Building the sex dungeon: Gay leather culture and the development of spaces for recreational sex at home

Abstract

This article examines the role of the gay leather community in the development of the home sex dungeon since the 1970s. The author maps points of contact between commercially produced equipment, publications containing advice on furnishing, and the approaches production of a domestic space that was documented by its owner. By tracing how style developed in tandem with collective making processes, the author reveals the centrality of collective making processes to the development of gay leather culture and identity in the United States. However, as the production of spaces for sexual fantasy have a limited space for expression in the home, the sex dungeon can also reveal tensions inherent in the construction of the leather identity.

Keywords:

• sex
• dungeon
• leather
• sadomasochism
• queer domesticity

Introduction: Where is the history of the home sex dungeon?

In February 2019, various news outlets drew attention to a real estate listing that had gone viral. The house in Maple Glen, Pennsylvania (Figure 1) was dressed for sale with soft-modernist soft furnishings, cow-hide rugs and cream carpets positioned alongside sex furniture was perfect click-bait fodder for media outlets such as Vice, who feigned shock at the juxtaposition of affluent suburbia with the ‘darkest BDSM fantasies’ (Vice.com, Feb 8, 2019). The listing went viral partly due to the uncomfortable feelings that arise when taste and class expressed through interior design intersect around the aesthetics of the erotic. This phenomenon was also abundantly clear in Peter Bradshaw’s review of the first 50 Shades of Gray film:

Figure 1 Sex Dungeon at Maple Glen, Pennsylvania.

It is…like being bent over a Jasper Conran pine-effect table and having your bum smacked with a copy of Condé Nast Traveller while the Nespresso capsules go all over the floor. (The Guardian, 11 February 2015)

Bradshaw’s reference to ‘aspirational’ furnishings such as Conran, Condé Nast and Nespresso highlights a key design issue for domestic sex dungeons that does not apply to commercial sex premises: the condition that the mundane and the perverse must sit side by side. The design scheme at Maple Glen does not distinguish between office, kitchen, snug or whipping bench, meaning that kink in this house is inferred as mechanistic, routine, something to do after the cleaner has left and before the kids get back from school. In this example, the home sex dungeon seems absurd because it is no longer an example of a cultural expression of a sexual subculture, but more broadly as a socio-economic phenomenon that is subject to social and aesthetic possibility formed by cultural experience and financial means. In short, they are an expression of a very specific kind of cultural capital that is bound as much by class as it is by identarian politics.

The intention of this article to investigate the development of a type of “room” that is largely absent from histories of interior design. As several authors have pointed out, the historical study of interiors is met by challenges relating to the retrievability of material, the fact that they are often in use or modified, that they are immobile and that they are usually private (Lees-Maffei 2008, 18, McKellar and Sparke 2004). The issue of privacy makes researching the history of the domestic sex dungeon a particular challenge, as it is only recently that such interiors have reached. Larger public audience through social media. Additionally, sex dungeons may easily be dismissed as unrepresentative of broader trends in the history of the interior: it is difficult to know how many people have access to a home sex dungeon, both due to privacy and the class dynamics of how and where sex dungeons might be.

Queer spaces

This paper focuses on dungeons produced by members of the US gay leather scene, with reference to materials held at Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum. With an emphasis on the late 20^th century, these materials form only a partial insight into the development of the sex dungeon – but the forms of community organization in the leather scene make it a significant one. Available sources include furniture catalogues, DIY advice, and personal archives which reveal how men in the BDSM and leather scenes built home dungeons in America from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. These fragments do not amount to a comprehensive history of the dungeon, but indicate how understanding the social aspects of making can tell us about the development of the leather identity, and the contribution of the leather community more broadly to the development of the home in the late twentieth century.

This builds on research into queer domesticity that has attempted to challenge some of the normative biases in interior design history. There has been much at stake in the representation of domestic homosexuality. Does the study of queer interiors help us to see respectable, or as some would perceive it ‘homonormative’ lifestyle, or do we seek to identify a potential for liberation through anti-heteronormative lifestyles? Literature on queer domesticity frequently replicates assimilationist and exceptionalist positions within histories of queer activism and academia. (Colomina and Bloomer 1992, Pilkey 2015, Gorman-Murray 2006, Cook 2014, Gorman-Murray and Cook 2018, Pilkey et al. 2018, Potvin 2013, 2018). For authors such as Aaron Betsky – author of Queer Space (1997)- there is an imperative to argue that gay male space is almost entirely determined structured through male erotic desire, while design historian John Potvin has called for an understanding of queer domesticity that is ‘more a product of alternative modes, orientations, expressions, and articulations of the everyday, than outcomes purely resulting from practices of sex’ (Potvin 2018, 10). Gorman-Murray and Cook (2018), two leading scholars on of queer domesticity, have concluded that

In most homes, homemakers and homemaking practices, we can identify an investment in whatever ideas and configurations of the normative’ are circulating at a particular time, as well as touches of the odd, unusual, or more decidedly queer.

While a study of the sex dungeon in the leather scene could easily overplay gay men’s home-making practices as driven principally by erotic desire, my aim here is to situate the sex dungeon in relation to a broader range of social and cultural phenomena. I argue that the furnishing of spaces for recreational sex is bound by everyday considerations, and that the meanings invested in creating a sex dungeon have been as much about performing identities that embrace aspects of masculinity, perversity and community, as they were about erotic fantasy. For most leathermen who fit dungeons in alongside washing machines, bedrooms or garden tools, the home sex dungeon can reveal the ways in which sadomasochistic sex was shaped by a combination of material, spatial and skill limitations, while fueled by a community that rewarded ingenious forms of perversity. The dungeons discussed in this article are often semi-public parts of the home that was an extension of gay urban geography. A well-kitted out dungeon enabled middle-class home owners to invite home men they had met in clubs, through cruising, or contact adverts in BDSM magazines. However, we also see the abundance of smaller scale solutions suitable for renters, which indicated that the development of the domestic dungeon should be understood as a cross-class phenomenon. The sources referenced in this article indicate the predominance of white men in this community that mirrored social segregation in the US in the period under discussion.

Origins of the domestic sex dungeon

Photographic evidence of home sex dungeons before the 1960s is incredibly rare, and most available evidence points to the dungeon as a province of the professional dominatrix. One example is an interior shot of the New Jersey home/dungeon of Monique Van Cleef – a dominatrix who was subject of an SM sex scandal in 1965 (Bienvenu 1998, 184). A 1966 issue of the pulp magazine Confidential shows Von Cleef in a dungeon with home-made stocks, gym horse and a selection of whips and other equipment. At this point, the fetish scene was not part of a bigger infrastructure of commercial and community structures that had a specific focus on furnishing the dungeon space. This indicates that such dungeons were usually self-built, or furnished with equipment designed for other purposes (such as the gym horse), or with smaller-scale toys bought from catalogues. The majority of classic Bizarre style fetish photographs and films (such as Satan in High Heels, 1962) were produced in the apartment of photographer Lennie Burtman. As Robert Bienvenu has noted, ‘There are literally thousands of classical fetish photographs in existence today that repeat backgrounds of…Burtman’s entry foyer, hall mirror, bar, plants, radiator, and exotic paintings.’ (Bienvenu, 184) Casual browsing of dominatrix magazines of the 1970s, such as Dominant Mystique reveals little in the way of the home dungeon as a dominant interior design type in straight fetish culture. The scenes depicted are frequently domestic and situate female domination in settings associated with middle-class domesticity – the living room and bedroom/boudoir are the primary spaces where men or women may be restrained and flogged or spanked. There is therefore little published visual evidence to suggest the dungeon as a significant typology in interior design before the 1960s, however a more comprehensive analysis is required.

The growth of the gay leather culture in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a proliferation of environments designed for sadomasochistic sex practices. Bars, private clubs, homes and even trucks and vans were outfitted to stimulate and enact sadomasochistic fantasy. But how did leathermen know what a dungeon should look like? Just as the gay leather look became more standardized with the help of films such as the The Wild One (dir. Lászlo Benedik, 1953), Hollywood was the major source of imagery for furnishing and equipping dungeons.

Since the 1930s “historical” Hollywood adventure movies often featured elaborate torture scenes including flogging, restraint, and escapes from elaborate equipment. By the 1950s, such imagery had been recycled many times and was a mainstay of “Swords and Sandals” movies that had Roman or Biblical settings, and were filmed in Italy to lower production costs. For example, Duel of the Titans (dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1961) features a muscled Steve Reeves in a Loincloth strapped to a St. Andrews Cross which is vertically rotated at great speed while he is flogged across the chest. The Samson series of films (1961-65), starring Alan Steel featured torture racks and spiked cells ready to crush any occupant lacking in superhuman strength. Sodom and Gomorrah (dir. Robert Aldrich et al.) similarly used sex and sadistic torture to attract movie-goers. Robert A. Rushing (2016) notes how the films were marketed to a number of male audiences deemed to be in need of instruction in terms of how to be a man: the 1958 Hercules film was advertised in under-the-counter gay magazines as well as to the Boy Scouts of America and in Men’s Fitness Magazines. (Rushing, 12) ‘For the young male viewer in the theater,’ Rushing explains, ‘there is a half-acknowledged nod to same sex desire, but a pedagogical instruction that, after he leaves the theater, it will turn entirely to same-sex identification.’

For gay men who came of age in the after world-war two, these films were an early source of sexualized imagery in the field of male bondage. While beefcake magazines aimed at gay men such as Physique Pictorial had also included themes of bondage in the artwork of George Quaintance, alongside some Roman and Biblical photographic shots, it was never particularly conceived as SM in the same way as it came to be institutionalized in the leather scene during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bob Mizer, founder of Athletic Model Guild later commented, “Sure we showed the model form under restraint and duress, but we never thought of it as S&M. I guess we were ahead of our time.” (Drummer, December 1979)

The fact that such films were consumed by some gay men is clear from a regular column in Drummer magazine. In a series of columns entitled ‘More Movie Mayhem!’, Allen Eagles provided tongue-in-cheek film criticism with a focus on mainstream depictions of bondage and sadomasochism. Each article looked at a different theme such as ‘tortures by the arabs and orientals’ or ‘maritime tortures.’ (e.g. Drummer, December 1976). These reviews are notable for their embrace of camp, and the absurdity of watching such hammy films in order to review their torture scenes.

R.F.M. and bondage furniture catalogues in the 1970s

The furnishing of dungeons in the home using specifically produced commercially available equipment does not appear to have become a widespread practice until the early 1970s. Though publications like London Life providing toys and whips for a broader fetish audience had been available pre world-war-two (Bienvenu, 42), furniture was harder to come by. Some basic fittings are available in Centurians Encyclopedia of Sexual Instruments (from 1970), and more elaborate furniture was marked through the catalogue S&M Dungeon Devices (Figure 2, 1976), produced by Bouchard Wood Products ltd (based at The Dungeon on Folsom, San Francisco). The latter has high production values – its equipment demonstrated in studio-photographs and published in two versions: one with all male models, the other mixed.

Figure 2 S&M Dungeon Devices Catalogue, 1976.

The R.F.M. ‘equipment catalogue’ produced close to Los Angeles from 1975, tells the story of an amateur interest that became a business. This is a much more amateur feeling publication, with photocopied line drawings and stenciled/typewritten text copied and pasted. The drawings are much closer to technical drawings than its glossy counterparts – many items are presented in isometric representation such as one may learn at technical college, with outlines bodies added in order to explain how to use an item. (Figures 3 and 4) The furniture was produced by a masochist known by his first name Robert. He ran a small cattle ranch at Glendora outside of LA and produced racks, whipping posts and stocks that were designed to appear rugged and crude, just like those produced for spear-and-sandals cinema in nearby Hollywood.

Figure 3 , Racks by RFM.

Figure 4 Whipping Horse by R.F.M.

Like many small SM businesses, the owners of RFM had begun by constructing furniture to satisfy their own sexual fantasies to be enacted in barns and around the grounds. The owners of the ranch left behind an account of his sexual journey in The Life of a Masochist (1978). The illustrated memoir not only provides examples as to the BDSM practices popularized at that time, but also indicates that the early 1970s was a time when it became financially viable to make the transition from skilled amateur making to business if a few adjustments were made to the needs of clients.

Robert (born 1943), grew up in LA with an interest in mechanical objects – fixing his first car at the age of 16 (RFM 1978, 5). After spells in the military and running a boarding house – he bought a small cattle ranch outside of the city. Following some complicated sexual histories, he got into SM sex through contact adverts, but was disappointed by the spaces he encountered in suburban Los Angeles. He complained:

The usual deal was that they’d have a small bagfull of stuff – toys, etc., - and often lived in an apartment where you couldn’t make any noise. I’d end up tied to the leg of a piano, or on a bed, or spread-eagled on the floor with hands tied to the legs of the TV set by old necties(SIC) and feet tied to the couch legs. (RFM 1978, 6)

Converseley, men who came up the ranch found the atmosphere liberating, and the proliferation of equipment could stimulate the imagination of those attending parties. ‘A barn can invoke many possibilities for sexual torment,’ (RFM 1978, 12) he wrote. Robert’s specialty was building torture-racks – an object type commonly seen in Hollywood adventure movies. He enjoyed the problem-solving aspects of building the racks used for stretching victims. Unlike set-builders who needed to produce something that looked visually threatening and comprehensible to a screen audience, Robert and his friends needed to build racks that could distribute pain in the right way. As he recalled when designing a rack for the ranch around 1970:

The design of the restraints used with the rack caused many troubles: the restraints would cut into the wrists and ankles of the bound person quite painfully before he even began to feel the pain and tension of the actual stretching, the latter which is supposed to be felt in the shoulders and back…We finally worked out all the problems, but not before 50 or 60 field tests with different restraints, each one of which was tried out on Richard. (RFM date unknown, 4)

Robert took his furniture making to extremes, producing more and more bulky wooden furniture including stocks, whipping posts, and many other things too. This had an effect on his home, which took on a rather extreme aesthetic. He recalls:

The house I lived in was essentially a dungeon. The walls were painted black and there were psychedelic lights in all corners. Except for bedroom equipment, there was no furniture. The entire décor consisted of sawed-off telephone poles, chains, padlocks, whips and torture devices….It was strange, but I think I actually enjoyed building the equipment more than I enjoyed using it. (R.F.M. 1978)

When he launched the first catalogue in 1971 it included a range of furniture that he had built and tested at the ranch. They soon also started to include objects produced by their friend ‘Larry the mad welder,’ who owned a popular LA venue called Larry’s bar which contained ‘the largest collection of sex toys and equipment in any bar.’ (RFM date unknwon, 41) While Robert had an entire ranch where he could enact his fantasies, few of his customers had a similar luxury. The RFM catalogue carries two distinct types of furniture: Those with a chunky, roman/medieval/Western aesthetic that take up a great deal of space - and transformable furniture much more in tune with the Sears catalogue than magazines like Playboy that dealt in stylish masculine interiors. The Combination Cock Sucking and Utility Table (Figure 5) ‘for use in apartments where there is no convenient space for a dungeon or playroom’ (RFM 1975) is depicted as a hall-way table for flowers or a telephone which can then extend and allow for restraint. The head hung over the edge of the table gives the S a direct shot down the M’s throat.’ The object expresses the desire to own a functional dungeon coupled with anxiety about who may enter the home, or a sense that sex furniture should only reveal itself in domestic spaces when in use, to be hidden away on other occasions.

Figure 5 Combination Cock Sucking Training and Utility Table by R.F.M.

A somewhat more extreme creation is the Psychadelic Fuck Rack (Figure 6). ‘By day, a smart piece of furniture, by night, lift off the top and it’s the ultimate trip for any subject into light and sound and intimate thrills.’ (RFM 1975) The lights could move and change color depending upon sound frequency – to match, for example, the screams of anyone tripping and being fucked while strapped into this device. The extremeness of this invention is amplified by its transformability into a ‘beautiful light bar and stereo speaker cabinet’ that resembles the stereo consoles that were available through Sears and other mainstream outlets. Like the Maple Glen home I discuss in the introduction, the furniture that is specifically intended to blend into people’s homes is a curious mix of styles: high-end bespoke sex furniture that stylistically references ‘middle-brow’ taste of the period. In order for items not to draw attention to themselves when visitors are around, it is important that these items blend in with their surroundings.

Figure 6 Psychadelic fuck rack by R.F.M. (1978).

However, men who had access to catalogues such as RFM or B&D sex devices were met with a range of logistical challenges in furnishing dungeons. This furniture was often expensive, and the bulkier items were expensive to ship. For many men, such catalogues were more important as inspiration for do-it-yourself projects. As the leather scene grew, the culture developed its own ways of disseminating of visual inspiration, through magazines Drummer in the US or Mr SM in Europe, and through porn. Visits to bars, clubs and events would also be sites where inspiration for DIY projects could emerge. However, publications frequently focused on the erotic photography, illustration and literature, with only rare examples such as Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook (1972) giving clear ‘How to’ advice. The process of getting from a fantasy to a material reality would require networks of advice and knowledge that would take into account everyday aspects that may restrict and enable fantasies including cost, social appropriateness of a particular fantasy, the need to maintain privacy, and the social benefits of proposing and developing DIY solutions.

DungeonMaster: the popular mechanics of gay SM

The growth of DIY in the latter half of the twentieth century has played an important role in the shaping of subcultural communities as its development is reliant upon the sharing is skills among its participants, and the distribution of skills and knowledge not through tools and materials – and therefore is supported by a much larger networks that fuse individual and corporate interests. In the 1950s, DIY was promoted as an agent of identity formation by government propaganda agencies such as the United States Information Agency who argued that the home workshop would be ‘a touch stone for evaluating life around them – and their own.’ (Roland cit. Smith 2014) Leathermen were not the only subcultural group to embrace DIY. Publications such as the Whole Earth Catalogue (from 1968) drew on mainstream DIY culture as well as the consumerist phenomenon of the mail order catalogue to facilitate counter-cultural ways of living that were critical of normative disciplining forces in ‘mainstream’ America (Smith 2014). Shove et al. (2007, 64) have described some of the social effects of distributed competence and shared imagining through DIY projects:

In structuring distributions of competence, objects indirectly structure possibilities of practice and consumption….the doing of DIY is itself of consequence for individual careers, emergent projects and future patterns of demand - including demand for objects that indirectly define the possibilities of future practice.

The magazine DungeonMaster, published from 1978, played an important role in connecting individuals with tools, approaches and other community members. The magazine was founded Tony DeBlase, a trained biologist who published under the pseudonym der Fledermaus (his PhD was on the bats of Iran). DeBlase was an important figure in the leather scene – running DungeonMaster, the SandMutopia supply company (which stocked hard to find bits of kit), and running the iconic Drummer magazine from 1986 (Rubin, 291). DungeonMaster (DM) was inspired by the proliferation of specialist cooking periodicals during the 1970s – magazines with a small circulation (that of DM reached about 1000) – but facilitated the discussion of a group of enthusiasts who could contribute their own material to be used as editorial content (DeBlase 1993). The magazine featured a mixture of articles about SM techniques and equipment that may range from entire dungeons to furniture, whips and more specialized equipment for electro-play.

Eleven years after the first issue, DeBlase wrote an editorial policy that explained his mission in sourcing articles from within the community.

I view DM as the Popular Mechanics of S&M. Its role is not to titillate or purvey fantasy. Rather it should provide down-to-earth information of use to the practitioners of myriad facets of S&M, both top and bottom…[Its] reader has invented spur-of-the-moment devices for a scene which might give ideas to other people–-He has made mistakes which other people should be warned to avoid…He has found a little out of the way farm implement store which sells all manner of kinky devices far better than those from your neighborhood leather toy store….We are requesting our readers to assist in this project, providing anything from short hints to full length articles. (DeBlase 1989)

The reference to Popular Mechanics is crucial for understanding how DeBlase perceived DungeonMaster. Popular mechanics was founded in 1902 as a magazine of popular science and technology. A key part of the magazine’s success lay in encouraging its readers to undertake home DIY and technology projects to save money, but also to emphasize the importance of efficient management in the construction and use of dungeon spaces.

Like Popular Mechanics, many DungeonMaster projects presupposed access to some form of workshop in the home. The growth in popularity of the home workshop in postwar America was predicated on the expansions of housing space, leisure time and affluence among mainly white, middle-class Americans who were increasingly engaged in white collar professions. It was encoded as a male HQ for various home improvement projects that also enabled expressions of appropriate domestic masculinity. Stephen Gelber (1999) writes:

By ceding men space for a workshop and proprietary interest in the house, women helped to perpetuate a male domestic sphere. The hammer, saw, and quarter inch electric drill became the emblems of the new masculinity, and men who refused to master them did so at some risk to their standing in the eyes of spouse and community.

Manuals such as David Manners How to Plan and Build Your Workshop (1955) gave tips on how to convert garages, basements, attics and other bits of spare space into an efficient working space (Knott 2015). Emphasis was frequently placed on the workshop as a space for intergenerational male bonding and acquisition of skills required to perform handiwork commonly expected of men in mid-century America.

Bearing in mind historic associations of homosexuality with feminized interests in interior design and cooking, DIY was one way in which the leatherman – alert to the semiotics of masculinity – could engage in the ‘wholesale reappropriation of masculinity and masculine style’ (Rubin, 56) that was a key social development for gay urban male populations during the 1970s. Leathermen with workshops may have also drawn on basic skills from wood- and metalwork classes at school, as well as the development of handiwork skills gained during, as was the case with Robert of R.F.M. At the same time, DIY offered the opportunity to expand their array of perverse sexual practices by devising new scenes related to different objects.

DungeonMaster frequently featured two regular columns relating to dungeon design. One included photographs of exemplary home dungeons (later with occasional adverts for professional dungeon design services such as Dungeon Works, as bespoke design service based in Houston, Texas). This column included DIY projects of varying scale, and accompanied photos of domestic dungeon solutions. Just like the workshops in DIY manuals, dungeons are frequently praised for being ‘efficient’ spaces (Figure 7). They are required to show a rational logic to enable a workmanlike approach to producing a bondage scene. In this sense, the home dungeon is material evidence of the hobby that replicates work in free time. There is a certain irony to this, given that literature on the historical development of hobbies situates the replication of work as a traditionally moral activity, without reference to work as an enabler of perverse possibilities (Stebbins 1982, Gelber 1999).

Figure 7 A Brussels Dungeon Reviewed in DungeonMaster.

While both the home workshop and sex dungeon ideally would inhabit space within a detached style house (preferably with some sort of sound insulation), there were a multitude of solutions for men living in apartments – of particular importance to men who had moved to gay villages to be in proximity to like-minded men and to gay nightlife. Again, this mirrors the historical development of the home workshop: for example, Stephen Knott (2015) has drawn attention to the ‘sofa-workshop,’ (a sofa that folds out to become a mini-workshop) that attempted to ‘confine do-it-yourself activity to a separate realm in order to reduce its interference with other domestic spaces.’

Similarly, DIY projects featured in DM provided insight into how to construct environments that are ‘hiding in plain sight.’ (Knott). ‘One of the problems for an urban leatherman is to deliver equipment that is useable but that is sufficiently disguised so as not to raise eyebrows from landlords, mothers etc.,’ declares Dean Sandford (1980), the engineer of a torture rack/shelving unit for use in New York City (Figure 8). A series of posts and chains could be used to secure slaves to the rack for a party. Cost is an important factor (the rack cost 90 USD in spite of high lumber costs in Manhattan), and this rack was ‘finished off by mirroring the wall with tinted one-foot square mirrors’ with the author revealing ‘the cheapest we found was at Sears.’ Again, these items of furniture are frequently bespoke but use materials from middle-American retailers.

Figure 8 Torture Rack/Shelving Unit for urban leathermen featured in DungeonMaster.

The ‘Dungeon in a Closet’ (Figure 9) is featured in the Dungeon Design section of an issue from 1990. Hiding behind a set of shutter doors is a whole series of supports, stocks, pulleys and room to hand a sex sling. The rack is praised for its adaptability and comfort, with ‘fleece-lined’ stocks and slots that make the restraints useable by men of various sizes. Just as the workshop is separated from the domesticity of the house, so too is this foldable dungeon portioned off. However, the photographs suggest a clash between the stereotypically masculine, workmanlike and efficient space of the dungeon/workshop, and the slight fussiness of the interior. For a man lying in the sling, the owner’s china plate collection would be visible on the top end of the wall, as well as a series of ornaments that sit by oil paintings that are evidence of a middle-class cultural capital that sits uncomfortably with the aesthetics of the torture chamber. While the workshop-like nature of the closet dungeon speaks of an attempt by leathermen to disassociate interior design with homosexuality, the interior simultaneously references a desire for luxury in white gay male culture that can be an ‘essentially or aspirationally middle class’ form of refinement. (Halperin 2012) That these aspects of gay cultural identity that simultaneously reject and reinforce gender stereotypes may conflict or negate one another are reflected in the difficulty of accommodating dungeons within broader interior design schemes. The closet metaphor, in this case, seems not to relate to homosexuality but to the status of kink which remained a taboo in some parts of the gay community.

Figure 9 Dungeon in a Closet, DungeonMaster, 1990.

Other projects featured in DM emphasize the importance of portability. Another wink to mainstream home furnishings, the ‘Home Entertainment Center’ is one of the more elaborate how-to projects featured in DM. The base element of the project is the construction of a frame initially used to suspend a sling for fisting because ‘hooks cannot be put into the walls’ of the author’s apartment – evidencing that solutions were sought for men living in rental apartments. This indicates that the authors likely saw DIY as a democratizing force (Atkinson 2006) within the scene, alert to the possibility of exclusion through access to space and equipment – and opening the possibility for less affluent subscribers to engage in kink-related DIY projects. After accumulating various pieces for furniture for his ‘fuck palace,’ the author ‘wondered what would happen if [he] attached the door to the sling chains to make a sort of “floating table”.’ Again, the author prides himself on both efficiency and frugality:

For less than 200USD, I created for myself a play area better than many of the multi-use dungeons it has been my pleasure to visit, using less than a quarter of the space. Its creation takes four to five hours. Since it is bolted together, it can be taken down in less than 30 minutes. (Talmead 1984)

The article concludes with a description of one way in which the Home Entertainment Center might be used (a scene called Puppet on a String – a camp reference to Sandie Shaw’s 1967 Eurovision entry) and the comment on a diagram which reads ‘The Drawing Isn’t Straight, but neither is the artist’ (Figure 10) – emphasizing amateurness and non-seriousness, while the main text replicates mainstream notions of efficiency and frugality that are present in mainstream DIY literature.

Figure 10 Instructions for Home Entertainment Center, DM, 1984.

It is notable that the photographs of the Home Entertainment Center were taken at Inferno an annual event at a remote location that began in 1976, hosted by the Chicago Hellfire Club. Inferno is an annual invitation-only event for the ‘elite’ (Deblase and Rubin 1993) members of the male SM scene, and has been hosted in a number of rural locations in Michigan. The event was logistically complex due to the absence of fittings for bondage furniture in the tents used during the event. This means that all furniture would need to be self-supporting, and should be possible to pack up for transport and reassembly. A major draw at these events was the possibility to inspect, discuss, and try out various dungeon devices. A reputation for inventiveness – both in terms of constructing equipment and how to produce scenes could earn respect within this self-selected part of the subculture. For some, this was a way to attract a greater range of partners for play. DM’s editor Tony DeBlase recounted in an interview that he had considered himself overweight and that:

I have never felt that other people would be attracted to me physically, and so I’ve never tried to pick up people in bars….One of the reasons I like to perform SM in public is then at least people can see what I can do…and they come to me for that reason rather than for physical attractiveness. (Deblase and Rubin 1993)

The ability to build inventive structures was (and still is) a source of caché among SM practitioners. At the heart of the making undertaken by the writers of DungeonMaster and its readers was a form of DIY that was predicated on thinking creatively about how to use products, services and objects on offer both within DIY and hardware stores and beyond. Whereas businesses selling toys tended to categorize them in relation to sexual practices that predefine their utility – the DungeonMaster community found value in recognizing affordances (Gibson and Carmichael 1966) – not what an object or material is defined – but according to its possible uses. The importance of affordances for this group indicates its importance for innovating new objects types, rather than acting as mere consumers of furniture equipment. Examples of this may include using a special type of bungee that can secure someone in a more comfortable way, locating an electricity generator that could be easily adapted to pass current through the body without endangering the submissive participant.

The algolagnic atelièr

While recognizing affordances seems to have been an important skill for DM subscribers, the overall focus on functionality contrasts with the care taken to produce an aesthetically appealing object – such as those produced by R.F.M. This is true of equipment produced by Mark Ensinger, a freemason and naval officer who lived in a suburban house in the town of Novi, Michigan. This was the site of a large basement dungeon (known as the No. 6 dungeon) that he used for frequent play-parties to which he invited men from across the northwest. Ensinger was an occasional contributer to DungeonMaster and could be characterized as somewhat of a DIY nerd. In his collections donated to Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum are hundreds of photographs that document many scenes that took place in his dungeon. He also hosted an annual party called the Algolagnic Atelièr (algolagnia referes to the phenomenon of increased sexual pleasure with the use of pain) which speaks of his desire to produce artful, experimental spaces.

Figure 11 Pegboard in Ensinger’s Dungeon, LA&M.

Accompanying this is a diary, the Dungeon Log, which details a wide range of encounters and interior shots. It is the most extensive record of a home sex dungeon in the collections of the Leather Archives and Museum. One remarkable feature of the diary is how the development of his basement dungeon is narrated alongside sexual encounters. The making and experimentation also go hand in hand – new toys and devices often merit an entry in the Dungeon Log. There is an abundance of phrases such as ‘Medium butt plug held in with anal training belt (just made that morning)’…’I strapped him down arms above his head and used the new Head Harness I had devised.’ The topic of renovations in the dungeon is also an ongoing concern. He writes on 13^th December 1989:

Early this afternoon, I was crusing in the MLB john when a note was passed to me…We met in the hall and it turned out to be [name redacted] whom I had played with last January. I brought him back to [the dungeon]. On the way we stopped by the lumber yard and he helped me pick out some peg board for the dungeon expansion.

Judging by his photographs, Ensinger had a great deal of pegboard in his dungeon (Figure 11). Pegboard, a trademark first used by the Masonite corporation in 1962 – also known as perforated hardboard was a key material for the production of the home workshop. Knott has commented on the appeal of pegboard for those constructing home workshops:

The garage kitted out with Presto Pegboard, with the tools placed in a delicate symmetry, suggested the inexhaustible potential of domestic labour, its ‘work-readiness’. The advertisement appropriates the allure of the latent energy inherent in tools themselves and the fact that all these tools could be employed in a multitude of domestic labours. (Knott 2015)

‘Work readiness’ in the dungeon might refer to repertoire of skills, ideas and acts that could be combined in different ways to produce a scene. The tools – restraints, enema equipment, pegs, weights, clamps, locks are all potent in this setting – ready for the top to recognize an affordance and bring them into a scene. The efficiency of the space speaks of work-like attitude to masochistic sex whereby there is no rummaging around for the right toy (or tool).

Designing his own furniture also enabled Ensinger to maximize the range of equipment within his means. Some of the furniture he produced was based upon designs he found in catalogues. He produced nine replicas from Bouchard’s 1976 S&M Dungeon Devices catalogue, including three types of stocks, a training seat (for enemas) and a wall rack. Ensinger’s biggest project – the Fantasy Jail and Suspension center (Figure 12) was a large-scale construction that he took to various events, but also had erected in his living room. He explained about the upgrade on 6 March 1989:

Figure 12 Fantasy Jail and Suspension Center, Mark Ensinger, LA&M.

It has over 80 man hours of labor in it by Johnny and I and over 400USD in materials. It is a jail cell with a bunk, has glory holes, and had an overhead bar for the suspension of three chain hoists. Plus, it has hooks for the five-point sling. It is intended that it will replace The Gallows in versatility and working space.

Throughout the Dungeon Log, Ensinger repeatedly emphasizes work in both construction and use of his Algolagninc Atelier. Unlike in a commercial setting, the 80 hours of labor is shown as evidence to quality – the idea that more time spent on a project evidences quality is frequently observed feature of time in amateur work (Knott 2015). The 400USD is a reference to the investment of money earned through regular work – a rare example of a boast on the amount of money spent by Ensinger. The implication is that the money spent on this non-alienated labour would mean that the jail would be worth many times that in a catalogue such as B&D Dungeon Devices. Finally, the reference to its ‘working space’ (and not play space) indicates the seriousness of the hobby. The Fantasy Jail and Suspension Center is a workshop where values such as efficiency and precision are needed. The dungeon is not discussed in terms of its aesthetic qualities – it is entirely justified in terms of work.

Conclusion

This article is an initial step in constructing a history of the sex dungeon as an interior type that emerged in the late twentieth century. By examining commercial catalogues alongside the emergence of a DIY culture within the gay leather scene, it appears that the design of furniture and broader environments was determined by two major phenomena. Aesthetically, the appearance of dungeons was influenced by Hollywood adventure films, where the image of how torture should appear was already a feature of the popular imagination.

The proponents of an elite bondage culture within the gay leather scene developed an alternative approach to the dungeon. Mirroring the logic of the home workshop, discussions of aesthetics were omitted in favour of a language of efficiency which draws on a historic mirroring of labour in amateur making and leisure. This is replicated not only in the production of environments, but also in discussions of their use. While heterosexual men found a space in the home to engage in appropriate masculine activities, gay men could engage in domestic design activities without necessarily emphasizing traditional associations of interior design and feminized masculinity.

Later innovation in dungeon design occurred in concurrence with the increased public visibility of both the professional and domestic dungeon that intersect with the development of businesses, pornography, the growth in the size of houses, and the professionalization of dungeon design – both in terms of specialist services and increasing ranges of equipment available through mail order catalogues. Events such as Inferno provided a context where ideas could be exchanged between amateur makers, retailers, and designers of commercial spaces used for parties.

In each of the instances described above – the process of making furniture is an act which is made possible through the assimilation of distributed skills not only within the, but those embodied in the tools, materials and products marketed to DIY enthusiasts. The development of the home sex dungeon connects the performative aspects of sexuality to wider aspects of identity formation made possible by the existence of gay leather culture in the twentieth century United States.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under grant P18-0029:1.

Notes on contributors

Tom Cubbin

Tom Cubbin is a design historian whose work explores various peripheries of design culture since the 1960s. Tom has a background in Russian and Soviet studies, and his book Critical Soviet Design (Bloomsbury, 2019) charts the development artistic design work in the Soviet Union. His current research project Crafting Desire: An international design history of gay male fetish making is a case study that analyses the formation of communities of practice within the gay leather scene. Tom is currently head of HDK-Valand, Campus Steneby – a specialist design and craft school. Email: [email protected]