I never had a problem [with] coming out about my gay life or S/M. Maybe I've been out all my life, because I'm too lazy to be in the closet. As for my [S/M] activism, I write for a living. One of the primary rules of writing is to write what you know. So, for many years, I've been writing, and because of that, occasionally lecturing [at] universities about what I know. And one of the things I know is S/M. I generally feel that if I am allowed to be the way I am--which is way outside most people's definition of acceptable--then I have to let other people be the way they are, even when they are way outside my definition of acceptable, which includes being bigoted, closeminded idiots. If that's the way they've made their lives, then I say let them be like that.

Anything and everything that anyone does has some spiritual component. We don't escape our spiritual existence any more than we escape being bipeds: you can crawl, but you're still a biped. When we do anything that is difficult, extreme, anything that is ecstatic-- that's not to say something that's a little bit of a problem for us [or] something that makes us feel better, but [something which is] really hard for us to achieve or really extreme from our personal point of view, or [which] produces a state of genuine joy--when we do anything that goes to those levels, we engage ourselves very deeply. The key to that is very often connected with our sexuality. If piss is connected with our sexuality, as it is for a lot of people, then it's going to be, at least sometimes, difficult. I've never had an ecstatic experience, an experience that changed my consciousness, even momentarily, in vanilla sex. But I would be very surprised to find that I had fewer than 100 experiences of mind-altering ecstasy in S/M. The fact that [this] can happen, however rarely, is one of the attractions of S/M.

There's [another] important issue: we make our way through childhood bearing the [knowledge] that we have to learn to piss and shit when and where appropriate. [And we're] told to give absolutely no attention to the body parts involved: none, ever. There is no appropriate moment to look at your own penis or to touch your own asshole, and yet you have to be in control of their functions, which are only marginally acceptable. So, without saying that parents are to blame for water sports--because that's not the issue here--in a way, we establish in childhood that to be involved in any way with piss is frontier territory. I think that may serve as an initial fascination for a lot of people. [But] beyond that, you eventually arrive at pleasure; you sort out your sexual activities on that basis.

I lived on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks when I was little. One of the laws of the Ozarks is, if you do anything, not only must you do it well, but you must do a lot of it. [When] I lived there, the bathroom facilities were an outhouse. I was fascinated by the fact that my uncles and other adults who lived on the farm could stop anyplace and pull it out and piss. That fascination never went away. I always liked the sound of it; I always liked to see it. There was also some thrill for me in the thought of other people hearing or seeing me pissing. The fascination with male urination [was there when I was six or seven], but I had no involvement in any sense. But I imagined being able to see it, having my uncles know that I was seeing it and [I] imagined that they enjoyed that. I didn't really think about it again until I discovered that I was homosexual.

I began to hear of people who pissed on each other or [drank] each other's piss, and [I] wanted to find such people. When you [heard about this] in the '60s as I was coming out, [it was] only in the most derogatory terms. It was some queen saying, "You wouldn't believe it, he wanted to piss on me!" and they [were] disgusted and horrified and humiliated. [I] didn't know how to [find] anyone who would not be horrified by it.

In the early '70s, when there [was] sexual activity in gay bars, it became easier to sort people out. One day, I was [a] Los Angeles [bar]. cupped my hand [over] a guy's crotch and kind of squeezing rubbing, he started pissing hand. felt like'd come home. During next few years, discovered that, even many bars that had no other activities, bathrooms were awesome places find someone who wanted play. quickly great majority [shared my] attitude: pleasure not some method by which tops could humiliate or degrade bottoms. Eventually, learned play way, [as well], because you run into bottoms must think water sports as humiliating be involved. rather do [to] work them up point where they recognize can just joyful, externalized exuberance. Humiliation fun scene, [but] for me, using piss takes best edge off.

For a lot of people, the first turn-on is going to be that they want to submit. The top [may demand] that they have to allow themselves to be pissed on or drink the top's piss. We get our hierarchy of categories of sexual turn-on from our early experiences in any area of sex; so if the top says, "You must do this," and we're learning to be submissive--that gives it a sexual charge.

One of the things that makes a wide category of S/M more sexual, even hypersexual, is that it assaults multiple senses at the same time. I dislike sounding overly academic about these things, but if you were orchestrating a scene in the way that a composer writes a piece of music, you would see that there are moments when you want to bind together the people in the scene--with all their senses--to make it as solid as possible. With the sight and the smell and taste and the feel all at once, piss [play] can be very effective in that regard.

I don't particularly think [consensual coercion is part of the attraction], although it often is involved for people who know they're interested but can't give themselves permission to do that [because] it's too disgusting. Labeling it humiliation and instigating consensual coercion covers that base for them. I think that's true in a lot of S/M. I know that there are other mechanisms involved, but I think at least in water sports, that's often the mechanism that's engaged.

It's probably true that a great many people involved in water sports are not involved in S/M [and vice versa]. But I think that there is probably a core of, as it were, kinky people, who have some pleasure in the D&S relationship and the power exchange implied by that and who also have some pleasure in water sports. I [suspect] that they are the majority in the S/M community.

The idea of piss play is approached with tremendous circumspection [among S/M'ers]. The taboo is so strong it makes any idea of the numbers impossible to get, but the fascination clearly [exists]. Whether the practice is as widespread is another matter. Recently, when QSM [Quality SM, an educational and support group] called and [asked] what [I] would like to do a class about, I said, "We're not ready to do flogging and whipping again and I don't feel up to preparing a mummification class at the moment. [So] maybe nothing, because no one wants to do a water-sports class." And [the director] said, "I do." So we scheduled it. Ordinarily, when a new how-to fetish class is presented, we get maybe as many as 18 people. For the water sports class, which was fairly early on the slate--so [there wasn't much time] for people to register--there were 32 actively interested people. They were all saying, "I have [X number] of friends who wanted to [and] didn't want to be here." I ran two videos as wallpaper, and we talked about water sports. I discovered that even among people who were willing to spend $15 or $20 to be in the room, there was still a tremendous residual taboo and embarrassment hanging over [everyone], except for [a few] friends of mine who sat in the front row--a couple of women who were very active participants. Most people were very reticent to raise their hands. So while it was a fun class to do, it was still one of the must difficult, because the participation level was so low. At certain points, I did get sudden flurries of tremendous activity from the crowd, which proved that it wasn't a lack of interest [or] that it wasn't going well. It was the taboo in effect.

The AIDS epidemic [has been] really chilling even for activities as safe as water sports. Usually I get clinical and point out the historical stuff about people who, [as] in India, of course, drink their own piss because it's the only safe fluid to drink, and in the U.S. Army, my father--and I suppose generations of soldiers before--were taught to treat athlete's foot by pissing on feet. But in the age of AIDS, all body fluids were suddenly filthy again, despite the sexual revolution. It was [former Surgeon General C. Everett] Koop who made the first real public statement. He said this is ludicrous--[that] we've known for centuries that human urine cannot be infected in [this] way. [But] a lot of people, doctors primarily, who were disgusted by the thought that men, especially gay men, were pissing on or in each other, continued to press for all body fluids, most particularly urine, to be seen as unclean. Some medical studies were undertaken, and it was very firmly determined [that], like almost every other virus and bacterium in the world, HIV breaks down in piss. No replicable whole units of HIV exist in piss, even in the most infected individual.

I don't know that [AIDS has] changed the way that serious players play: serious players tend to look into the safety of what they're doing and take great pride in knowing what is and isn't true. I think it's probably powerfully affected the way that novices, and nervous people who don't take that responsibility, play. Piss play of all sorts is still on the unsafe or questionable list in many localities, although AIDS safety lists are different from city to city, state to state, country to country, and continent to continent. But I think people are trying desperately to shake off the part of the sexual chill that was phobic rather than realistic. We're seeing more and more efforts in [the] gay and straight press to clarify what is unsafe. There are too many sexophobes out there who are looking for the opportunity to attack.