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OUTING Outing is a term most frequently associated with members of the gay or lesbian community when they voluntarily or involuntarily reveal their sexual orientation publicly. Outing is similar in many ways to those living within the BDSM lifestyle. Outing, even if you are the person initiating this revealment is frightening and dangerous. Many aspects of BDSM play can lead to real life legal situations and problems if your BDSM activities become part of any type of 'abuse' related lawsuit. In addition, BDSM activities can and sometimes are reported by detached third persons as 'domestic violence'. D/s is or tends to be poorly understood by law enforcement whose primary duty is to maintain civil order. From their perspective any type of activity where one person may appear to strike, injure or cause significant pain to another is abuse. There are often excellent reasons for hiding your involvement in the BDSM community. You may be at risk through the potential removal of your children from your custody, the loss of employment, the potential identification of you as a sexual offender if you are subjected to legal prosecution with BDSM or D/s as part of that prosecution. In addition you risk the loss of family, friends and community. Your involvement in external activities such as church, scouting and other philanthropic or charitable organizations may be severed. Your standing within your community may be damaged or your reputation irrevocably tarnished by implications of sexual deviant misconduct. There are lots of reasons to maintain secrecy. However, living behind a mask can be difficult and demeaning as well. The implications that you 'agree' with external societies assessment of BDSM or D/s as wrong, improper, perverted, profane, abusive and destructive can be very difficult to sustain. Outing in some forms is a final acknowledgment of personal belief. It is a way of standing to your beliefs and accepting the wrath, contempt and fear of those around you. Members of this community have long acknowledged the risk they take in accepting new people into their lives. With every person who knows of your nature your risk of personal exposure grows. In many cases anonymity is maintained through mutual blackmail. If one person knows the other - each are at risk through potential equivalent loss. This works except and unless one person is willing to be outed. Not all things are equal. One person may have a very public career where another has no visible public reputation at all. In that case the risk is virtually all one sided. There is no way to adequately protect against outing except by isolation from the community completely. It is important for everyone involved in the D/s community who has a level of risk to realize that this risk is real. If you are one of these people it becomes mandatory to consider whether you can reasonably risk the custody of your children, the integrity of your marriage and the investment in your career on addressing your needs at this moment in your life. In most cases the risk is not worthy of this choice! Within the D/s community it is important to believe in the person you interact with. To trust in them. We often do not wish to recognize that D/s relationships are just as liable to breakage and perhaps even more so than vanilla ones. We also do not wish to acknowledge that such breakups sometimes make people act out in angry bitter ways. At such a moment, even a very short lived D/s relationship can result in the forcible angry outing from one partner to the other. This can wreck wholesale devastation in the lives of all concerned. It may be a blind momentary choice driven by heightened emotion and hurt raw feelings. There is no adequate way for a person to predict the actions of someone else when things go wrong! So, if you are in a position where your life, children, family and career are indeed vulnerable to outing - make a choice in favor of the oaths you have already taken in this life and set aside your own needs until you feel that risk is greatly minimized. For some of us outing is a voluntary choice. We may be independent, our children grown or almost grown. Our relationships with those dear to us are solid and our careers may not be vulnerable to the external judgment of others. Making the choice to reveal our orientation or involvement in the D/s or BDSM lifestyle often comes after years of consideration and frequently after many slight suggestions of our nature to those who are meaningful to us to test their potential response to the revealment of this information. None of us want to lose people we love! Delicately we approach those who we deem truly important in our life to sit down with them and try to explain in some form who we are and the kinds of lives we choose to live. Setting aside the mask offers a freedom most of us have never known before. Executing this choice with dignity restores our belief in ourselves. |
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