DISPATCHES

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In the basement of an austere home in the hills of L.A.'s poshly bohemian Silver Lake, the walls of a small, soundproofed room are painted a buttery, shimmery yellow. White candles fill the air with the slightly cloying smell of gardenia. Native American chant music plays. A quote in calligraphy script adorns one wall, from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire: Come to the edge, he said. They said: we are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them . . . and they flew.
    This is Skip Chasey's leather playroom. More yoga studio than dungeon, it perfectly encapsulates his multilayered identity as an openly gay Christian leatherman. The contents of the room signify no mere hobby: there is a St. Andrew's cross with leather straps, and a "puppy" cage, big enough to contain a few crouching people. An infrared camera — not used very much, Chasey notes — is poised in the corner near the ceiling. Butt plugs and cock rings are discreetly tucked away in cabinets. For Chasey and Tim Hamilton — "Master Skip" and "Pup Tim" to each other and the leather community — the room is "sacred space."
    A tall man with a moustache and clear eyes, Chasey, forty-nine, radiates a ministerial calmness and a sense of firm but gentle authority. He speaks in measured cadences with great control; his enunciation is crisp as an ESL instructor's. A leader in the leather community, he has spoken at the Millennium March on Washington, co-owns the Southwestern Leather Conference and is the master of a leather family. This comprises two slaves (one female Muslim slave he doesn't own, one male slave he owns — "owning" denotes a lifetime commitment), a "boy," and Hamilton, who's been in Chasey's family longer than anyone. Chasey and Hamilton aren't lovers, but they've been close since being introduced by a mutual friend eight years ago. A laidback fellow with a droll sense of humor and a shock of blond hair, Hamilton was thirty-six at the time and in a period of personal turmoil. By being "present in all ways and a healing force," says Chasey, he helped Hamilton out of his depression. Their relationship quickly developed archetypal resonance: Chasey is the benevolent master, and Hamilton tries to embody the qualities of the Dog — friendship, loyalty and obedience.
    With a raised eyebrow, Chasey says the family members, all L.A.-based, "get along, to varying degrees." Typical spats aside, all of them believe that transcendence can be experienced at the end of a bullwhip. Getting tied up, or zipped into a mummification suit, can be a cathartic experience. Any variety of SM play can bring one closer to the Divine, "an interaction that only its participants can verify, or deem healthy or unhealthy," says Hamilton.
    The Divine, for Chasey and Hamilton, is simply another word for God. It's not a concept or an easy definition. In fact, "it's everything you can't say. That's the problem with too many organized religions," says Chasey. "They're so busy trying to define God that they've made the concept the God, instead of the experience — ineffable and different for everyone."
    It's well-documented that BDSM play can result in altered states of consciousness, but to Chasey and Hamilton, this isn't due just to the narcotic rush of endorphins to the brain. "The flogger, with each lash of the whip, has one message: now, now, now, now," says

"The religious right knows they lost the war against gay people," Chasey says. "We're visible. But the leather community is still regarded as deviants, outcasts, freaks."

Chasey, lightly slapping his thigh for effect. "So sooner or later, like it or not, you're going to be in that moment, and you're going to come face to face with all that stuff you haven't been looking at, and there's going to be this big cathartic experience. And that's where the Divine exists."
    An executive at a TV-production company, Chasey hasn't always embraced religion. Despite his devout Southern Baptist upbringing in Phoenix, he became estranged from the church and his biological family at the age of nineteen. It wasn't until 1992, after his lover of fourteen years died of AIDS, that Chasey ventured into a place of worship again. This time, it was the Metropolitan Church Center of Los Angeles, an ecumenical Christian ministry that is rooted in the GLBT community and has churches in eighteen countries. Around the same time Chasey attended his first service at MCCLA, he began to explore leather more seriously. Wracked with grief — and fear that his lover was condemned to hell — he sought assurance. "I needed to know that everything worked out for Victor. And I needed to explore these toxic beliefs that were still in me, that I had shelved for years."
    Though Chasey's family had trouble accepting his homosexuality, Chasey himself never had a problem with it: "I never had this torture that so many people experience. I knew that I was made decent and good." This innate belief spreads to his feelings about spirituality and leather play. "When people have a problem with it, they're trying to square it with the dogma that's embraced by some, and not the original scriptural teachings." He points out that BDSM is nothing new in spiritual circles: both Native Americans and Buddhist monks have explored the meeting ground of pain and divinity.
     Raised in a nonreligious household, Hamilton found himself drawn to the spiritual as he got older, and began volunteering at the MCCLA. Now he's pursuing a Master of Divinity degree in seminary, where he's been openly gay from the start. "They welcomed me," he says. "They don't want to deny any community of grace. The [GLBT] community needs faith." Though not specifically out as a leatherman, Hamilton says it's probably obvious when "I pull up on my motorcycle wearing leather from head to toe. There's always been gay men in seminary," he says with a dry laugh. "Now those gay men are more out, and seminary is starting to learn we're not so scary."
    There are obvious questions here: Why identify with Christianity when its leaders are notoriously intolerant of non-mainstream sexuality? "I believe the Christian faith is not hostile to alternate sexual expression," says Hamilton. "Some churches are. In fact, I think the teachings of Christ are great. Everyone was welcomed to his worship and his table. He taught lessons of love, forgiveness and compassion. Some churches have claimed to follow Christian lessons, but they're not welcoming to strangers and work to exclude people from Christian relationships. For them, I'm sad."
    Nor is he discouraged by Leviticus 20:13 ("thou shalt not lie with a man ..."), the Bible passage most often cited as evidence that homosexuality is a sin. To Hamilton, that's an error of context: the passage appears as part of a larger discussion of ways men should not be adulterous. (Leviticus 20:12 says men should not commit adultery with a daughter-in-law; 20:14 says one should not commit adultery with one's mother-in-law.) "What Leviticus is asking us to do is to honor our relationships," says Hamilton. "This passage is not an anti-gay passage, it is a pro-relationship message."
    Although Hamilton hasn't found any specific Bible reference to BDSM, "the intention of the act is critical to its interpretation," he says. "Yes, good intention can turn out badly. But not to act at all is of greater damage. BDSM certainly will not work for everyone, but then again, being a vegetarian, a suburban housewife, or any other practice that helps an individual experience a greater bond with the Universe won't work for everyone. I don't sense a need to legitimize the path, as much as I sense a call to support people along their path of grace."
    For Chasey and Hamilton, BDSM play, if done with care and respect, is a ministry to be spread and nurtured in the leather and spiritual communities, not only to draw them together but to bolster the leather side against attacks. "The

Skip Chasey (left) and Tim Hamilton

fanatical religious extremists on the right know that they lost the war against gay people," says Chasey. "We're out there, we're visible. But the leather community is still under fire. It's like, 'Well, we'll let you [gays] have your TV shows and get married in some places,' but leather people, we're still regarded as deviants, outcasts, freaks."
    With this in mind, in 2002 Chasey and Hamilton started People of Leather Among You (PLAY), a monthly support and social group at the MCCLA. Since its inception, PLAY has attracted a steady crowd of thirty, with attendance occasionally reaching 100. "It's a place where the spiritual come to find their sexual identity, and leatherfolk come to explore their spiritual sides," says Hamilton. "It invites people to have their own vision of whatever their sexuality and spirituality mean to them. We're not specifically about spreading the word, so to speak, but our members are preaching the gospel by living it."
    From the very first meeting, PLAY has attracted people from all over the globe, from heavy hitters in the leather community who value the chance to address a unique demographic cross-section, to the inexperienced-but-curious who drive in from all over Southern California — San Diego, Palm Springs, Ojai. "It's a little Noah's Arc of sexual expression," Chasey says. "We have people from long-established religious practices — Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jews, Muslims — and then we've got Pagans and Wiccans. Then there are people who don't have any significant or formal spiritual background but are realizing there's something deeper about what they're experiencing."
    On a cool April night, with the ubiquitous church soundtrack of clomping piano music and a rehearsing choir in the background, about thirty people are listening to Cara, a petite woman in an indigo yarmulke, talk about her masochistic leanings and her studies of the Kabbalah. The crowd is mixed, with the only commonality being that nearly everyone is wearing black — one man is white-haired and bearded like a Haight-Ashbury hippie; another guy wears an impossibly stiff leather jacket and boots, the requisite leatherman outfit; one woman with honey-colored, shoulder-length hair peppers Cara with intelligent questions, like how do Cara's interactions with the spiritual during her SM scenes carry out into the world?
    Cara's answers are, enjoyably, all over the place: she talks about the privilege of standing at the edge of life and death, of how she uses that experience to infuse her life with a richer sense of light and dark. She talks about studying fencing and bondage to learn about constraint. She even breaks out into something like a Jewish Jeff Foxworthy routine when she says, "You know you're a masochist when your favorite holiday is Yom Kippur." The crowd, focused but slightly flaccid, politely chuckles at the joke, except Chasey in the front row. He's been watching Cara raptly and laughs with hearty, genuine amusement.
    Each meeting features a presenter or an interactive event, anything from drum circles to foot-washing rituals. Before that, attendees are invited to share their concerns. For the most part, they discuss the ordinary concerns of relationships, love,

"If the popular way was always the right way, Jesus would not have been necessary — but he is."

happiness. Chasey says that by the time someone decides to attends PLAY, they're okay with their leather/fetish choices, if those choices were ever an issue in the first place. "Sometimes the questions are more about breaking out of a conscripted role of master, slave, submissive, dominant: 'How do I get out of the box, and can I go back in again?'"
    Every meeting closes with a ritual. Tonight, it's led by David, a built man with flashing blue eyes. His speech about friendship and death is deliberate but increasingly volatile. He takes out a knife, slices open his finger and says, "Is this real?" A few minutes later, he brandishes a very convincing fake gun, cocks it and plants it above his left ear. "Is this real?" he says, and pulls the trigger. The room is rigid with shock.
    Slave Rick, one of Chasey's family members, is hosting tonight; he thanks David graciously but with visible unease. The meeting disbands, and most people leave pretty quickly. Chasey will tell me later that David's disturbing ritual wasn't typical (usually it's a chant or a meditation) and that it rattled some of the regulars, not to mention the newcomers.
    A quick but lively social period ensues. The regulars standing in clusters, catching up. I talk with Cara, who tells me about some advice she gave a coworker who wanted to surprise his wife. She told him to lie in bed naked and say, "I'll make love to you any way you want." "For a lot of straight women, this is the ultimate fantasy, I think. Mine would be the same, but with lots of rope," she laughs.
    I wonder if the group has been condemned by mainstream Christians. "For the most part, those who have sat and taken time to know me have been excellent and supportive," says Hamilton. "Those who yell words of hate and anger fail my test of Christian credibility. Jesus would have stood with those being persecuted in his name. From my Presbyterian brothers and sisters to my Hindu motorcycle riding partners, across the board we find common ground. We don't 100% agree on anything, but we do hold ourselves to a common rule: Do unto others as you would have done to you. Judge not, lest you be judged yourself. If the popular way was always the right way, Jesus would not have been necessary — but he is."
    At the end of the evening, I discover that my car is locked in the wrong parking lot, and the church has no key. Chasey, Cara and Nicole, a squat young woman with a ponytail and a leather vest full of pins, stand around with me, debating what to do. There are three penthouses above the parking garage, Chasey explains, that likely have access. I get someone on the intercom, but he hangs up when I ask for help; Chasey wonders if it was the famous drag queen/porn director who is reputed to live in one of the penthouses.
    As my options dwindle, Chasey offers me a ride. Now that my safe return has been guaranteed, Cara and Nicole feel free to leave. Cara departs first, and there's something about her goodbye, warm and rambling, that reminds me of the people I knew growing up in an Episcopal church, a church in which I no longer participate but have mostly fond memories of nonetheless. Cara, Chasey and Nicole are the good kind of church people — the kind who'll stick around with you late on a Thursday night when you've done something stupid, just to make sure you're okay.
    Nicole says goodbye and starts to walk away under the yellow buzzing lights of the parking lot, the unlocked one I should've parked in. "Nicole," Chasey calls out. She turns around. I'm reminded of something Hamilton told me about obeying Chasey: "It's easy because he never asks me to do something I wouldn't want to do."
    "Get home safely," he says.
    She smiles slightly — "yes, sir" — and shuffles off into the night.  n°

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margaret Wappler regularly contributes to Nylon, Rollingstone.com, L.A. Weekly, Venus and The Believer, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on her first novel.