Free Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy by Staci Newmahr Page B

fun!”
    “Don’t let him be mean to you,” called James, the owner of the club.
    Lars smiled as we passed him. “Always with a full dance card,” he complained jovially. “Let me know when it opens up!”
    When we found a play space, Elise was sitting in the room. She squealed and clapped loudly.
    “Oh goody, Dakota and Adam are going to play! I love to watch you guys play! Oooh, wait wait wait! I gotta pee! I’ll be right back!” She dashed off. Adam and I exchanged surprised and flattered smiles.

    About an hour later, our scene was interrupted by an announcement over the loudspeaker that the club was closing. We ignored it. James, the owner of the club, played “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” a loud, fast-paced, grating bluegrass song intended to put a quick end to the scene. James lived far away from the city and had a long commute home. Disregarding the not-so-subtle hint, Adam danced a mock two- step as he swung his flogger.
    The club went black. Startled, I gasped. James, a longtime community member and well-known spanking aficionado, sighed tiredly into the microphone.
    “Okay, everybody. No more, you freaks!”
    We laughed. I sat down and Adam hollered, “All right, old man, all right.” He began gathering our things in the dark. James turned the lights back on. We made our way to the front of the club.
    It was nearly four o’clock in the morning. Only about twenty-five regulars were left. It appeared that everyone else had finished their scenes and was sitting around, glassy-eyed from either play or exhaustion.
    As we made our way to the booths where we had left our things, Jacob commented to me, “Hey, I didn’t know you liked knives. I’m really, really good with knives. We should play sometime. Seriously. I make people faint!”
    I smiled and thanked him for the offer, but did not accept his invitation to unconsciousness.
    We arrived at the booths, and the ritual chatter began. Planning the post-club diner visit involved multiple simultaneous conversations that generated the same result almost every weekend night.
    “Who’s going for breakfast?”
    “Hey, are you guys going to Sully’s?” “You two going for food?”
    “I think Joanna wanted to head over to Paradise.” “I’m going home. I’m exhausted.”
    “Who just said home?? It’s only 3:30!” “Hey, you guys going for breakfast?” “What’s wrong with Paradise?”
    “Schuyler’s my ride. Where is she? Oh, she’s over there—hey, can one of you guys ask Schuyler if she’s going for breakfast?”
    “We’re going to go to Sully’s. We’ll save a booth in case you end up over there.”
    In the end, we all ended up at Sully’s, as we had the night before, taking up several tables and annoying the wait staff with individual checks. I left the diner at seven and crawled into bed, thoroughly exhausted, at eight o’clock in the morning. Again.

    Like “identity,” the term “community” is contested in the social sciences. Its meanings vary widely, and criteria for its use are elusive. 1 It is always, however, about boundaries. The notion of community is used, in academic writing and in American discourse, to draw lines between insiders and outsiders. This division is what brings the members of Caeden—and what compels me—to consider it a community. Used interchangeably with “the scene” in the discourse, “the com-
    munity” serves as a source of a good deal of personal meaning. Participants in the scene find in the community a bond created by shared life experiences and shared objectives.
    Though the concept of community remains particularly nebulous in both sociology and anthropology, in psychology in recent decades it has been sub- jected to valuable hermeneutic shifts, from community as geographical and cultural territory to community as social-psychological responses to social spaces. This has allowed for the study of the “sense of community” (and, later, the “psychological sense of community”),