SIREN'S SOAPBOX
January 26, 2021 - April 19, 2020
all material copyright ©
1998-1999
dr. gloria g. brame
<--- previous articles
next articles--->
SIREN'S SOAPBOX
January 26, 2021 - April 19, 2020
all material copyright ©
1998-1999
dr. gloria g. brame
<--- previous articles
next articles--->
If you've been reading this page over the past few months, then you know that real world events have prevented me from updating this domain with my typical gusto. Indeed, it's been a couple of months since I've made any significant changes or added substantial content. A few features--such as the links catalogues--need a good bit of polishing up. All will be done but it is taking me longer than I'd hoped to find the time to devote to Net work.
Part of the reason is professional: I've been absorbed in a new book project, and am now only a few weeks away from final deadline. The new book--another tome on kinky sex-- is due at the publisher right around Valentine's Day. Once it is done, I plan to take a break and perhaps even allow myself a short vacation someplace sunny.
Another reason I have been more or less on hiatus is because of personal events. I've written here a few times of my father's struggle with Alzheimer's. The disease has been taking its awful toll, devouring the last identifiable shreds of the person I once knew. He was rushed to a hospital about two weeks ago as the illness pushed him into yet another, deeper state of mental chaos.
Except for his physical body, there is nothing left of the man who raised me. As hard as it is for me to assimilate and adjust to this, it has been that much more difficult for my mother and my sister. Out of respect for them, I will hold off on further details of these final, almost unfathomably grim stages of the illness. For now, suffice it to say that my father is gone from us in all meaningful senses.
One day, I hope to write about it at length. I know some readers have found comfort in seeing this difficult subject discussed so plainly. I'd like once more to express thanks to those of you who have cared enough to send letters, prayers, poems, good vibes, well wishes, and stories about your own lives and sorrows. We share a bond.
Some Bright News
Fans of this site who need an interim fix of my depravity can rejoice. There are now kinky e-cards you can send to friends and lovers, featuring my shamelessly exhibitionistic self!
Visit KINKYCARDS.COM and you'll be able to select from 12 different pictures of me, each with a suggestive kinky caption.
The cards are free, so send as many as you like or collect them for your own amusement. And for those of you who have already emailed to say you're using 'em as wallpaper... please seek help. Soon! :-)
Say, did you know that the BDSM POETRY CONTEST is STILL open to entries?! We are going to keep it open until our judge feels we've received a large enough pool of solid contributions. If you've been hesitating to enter, it's time to summon up your courage and DO IT!
If you are on AOL, don't forget that you can talk to me live every Friday night at midnight (eastern time). Each Friday, a lively group of perverts assemble to discuss serious issues, make terrible jokes, and generally have one of the hottest, most intelligent discussions about kinky sex that you are likely to see on the Internet. Do visit us sometime. It's easy to find us! KEYWORD: GLORYB
Finally, I'd like to say a nice word about a new book that just came out--especially since the book had some nice words to say about this site. The Woman's Guide to Sex on the Web, by Anne Semans & Cathy Winks (authors of The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex) is a great round-up of sex-positive resources for all literate adults. The authors wrote: "Enter the Castle and you'll find a wealth of pages reflecting [poet and author Gloria Brame's] 'frighteningly diverse' interests: contemporary poetry, technology, and the wide world of sexual dominance and submission. Gloria has been involved in online and S/M communities before either were hip or mainstream, and she brings humor, good sense, enthusiasm, and a wide-ranging intellect to all her endeavors."
Gee, THANKS, y'all!
Stay warm, my friends, and let's all dream of better days....
Glory
My dad died early this morning, after a long battle with Alzheimer's. I am flying home for the funeral in a few hours. Services will be held tomorrow in New York City.
My sincere thanks to all of you who have written to express your sympathies. Your loving support has meant the world to me.
I had planned to begin a significant update to the site today. Clearly life had something else in mind. I will be back next week and hope to start updating, revising, and adding new materials to the site then.
Glory
I love you, Dad.
The other night, I caught an old 60s game show on cable tv. Nine men, wearing heavy rubber galoshes and big raincoats, their legs bare, stood behind the host. They were a bunch of regular working Joe's--accountants, salesmen, plumbers, electricians. The panel of minor celebrities, dressed quaintly in tuxedoes and evening gowns, tried to figure out their secret and failed.
Afterwards, the contestants shrugged off their raincoats, yanked off their boots and stood revealed: behold the "Ballet Corps of Irvington, New Jersey." In matching ballet slippers, leotards, and tutus, the men proceded to dance badly while a recording of Swan Lake played. Middled-aged, balding, paunchy, the cross-dressed ballerinas flitted and pranced about happily. The studio audience howled and applauded them wildly. The panelists too guffawed. Everyone was thoroughly delighted.
Naturally, this was all supposed to be a gag, one of those harmless amusements at a place and time when a man dressed as a woman could be considered nothing more than a joke. But just as naturally one (especially this one) had to wonder: how many of those men really were transvestites? They had all emphatically stated that they would love to give up their real jobs to be ballerinas full-time. Even if some of them were doing it uniquely as a joke, what about the one in the front row who was so completely absorbed in his dance? Or the one in the back, who moved like a girl? Was it possible that a group of closet transvestites had somehow managed to find one another in the suburban wilds of 1960's New Jersey?
Everyone treated it as wholesome fun. Indeed, it was wholesome fun. It was a bunch of guys who liked dressing up like women and having fun with it, while an appreciative audience, overcome with good-natured laughter, applauded their feminized antics.
So what's my point? Simply this: kink is everywhere. It is and it always has been all around us and it always will be. We just never knew how to look at it in the past. We never had the keys to understand it. We have always been ready to laugh at it, to be titillated by it, to watch it and, at times, under the right circumstances, to participate in it.
Moralists and prudes claim that the increased visibility of kink in mainstream media is a symptom of our decaying society. They have it all wrong. Kink was always visible in entertainment media. The only difference is that we now understand the underlying psychology of things formerly misunderstood or ignored. This is intellectual progress in its purest form.
Progress brings out the best and the worst in us. While knowledge frees some, it frightens others. When Laurel & Hardy shared a bed in their comic films, no one blinked; when the Bert & Ernie Muppets did so on "Sesame Street," prudes called them gay. I doubt that Bishop Sheen wrote angry letters to the quiz show producers in the 60s about the frolicking transvestites; but I suspect that, today, Reverand Falwell would loudly object to them. After all, he's denounced a Teletubby for wearing a purple costume and carrying a bag.
Moralists may say that America has lost our innocence. We haven't lost our innocence. We've lost our ignorance. Now our job is to teach the wilfully ignorant that knowledge is not the fruit of evil but the tree of life.
CRAAAAASH! As if it wasn't bad enough that I haven't been able to keep up with regular website revisions and the voluminous email that arrives each day, two weeks ago I discovered that my entire emailbox had crashed. Gone, vanished, kaput. This happened right before my father's death. Rather eerie. Perhaps it was a final gift from him. He always worried that I worked too hard. So whether I have my dad to thank, or just a really bad glitch in the software, the crash has indeed eased my workload. The 300 waiting messages are not waiting anymore. At least not in the dimension of reality.
If you sent me email before February 15 on any important business PLEASE WRITE ME AGAIN. Sorry for this inconvenience. Please just think of it as my father helping me out one last time. I try to.
SITE NEWS
Bibliophilia has been
totally revised with scores of new books that will surprise you.
From fabulous fetish art books to how-to's on tying knots; play-
books for infantilists and a manual on interrogation for torture
fans, there's something for all kinky tastes in all price ranges.
Just as the hyacinths are poking up their heads, I am emerging from a long period underground. Buried under massive writing projects with impossible deadlines, I isolated myself to get it all done. It often it seemed I was expending, rather than shoring up, vital energies. When my father died, I thought I'd reached the limit.
It was not his death which so undid me: it was the last year of his life. That year was a chasm of despair for him. The natural cycle of life and the inevitability of old age and death did not hurt. Witnessing his despair and the mental chaos to which he succumbed did. One thing I knew: he did not want to live this way.
His death finally came. It came peacefully, nonchalantly, an anticlimactic end to a harrowing tragedy. It reminded me of the poem "A Song on the End of the World" by Czeslaw Milosz.
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always
be.
My father died died with so many questions left unanswered, so many secrets left unshared.
Spring brings a sense of promise, renewal and hope. In Atlanta, the azaleas are blossoming and flowering trees are pushing forth fragile blooms. This time of the year makes one feel that anything and everything is possible.
So my plans for 1999 are ambitious. As regards this website, I intend to do some vigorous spring cleaning. I will be polishing up neglected pages, freshening features with new material, and brightening the look throughout.
If you visit this site for the kinky stuff, you'll be glad to know I recently added about 140 new links in 4 categories to the Kink Links Catalogue. All categories will be similarly updated, page by page. Also now available are ten new transcripts from my weekly live show on AOL.
If you haven't already visited it, my bookstore, Bibliophilia was just massively revised. I combed through Amazon's lists and selected scores of books of special interest to kinky people. These are not the usual books you'd expect to find in a kinky shop but titles arranged in categories, according to kink.
To promote the bookstore's make-over, my publisher just agreed to offer my SM novel, DOMINA, at a big discount for people who visit this site. Buy direct from the publisher and save 40%.
If this is your first time here, or if you haven't had time to keep up with this page, check out the site's newest feature. Siren's Soapbox is an archive of the rants and rambles that have filled this space in the last six months.
If you come here looking for poetry or for arts links, I am planning to add some more work to Thermopylae, including new work by poet Michael Benedikt. I plan to revise Links for Literati, which have gone untended for far too long. It's probably time to add a few more comments to So You Want to be a Writer? too. I've received a lot of email from folks asking me about my experiences self-publishing DOMINA, so perhaps I'll write about that next.
Since the demise of ELF magazine means that I am left with some material that never got into print, I may add those to the site as well. They include some short interviews with poets and writers, including Mark Strand, Donald Justice, and Ernest Gaines.
Technology stuff, including links and advice on how to Grow Your Own Site needs some fixing up as well. No one's hired me to write about technology in the past year, so I don't have any new articles, alas. But I'll try to make the technology areas more current so they remain relevant to your needs.
By the end of 1999, there will be all sorts of new things going on here. As always, if you'd like to make suggestions on content, or submit work for one of the features, just drop me a line. I can't promise I'll answer everyone but I do read email carefully and keep your comments in mind.
My spirits are high and my ambitions brighter than ever. I hope you and yours feel the same renewal within your souls at this most happy time of year.
<--- article index
next articles--->
