Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission by Gloria G. Brame, William D. Brame, Jon Jacobs

that as a white person’s thing. “If you do that, it must be because some white person seduced you and made you do it.” There’s a lot of denial.
    Sex and sexuality [are] just not something you talk about. Therefore, if you’re some little black girl or little black boy who’s having naughty fantasies about being tied up, you figure you’re sick in the head, and you keep quiet. You never do anything about it. I happen to be an extremely nervy person so I try all kinds of crazy things. But I’m unusual. I find it hysterically funny that the stereotype among whites [is that] blacks have wild and crazy sex. In fact, most black people are horrified at the things that white people do. My students who think that they’re wild and crazy [will] say, “Yeah, I like getting busy [having sex],” but they’ll tell you all the things that they would never do, like, it’s disgusting to have oral sex of any kind. And they would neverhave anal sex—oh my God! That’s something homos do. They can’t even picture heterosexuals doing that. There’s a whole laundry list of things that they either haven’t heard of or, if they’ve heard of them, they just know that they’re wrong. It’s kind of amusing.
    Why am I bisexual? To me, that’s like “Why are my eyes brown?” I don’t know! I think that God made certain people so that they can understand both the masculine and the feminine a lot better than others. As far as D&S: I think it’s a way for me of exploring power. I like to be in control of myself. I’ve never been interested in drugs, and I’ve never been interested in some of the other ways that people use to get outside of themselves. This is the way that I do it. I find that spiritually, if I’m in the middle of a really good scene—and just about every scene that I’ve ever had with my lover has been absolutely wonderful—[it’s] almost [an] out-of-body experience. The closest that I’ve ever come to doing that in a nonsexual context would be through meditation, because I’ve been doing meditation work for quite a few years now. So to me, it’s part of a larger continuum.
    I’ve expressed some of my dominant feelings with my lover, but it’s not a major fantasy of mine. I’ve had occasional fantasies where I’d have him tied up to a chair and torture him by playing with myself and not allowing him to touch me, or playing with him and then telling him that he can’t come, because if he does, I’m going to give him a spanking. I sometimes keep those fantasies in the back of my head as an extra special turn-on.
    As far as my work life, it’s a totally different thing. I’m a schoolteacher, so I’m very aggressive and dominant in that situation. I think that’s why I like being submissive at home: I’m dominant all day long at work. Our roles do carry outside of the bedroom. Not all the time, but, for instance, when we go out to eat, I’ll tell him what I want, and he’ll order for me. Lately we’ve done things like shop for clothing, and he goes with me and helps me pick out things that he really likes.
    That’s not much different from the way a lot of women live their lives, but they wouldn’t call it a D&S situation. They would call it a typical marriage. The difference is that, first, I’m aware of what I’m doing. Second, to a certain extent, I would say that it’s a fantasy life—we don’t have to live this way; it’s not like if we stopped doing it, our lives would end. I’ve always considered myself a feminist, and I know that I am equal to my lover. That’s different than a lot of women who are in traditional relationships where they fool themselves into believing that the man is supposed to have his way because he’s a man. I don’t believe that.
    I realized since about the age of about five or six that I liked both boys and girls. When I got a bit older, I found myself drawn to strong women, because we have a lot of strong women in my family. And I liked that