As promised, the blog’s been leading up to Masturbation Month, which begins today May 1st and continues for four glorious weeks of self-love unburdened by shame! Theoretically. I mean, I have zero shame about masturbating. But how about you?
Maybe you’ll feel better knowing that May is when you can be sure thousands of sex-positive adults around the globe are having laughs (and squeals and screams of excitement) using their own hands or preferred toys on themselves — and you can be one of those people!
If you need a refresher, you can read my earlier blog posts on the subject on why masturbation is good for adult health, how to recognize when you’re masturbating excessively, and 2 exercises to get you in the mood for orgasm.
My gift to you for this merry May 1 is the scene in my new novel, Champions of Pleasure, where Dane, the protagonist, hops into the shower for his daily ritual of a quick wank and some heavy SM fantasizing, emerging from the bath feeling fresh as a daisy, inside and out, and filled with passionate energy and ambition to become an owned slave.
Dane doesn’t have inhibitions about sex. He has PREFERENCES. He prefers BDSM over everything else, including the gender of his partner. He is functionally bisexual, and lives with a gay man, but his dream is to become the permanently owned slave of the slightly mysterious and seriously stunning Mistress Lorraine, a glam domme who turns heads at Dane’s favorite BDSM club and has twisted Dane’s desires into a burning passion for her discipline and cruel attentions.
So let’s just JUMP into the shower with him!
Once the water temperature was perfect, Dane hopped in and floated away on sex fantasies.
What if today was his last day on earth as an unowned submissive? Once Mistress Lorraine put her permanent collar on him, she would get to call all the shots.
The thought of it paralyzed him with lust. He’d do anything for her.
It would be so friggin hot if she ordered him to marry her! He’d read posts from married subs who said their wives forced them to get them pregnant too, like stud horses. Maybe she’d make him cum in tubes and not even let him fuck her, just inject his sperm into her pussy while he was forced to wear a chastity device and watch.
The idea of it drove him wild. He stroked himself, he stroked harder, he stroked faster, he stroked to ecstasy and more ecstasy and blind ecstasy… and OH, THANK YOU GOD, he felt truly cleansed when the passion rushed out of him.
He felt he could break the walls with his hands now. He was Super Slave, man of action, a risk- taker. Even if Lorraine rejected him, at least he had tried. But he wasn’t going to fail. His life was going to change tonight. He knew it in his gut’s gut.
His old life as a horny bottom was about to end. The dominant of his dreams was going to drown the old Dane’s bullshit and the Dane who emerged from the hot butter tsunami would be a happier, prouder, stronger man for it.
He was the dragon! He wasn’t going to be some old dude in a nursing home who regretted making all the safe choices. He was going to be an old guy with exciting memories of all the crazy things he’d done. He would never forget tonight. One way or another, he would never forget the night he asked Mistress Lorraine to be her permanently owned slave. — Champions of Pleasures
I wanted to write a book about BDSM from a totally different perspective than I’d ever attempted before. I’ve written a lot of non-fiction about BDSM over the years, but I felt that writing fiction would allow me to show, rather than explain, why and how kinky people do the things they do, and how they integrate their sex lives and kinky sexuality in unconventional ways while maintaining a conventional life at work and in public.
In other words, this book is not about a fucked up billionaire transforming a clueless newbie into a clueless wife. It is about a guy everyone in the Scene has met, that submissive guy who for some reason never hooks up with a really nice woman, even though he is one of the nicest men you could ever meet.
One hang-up is that Dane is still struggling with being bisexual. One bad experience in college made him paranoid about telling women he pursued that he identified as bisexual. He feels his future is compromised by his interest in men, and that all women, except his closest Leather friends, judged him harshly for it. Even though he loves playing with his gay friends at the club, he’s uncertain about how far he wants to go with same-sex relationships in daily life.
Dane opted for fast and easy, in and out relationships, mainly one night stands on Craig’s List. He’d settled into his job and swallowed the discomforts of a squalid rental he shared with other computer geeks. He’d dealt with a lot of heartbreak in his young life, and was starting to lose his sense of self when he met a gorgeous older gay man, named Booker, who offered him an incredible opportunity to do light chores, contribute some money towards rent, and move into Booker’s spacious uptown apartment, no strings attached. The men had instantly bonded over a feast Booker prepared and soon began to live together as comfortably as if they’d grown up together. In the process, Booker teaches Dane that it is safe to dream big, to be vulnerable, and that hugs are basic requirements for a happy life.
The book plays with a lot of the themes that run through Kink culture, from the joy of unity to the devastating impact of shame and unwanted outing. It pays tribute to the phenomenal bonds of loyalty, trust and mutual devotion that ennoble the best relationships in the worlds of BDSM and LGBTQ+.
Social identities also run through the book. Dane is a white Mid-West millennial, from a dysfunctional, working-class family who opposed his desire to attend college. Booker is a bi-racial trust-fund baby with a generous and loving father, who has devoted his life to scholarship and preserving his famous Black family’s history. So, interwoven with the big themes of how BDSMers enjoy and/or hate pain, how power may be used productively or exploitatively, and the incredible complexity of the meaning of consent, not just in your kinky life but at the office and in daily life, the book makes note of social context, including economic classicism, the banality of evil, the reinvention of self through BDSM identity, and other insights into the psychology of pain, power and kink.
There is also a lot of food in it because, well, FOOD. It’s Booker’s obsession in life and Dane is hungrily happy to enthusiastically enable it. Any book with bone-in-bacon can’t be all bad, right?
MAINLY, though, I wanted to make sure people had fun reading this book. I wanted to keep it light, not preachy, and pare it down to people and situations and images that make you crave to read the next page and the next page after that, because you never can anticipate what fantasy, what flashback, what character, what fear or what bizarre situation will come next.
I ended the novel with a true romantic cliff-hanger. Did Dane just meet someone important — or is the only really important person waiting upstairs?
Now, in my mind, you’re all begging for more!! “Oh, please, Gloria, will you write another?” you are saying in my head. Keep it up! It’s very motivating to hear you say things like that in my imagination.
I’m planning the sequel right now. Suffice to say, Jax, the mysterious cab driver with the captivating laugh is the hero of the next book. I can’t wait for you to get to read her life story!
I love Champions of Pleasure. I hope you will too.
