yesterday, he was all ready with figures on hand. He's plunging quickly into our new method of record-keeping, without us having held any sort of formal discussion on this. (It's easier to show what I'm doing than to explain, so I'm going to save any explanations for when I send him the record of this week's schedule.)

The only problem we have is that his PDA - which has his timer software - is out of commission, so he's still struggling with his long-standing problem of losing track of time when he's doing leisure activities. I told him to buy a cheap digital timer as a back-up timer.

*** 27 February 2008

"You pitiful mob of sickly monkeys . . . you sunken-chested, slack-bellied, drooling refugees from apron strings. In my whole life I never saw such a disgraceful huddle of momma's spoiled little darlings . . ."

I turned to my apprentice for help tonight in translating the above speech (which is spoken by a drill sergeant in the boot camp portion of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers) into Dusk-speak. How were the above insults supposed to turn the recruits into better men? Making the recruits trot fifty miles a day - yes, I could see that as a building-up exercise that would harden them and make them into skilled soldiers, prepared to survive in any environment. It was the psychological attacks I was having problems with.

My apprentice had survived Junior ROTC, so I figured he'd know the answer.

Well, he tried his best to explain, but I fear that this is going to be one of those topics, such as one-night stands, where I can only take other people's word for it that such things can be a positive experience. This conversation led, however, into a discussion of my own concerns as to whether I've been pulling my punches in dealing with my apprentice, or whether - as I sometimes fear when I phone him and find him in a state of panic over some mild criticism I've offered - I am in fact too severe--

"No, Sir," he said firmly. "You're not severe enough."

Well, that was forthright counsel. The problem is how to translate it into action on my end. We agreed, though, that we both need to work on our proper responses in cases where I need to offer him criticism.

Later:

I got to this part of Starship Troopers. The first speaker is the drill sergeant; the second speaker is his officer. They're discussing a discipline case.

* * *

"They're a nice bunch of kids. . . . The twerps have gone home and those that are left are eager, anxious to please, and on the bounce - as cute as a litter of collie pups. A lot of them will make soldiers."

"So that was the soft spot. You liked him . . . so you failed to clip him in time. So he winds up with a [court-martial] and the whip and a [Bad Conduct Discharge]. Sweet."

* * *

(*Shuffles feet*.) Not the same thing at all, I mumble, but still.

This is why I read books that aren't to my taste; because I learn more from them than I do from reading books that are to my taste.

*** 6 March 2007

I've been added to the e-mail list for the Doms' Auxiliary of my apprentice's leatherboy club, which I guess means I'm officially part of the auxiliary, though my only contact so far with the club and its auxiliary has been a single e-mail from my apprentice's club sponsor last fall. The e-mail list, alas, is only an announcements list, so I'll have to wait till I visit my apprentice later this year to interact with the boys and their sirs.

Assuming I figure out how to finance that trip. I sure hope I sell some books this year.

*** 12 March 2008

Gifts from my apprentice arrived in the mail today. "Consider this a Valentine's present," he said. "Please ignore the Christmas paper, Sir."

The gifts were perfect: Hardy Haberman's Soul of a Second Skin: The Journey of a Gay Christian Leatherman (written by the gentleman who was kind enough to beta Leather, Licking and Lawnmowers for me) and Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours, about Carthusian monks in the 1960s.

Plus chocolate. That's the part I didn't tell Doug about. In our house, talking about chocolate is more dangerous than talking about leather.

Later:

This afternoon, my apprentice raised the topic of how some leatherfolk don't understand multiple levels of hierarchy: the fact that someone can be served while being in service to another person.

As a matter of fact, this is one of my pet peeves about the leather community: that so many members of the community can only understand two-level hierarchies. I told my apprentice about a conversation I'd had with a master (a former soldier) about military hierarchy. I'd pointed out to the master that military hierarchies operate on multiple levels, but he said that it wasn't the same as in a leather relationship, because in the military, he, as an officer, was expected to pass on orders that came from higher up the hierarchy, rather than having sole control over his men.

My apprentice's reply to this anecdote was that, while this was indeed true in the modern military, it wasn't true in military systems based on feudalism. He told how, during the Japanese feudal period, complex protocols developed to deal with the issue that a lord who was served by a lower lord did not have direct control over that lower lord's men. (I'm rephrasing what Jo/e said; I don't know what the technical terms were for those lords.)

By sheer coincidence, I'm dealing with this topic of multiple hierarchical layers in the novel I'm currently writing in my Life Prison series. It's a constant amazement to me how my real life and my literary life keep intersecting in subject matter these days. It's not a case of me seeing something in real life and then writing about it in my stories; rather, matters that appear in my stories end up turning up in my real life as well.

My whole relationship with Jo/e is a perfect example of this.

During the first three decades in which I wrote quasi-medieval fantasy stories about people in personal hierarchical relationships (lord & liegeman stories, etc.), I never expected to be in that type of relationship myself. In the years before I even thought of applying such matters to my own life, I put all my hierarchical energies into spinning daydreams, such as the daydreams that eventually became the Eternal Dungeon series. (I call that my Gothic Revival series; it has a medieval-like setting within a Victorian society.) During those years, I didn't even know that personal hierarchical relationships based on consensual imagery existed in the modern world (as opposed to consensual hierarchical relationships based on nonconsensual imagery, which I'd known about since I was a teen). Well, actually, I did know about traditional Christian marriages, and those certainly intrigued me, but they were based on gender premises I couldn't accept. Other than that, I thought that personal hierarchical relationships based on consensual imagery had ceased to exist long before I was born.

(I'm using the word "medieval" here as shorthand for ancient/medieval/Renaissance - the eras before egalitarian relationships became fashionable in the West. In actuality, the sorts of historical relationships I'm talking about began in pre-history and were still reasonably common in the early twentieth century, but I'll use "medieval" here as a brief way of labelling these centuries-long hierarchical customs.)

Then - so gradually that I can't even identify a specific date when it happened - I began to realize that such relationships existed now. When I finally got that fact fact drummed into my head, I was 99% sure I wouldn't find anyone who was interested in entering into such a relationship with me. I mean, for heaven's sakes, everyone else out there whom I encountered who wanted to live out such relationships was interested in modern military imagery, or Victorian employer/servant imagery, or (no, no, no, that wasn't what I wanted, though I knew that it worked fine for some other folks) slavery imagery. And here I was, steeped in modern hierarchical liturgies that were originally created in the ancient/medieval/Renaissance eras, having fantasies about consensual personal hierarchies in those eras. Talk about being out of step with the times.

("If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." This quotation from Thoreau appeared in every issue of the leather magazine Drummer.)

And so where did I finally find my relationship? With a gentleman who was reading my Eternal Dungeon series, wistfully dreaming about what it would be like to be in a personal hierarchical relationship based on consensual imagery. Talk about life imitating art.

I'd feel like John Preston - who used to use his stories as tools for seduction - if I didn't know that my apprentice's daydreams started well before he discovered my stories. Which makes it all the more eerie, that we were both having daydreams about medieval hierarchy for decades before our paths happened to cross in a very vanilla manner, by meeting each other in the gay fiction and slash fiction communities (he encountered my writings in both places). I suppose that shows how powerful a force literature is for bringing together people with similar interests.