Coming out of the kink closet...

Over the course of the past year-year and a half, I've gradually been telling people in my life that I'm kinky. Not everybody--my mom, grandparents, and fuckton of cousins don't need to know. But as I've started going to more and more play parties, and made more and more friends at said parties (hi new friends!) it's become increasingly more difficult to tell people I've known since middle school (hi old friends!) amusing anecdotes without going into detail. And the more people I tell, the more I feel like I'm hiding something really big from the people I haven't told.

Telling people can be hard. I think I actually make it harder than it has to be a lot of the time. But it always seems like kind of a big deal.

The first time I told someone I was interested in BDSM-y type stuff I hadn't actually realized it myself. It was the beginning of my junior year of college, I had been dumped over the summer by my boyfriend of two years, and I had started flirting with a cute freshman to...I dunno...take my mind off how shitty I felt. We were walking around campus one evening, talking about past relationships, and my emotionally abusive ex from high school came up. I believe what I said was "...I've realized since then that power games and stuff really need to stay in the bedroom where they belong."

On the surface, the conversation went smoothly along, but in my head I was freaking out thinking "WHERE THE HELL DID THAT COME FROM!? Did I really just say that?" I avidly read Savage Love every week, and usually Control Tower as well, so the idea of kink was not completely foreign to me...it was just that I very definitely thought of it as something other people did. Never mind that I fantasized all the time about being tied up...that was normal, not the sort of extreme stuff other people got up to.

After the ill-fated hookups with the cute freshman came to an end, I kept thinking about being tied up. I wore a corset in a show and loved how it felt, so I made my own (even tighter and sturdier than the costume-y one I'd worn before) and fantasized about being fucked while wearing it. I thought about being corseted and tied up. But still, I wasn't kinky. It wasn't until Jack broached the subject years later that I was even able to admit it to myself for real.

I'm still in touch with the cute freshman. We were in a show together, and we follow each other on Twitter. We're not close at all, though, and it's really weird to think that he's the first person I came out of the kink closet to. I doubt he even realized the significance that once little sentence has taken on in my life.