Abstract
This chapter explores the implications of race and class for sadomasochism through John Preston’s highly popular, yet understudied, SM classic Mr. Benson. Told primarily from the perspective of the young Jamie, Mr. Benson narrates Jamie’s initiation into a vibrant world of New York leathermen in the heady period after Stonewall and before the rise of AIDS. Originally serialized in ten issues of Drummer magazine (1979-1980), Mr. Benson was not published as a novel until 1983. Utilizing archival research I conducted at the Leather Archives and Museum, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of Mr. Benson’s two publications, revealing key textual edits between the two versions that remove the history of American chattel slavery from the novel’s consciousness; such changes ultimately decrease the published novel’s engagement with issues of race, class, and economic power. By situating the two versions of Mr. Benson within debates surrounding SM that circulated between 1979 and 1983, I posit that some of Preston’s editorial changes reflect the virulent anti-SM discourses within gay, lesbian, and feminist political movements of the time. This analysis of race, class, and other power relations in Mr. Benson demonstrates how Preston, like other SM erotica authors, consistently complicates any easy equation between social privilege and dominance within the SM scene. By treating SM author-activists’ work—like Preston’s novel and essays—as both an object of analysis and a critical methodology, this project intervenes in queer theorizations of SM practice that tend to elide the productive potential of SM for queer subjects.
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Notes
- 1.
Several of the initial serialized episodes were published pseudonymously under the name “Jack Prescott.”
- 2.
Italics indicate material published in the original Drummer serializations (1979-80) that was omitted from the 1983 novel printing. Corresponding footnotes will indicate the issue, year, chapter, and page number of the quotation in Drummer.
- 3.
Preston, J, Drummer Issue 29 (1979a), “Mr. Benson: Premiere episode,” p. 21.
- 4.
Preston, J, Drummer Issue 30 (1979b), Part Two, p. 27.
- 5.
Viola Johnson is an activist, author, and leatherwoman involved in the SM community since the 1970s.
- 6.
SM: One Foot Out of the Closet. KQED.
- 7.
It’s worth noting that pro-SM author and activist, Patrick Califia (1981) one of the founders of the first lesbian SM organizations in the country, countered Walker’s critique by arguing that “in an attempt to prove that S/M is racist, Walker describes these women [who were Samois members] as a white woman top and a black woman bottom. In fact, the top in this couple is a Latina lesbian” (p. 270). Given that minority status cannot absolve complicity in oppression, Califia’s fact-checking does not wholly vindicate the women’s participation in a documentary with such triggering effects; however, the ethnic identity of the Samois women in the KQED documentary does complicate Walker’s reliance on the anti-SM assumption that SM sexuality is invariably a replication of real-world power inequalities.
- 8.
Despite evidence to the contrary found in practitioner-produced SM texts, a great deal of lesbian-feminist literature of the time presumes that relationships inflected with SM erotics are antithetical to egalitarian partnerships, an argument that elides the pervasiveness of power dynamics in all human relations. Specifically, such claims obscure what pro-SM writing identifies as “emotional SM” in the lesbian community, and how “pain is simply the inevitable result of unacknowledged power roles....These pain dynamics show up in friendships & political work as often as in lover relationships” (Lucy 1981, pp. 32-3).
- 9.
This distancing from perversion that Preston performs is distinct from the reclamation of the term by other leather authors and communities, such as Samois’s statement of purpose in What Color is Your Handkerchief: A Lesbian S/M Sexuality Reader (1979) in which they declare themselves radical perverts.
- 10.
This is not to say that Preston (or his text) naively assumes that in the U.S. “everyone is really equal” despite race and class differences, but rather that one should refrain from presuming that social power automatically determines one’s sexual role in an SM context.
- 11.
Puar sees this exclusion of SM occurring in multiple directions: first the association of masochistic desire with terrorist Others, as illustrated by South Park, and second, through the association of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal with the individual perversion (i.e. SM desire) of the perpetrators, thus enabling the State to disavow such practices as anomalous and distance the events of Abu Ghraib from U.S. military and imperialist practices.
- 12.
One can read the kidnapping of blonde bottoms as an acknowledgement that whiteness, like other ethnic markers, is available for (racial) fetishization in a way that is characteristic of queer sexual subcultures, as opposed to the unmarked whiteness found in mainstream, heterosexual pornography. Tim Dean offers an extended discussion of whiteness as a fetish category in Unlimited Intimacy. However, the specificity of whiteness in this context could also have more to do with the type of vindicating pleasure that comes from an inversion of racist hierarchies, akin to the dynamic between Brendan and Rocco, except here without consent.
- 13.
Preston served as editor for The Advocate in the early 1970s. Additionally, if you count all the work published under pseudonyms, according to Preston, he was the most published author in Drummer history.
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Franco, M. (2022). “A Man’s Right to be a Slave”: Race, Ethnicity, and History in Mr. Benson. In: Clifford-Napoleone, A.R. (eds) Binding and Unbinding Kink. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06485-2_2
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