Us: An Introduction – 4/4/2021
Given that you’re about to read a whole book about Miles, Ben and me, you’ll probably want to start with some sense of who the hell we are.
I’ll go first, because my name is on the cover. I turned 66 this year. Most folks who have ever heard of me associate me with a book I coauthored, The Ethical Slut[1], which has been in print for nearly thirty years and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. But I’ve actually written a lot of books, mostly about kink/BDSM – including three memoirs, of which this is the latest.
I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, but my family moved to California when I was thirteen, where I spent my life till my spouse Edward and I moved to Oregon in 2009. If I had to choose the place that felt most like home to me, it’d be Oakland, CA, but who can afford to live in the Bay Area forever?
I’m bisexual, but tend to nest with men. You’ll read here about all three of the men I’ve lived with – Frank, with whom I raised our kids; Jay, who was an inextricable part of my rise to prominence as a kink and polyamory author; and Edward, to whom I am now married, and with whom I’m braving the imminent experience of old age. You’ll also meet several women who have been dear to me as lovers and friends, including Dossie, my coauthor, co-collaborator, sometime lover and longtime dear friend, as well as a host of other lovers, play partners and sweeties both long-term and incidental.
Miles, my older son, was born on Christmas Eve, 1977. He was the kind of easy baby that makes parents cocky about having more kids. (You think it’s because you’re such a remarkable parent that you’ve conquered all the usual parenting woes. Hah.) He slept through the night on our first night home from the hospital, and taught himself how to read at three by watching Sesame Street. The closest we ever came to disciplining him was counting to three, and we never reached three.[2]
Miles’s career ambitions started in his early teens, when our family’s frequent attendance at plays and movies crystallized into a desire to act. That desire multiplied through the years into a cluster of theater-adjacent skills and experiences: these days he’s an actor/puppeteer/writer/cartoonist/stagehand/mask-builder/filmmaker/merch guy, and I suspect I’ve forgotten to include six or seven more slashes.
Right about when I was abandoning all hopes of grandparenthood – he’d had several steady girlfriends, but none who shared his desire to start a family – Miles met and married Destiny. The two of them are beautifully in love; I suspect that they’re that rarest of phenomena, a true couple. (I’m cynical enough that I’d like to believe such things don’t exist, but I’ve met a few of them. I’ve never counted myself among their number, though.) Early this year, after a couple of false starts, they welcomed Felix, who appears to be following in his dad’s perfect-baby footsteps – or so I’m told, as COVID-19 has so far prevented me from meeting him in person. They live in Southern California, although I nurture a small bright hope of getting them to move up here one of these days. Keep your fingers crossed.
Ben came along five and a half years after Miles, mostly because I find preschoolers trying enough that it took that long before I was ready for a second round. Ben was the pint-sized antidote to parental hubris: all the first-child ease I’d thought was due to our excellent parenting – well, apparently it wasn’t.
I think if I were raising Ben now, he’d probably meet the criteria for Asperger’s – but of course that diagnosis didn’t exist then, so mostly I spent those early years pushing back against doctors and teachers who wanted him put on Ritalin. I maintained (and still do) that except in the most extreme cases, rather than drugging a kid into conforming with the schoolroom, we should find schoolrooms that adapt to the kid.
When he was in fourth grade, bringing home complaint after complaint from a rigidly unsympathetic teacher, I went to observe him one day. From my place behind the door, I watched the rest of the class doing flash cards on “rough” vs. “smooth,” while Ben was nose-deep in a fat fantasy novel he’d picked off his father’s bookshelves.
Frank and I were separated by then, but we were a lean mean team for the project of getting Ben out of there. After surveying various schools to find the right combination of a sympathetic philosophy, a manageable location and an affordable tuition, we agreed on Sacramento Valley School, an “unschooling” environment based on the famous Sudbury School. There, Ben could read to his heart’s content, experiment with making art and music, and form a few lifelong friendships with other oddball public-school refugees.
From the day Ben learned that there were people who made a living creating video games, he’d never wanted to do anything else. While SVS offered plenty of scope for research and experimentation with the arts, he knew he wasn’t getting the necessary grounding in math and science – so at fourteen he started attending community college to fill in the gaps, and got his GED at sixteen. He went on to get a bachelor’s in game design (from, unfortunately, a for-profit school which has since lost its certification), and has been following that career path ever since.
After a year programming for an animation-and-custom-games studio, he took off on his own, and has been working on an enormous solo game project (he’s doing the art, the music, the writing, the programming – the whole shebang) for years now. His discipline is fearsome and I don’t know where he inherited it: not from me, anyway.
Ben has never had a girlfriend (yet), mostly because he very rarely does anything that involves going to a place where women are. Like many geeks in his age bracket, his social life takes place almost entirely on-line, but it’s a busy one, with correspondents all over the world. He also does a weekly blog about gaming and the creative life, and creates custom illustrations as a side gig.
Ben lives less than a mile from me, and we see each other a few times a week for shopping, for him helping out with household stuff I’m not strong enough or willing enough to do anymore, and for our regular weekly writing/art-making get-together. We travel together easily and often (or did pre-quarantine, anyway), and he’s my regular moviegoing companion (ditto).
So, that’s us: three weirdos, leading our weird lives, together and separately. You can spend the rest of the book getting to know us better.
[1] Hence the title of this book.
[2] Which was fortunate, because we had no idea of what we’d do if the dreaded “three” ever crossed our lips.
Slut & Sons 