I realize I’m meandering all over the place on my way to blogging about my life as a sexual adult that began in 1961, and has now spanned six decades. I’ve had a lot to distract me lately, in the form of a writing class, a family visit, a May vacation to plan, B&Bs to decide on and a new and frequently mystifying Twitter account to learn the ins and out of, (all fun and exciting things) — plus an injured shoulder from doing the Bridge pose dead wrong, and a knee and a toe injury, not to mention my computer running amuck and requiring money spent on repairs, (not fun or exciting things at all) — I’m just now getting around to a short post about my recollections of sex in the 90s.
My husband an I continued to enjoy the Bay Area BDSM party scene until about the mid-90s. As a straight male, moderately bisexual female couple, our sexual interactions were primarily with each other — punctuated by the occasional and delightful safe sex encounter. And as such, our focus was on enjoying the social aspects of membership in the kinky community, in addition to the considerable stimulation of the live theater aspects of public BDSM.
Still, the raging STD epidemic was unarguably of grave concern to the entire sexual community. By then, never mind personal safety precautions, most clubs and play spaces had adopted a mandatory safe sex requirement on their premises — a sensible measure with which most thinking people agreed — although I still shake my head recalling one outraged male dominant expound on the outrage and indignity of being required to wear a condom while penetrating his own wife. I suppose the issue of how a dungeon monitor could be expected to know whose wife he was penetrating, evidently did not occur to him.
All in all, I have relatively little to say about the public BDSM scene in the latter part of the mid-90s. I’d turned fifty by then. For me, those were the menopausal years, the years of mood swings and hot flashes, accompanied by unwanted weight gain and plummeting sexual desire for the first time in my more than thirty-five years of sexually active life. For my husband, who was three years older than I, it was a time when most players around us seemed younger with each party we attended — and we were no longer that super hot, still youngish couple with whom everyone wanted to play.
Those were also the years of increasing career responsibilities and aging parent responsibilities, combined with young adult offspring responsibilities and that our aging dogs grew infirm, making us loath to leave them. By mid-decade, although we continued to play privately and occasionally with other couples, as time and hormonal imbalances allowed, we gradually and regretfully dropped out of the public BDSM scene.
Dorothy Freed 