For the past three years, my wife, Moon Daisy, and I have spent our time traveling in a dilapidated seafoam green 1971 Volkswagen Bus. The interior was a faded checkerboarded material that looked like cloth but felt like a damp sponge that sat in a dirty sink over the weekend. The van smelled of sex, caviar, and Drakkar Noir’s most nefarious scent, “Voyeur Connoisseur.” Throughout my years as a prolific mountain climber, award-winning hiker, and tantric sex thought leader, I have had many luxuries. I’ve dined in the finest restaurants in Hanoi. Slept on 1,000 count Egyptian sheets in Sudan. I’ve celebrated the new year with world leaders and billionaires in Club 33 in Disneyland. But one experience that separates “me” from “you” is trying to make ends meet and traveling throughout America in a piece of shit automobile for “fun.”
As a brilliant writer, I want to experience the world as you do, an uncultured puritan who doesn’t understand the mental anguish Klaus Kinski put Werner Herzog through. A person who would rather turn their head in shame than truly appreciate the immaculate testicular detail in Michaelangelo’s David. And so, for three years, Moon Daisy and I became you and traveled across the vast open lands of these United States of America. Very quickly, we experienced culture shock, in the same way you, a normal person, would feel during an 8-hour tantric sex symposium led by Sting. No, he’s not going to play “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” but he will stand close to you and use his healing chakras to unlock your greatest ecstasy.
In America, there aren’t BDSM dungeons at every bed & breakfast. What kind of fascist thought-police banned this practice? I want to check into a beautiful Victorian home, eloquently decorated with centuries old grandfather clocks, silverware made of actual silver, and laughable tchotchkes that should be left in the gutter, and be able to give into my most carnal desires in a damp basement lit with a few scattered incandescent bulbs, slowly swinging back and forth and as moans of both pleasure and pain echo off the bare cement foundation of the home.
Alas, never once did Moon Daisy and I come across a dream home like this: one which we surely would find everywhere in the UK, the Eastern bloc, or anywhere else in Europe. We stayed at hundreds upon hundreds of “B&Bs” in the States and never once were we asked if we wanted to be flogged, handcuffed to a rusted pipe that serves no purpose, or asked what our safeword is. I demand an experience where I am greeted by a “B&B” owner with something along the lines of, “Hello. Welcome. Breakfast is a 7:30 AM, sharp, and tonight’s safeword is ‘Wazzup!'” Or “You so crazy!” Or “Damn Gina!” Frankly, anything from the hit TV series Martin will suffice.
Instead, we were greeted, shown our rooms, told what time breakfast would commence, and more than once told that the TVs in the room did not have DVD players or SmartTV functions and only aired network television. Do you know how many times I fell asleep, completely unfulfilled sexually and in no pain at all while Ray Romano whined to his TV father about living his mundane, sexually drought life? The answer is 1,181 days. Yes, I am as shocked as you are.
Not once did I see a whip. Not once did I get taunted by a mistress while stuck in a stockade. Not once did any other couple even offer to switch partners for the evening where we would test our limits in pain. Not once did someone else’s partner offer to participate in Shibari with me. I can’t tie myself up, can I? The closest thing to that was one couple asked if we had seen the Hollywood motion picture 50 Shades of Gray. As someone who doesn’t go to the theater and support the “Hollywood machine,” I had no idea what they were talking about. When the plot was described to me, I was offended by how offensive it was to my lovers in the BDSM community. And that’s the closest I got to anything BDSM-related during my journeys.
It’s “Bed & Breakfast,” not a hotel. We all know what the curvaceous, erotic ampersand is implying. It’s a beacon for sexual freedom. It’s letting you know that as long as it’s legal and consensual, you are free to explore. To quote some uneducated cretin I once met at a key party, “You don’t yuck another man’s yum.” He may have been a Neanderthal by societal standards, metaphorically of course, but he’s right. Who am I to judge as long as both parties are willing and able? Sure, I may personally find sploshing to be deplorable, quite messy, and downright revolting (who’s going to clean up all that pie mess?), but it’s your right to engage in that activity in the dining room of Denise’s Delight: Sonoma’s number one rated “B&B.” It’s the same way someone might find me dressing up as a lion tamer in crotchless pants while my precious Moon Daisy dresses as a member of PETA, liberating the beautiful lions from my treachery, while whipping me over and over again not their cup of tea… But don’t knock it until you try it. It may not be your thing, but it’s my thing, and to be quite frank, it’s liberating.
The American Bed & Breakfast is nothing more than a puritanical sweatshop for long naps. This is not the America I hoped to live in and see progress where a book on world history is just as important as Vatsyayana Mallanaga’s Kama Sutra. For shame on you, Bed & Breakfasts of this fine country. Do better. Embrace your erotic ampersand and let this dominant, brilliant mind become a submissive gimp in your sex dungeon.
Fancy Boys Club 