Back in 2020, despite the heating up politics and polarizing community thanks to Trump, the world was pretty much okay. The 15 Association was wrapping up the greatest Anniversary, and sex was everywhere. Then few days after that, COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything in San Francisco.
The whole leather community was shut down. For myself, who was still in hyper-horny mode (needing a play at least once a week on top of the at least twice a day masturbation) the whole thing was devastating as I’m imprisoned with my own husband in our tiny loft.
A few months into it, at the end of May, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) was energized by the death of George Floyd. First of all, I do firmly believe in equality and empathize with the cause of BLM. However, personally, due to my trauma to May 1998 Riot of Indonesia, I don’t condone violence at all. I don’t agree when some people claimed that black people have the rights to riot and loot just because their life was looted from Africa.
The riot rippled throughout the country and scared the crap out of me, especially when they were doing that near my house in San Francisco, which happened in the vicinity of the San Francisco Hall of Justice. My husband also owns a consignment furniture business in a wealthy suburban neighborhood.
Then discussion also came out on how BDSM and Leather fetish would be considered racist acts. Considering police fetish and whipping fetish.
As I mentioned in the article above, Kink is never politically correct. They are a political act to reclaim what would be a traumatic negative event into a positive experience that consenting adults enjoy and love.
However, this conclusion came only after I did reconciliation and research, mainly from Danny Nguyen, an important figure in ONYX, a BIPOC Leather organization.
Despite what I believe, the community was heavily polarized. Was it the pandemic that separated us, or was it our firm political believe that made us not being able to tolerate each other, but I felt I’m turning into an outcast of the community.
FINAL FANTASY XIV
During a session with my therapist, a conversation floated up about how my life has been surrounded by community. I was helping to build a guild in Ragnarok Online, which shaped who I am. That made me decide to check MMO games to play with.
When I graduated from college, I stopped playing MMO because of the need to focus my life. And I never really need to go to MMO any more thanks to my work hard play hard credo (do your job and have sex hard). But hey, we are in the middle of a pandemic. So I decided to play Final Fantasy XIV.
Jumping into an MMO without a play buddy is typically a hard thing. But this game is so good that I’m absorbed into it quickly. The context of Realm Reborn and especially the Heavensward ranged deeply into what I felt in the context of the pandemic and community.
Back then I was playing mostly with straight audience. I wasn’t particularly aware of the queer community in the game, although noticed a few people there. Until then, late in the fall of that year, a friend of mine Raj (Stanithgar Ajagoda) joined me in the game. That made me decide to move to a different guild (Free Company).
The new guild GAZE, got someone who was on #1 for their PvP rank, the Frontline. On the same time Hason Rosseau is a Hrothgar, the race that made Raj joined the game since he is a Lion furry. The FC was thriving with a queer community, however, it has one strong rule that I’m hardly against, conversations strictly has to be SFW to the point they are slut shaming.
We did a lot of fun together. Then on a random crazy race, I had to stay awake from 2 pm to 5 pm to keep clicking an empty plot of small land; I was able to secure a house. Not sure because I’m gay or what, I was already good at decorating at the FC House. However, I wasn’t able to decorate them into something that was really to my taste. So I decorated them to look like Powerhouse bar. It has a big fish tank that any leather bar won’t afford honestly, but it’s what would be unique to other leather bars. I also added a dungeon in the basement, since, well, leather bar in the old days had play spaces (even now in some bar).
We were initially just using it to fuck around. Stanithgar would slap me or punch emotee to reimagine a kinky scene that we would have instead of doing ERP. Eagle Dragon wasn’t an Eagle Dragon until someone in the furry discord were thinking to run a party.
One thing that’s interesting with this game, acquiring a space isn’t that hard. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for rent other than game monthly subscriptions ($12/ month). With that, people think opening up space is really easy.
In the interest of having a space, I suggested using mine as a venue. The first opening, which was announced as Make Out Party, turned into something big but at the same time caused an upset.
The whole community, the whole FFXIV, was not aware of the concept of a gay bar. The community believes that, in the name of inclusion, everyone, both straight and gay, have to be in the same space. At the same time, ERP has to be in a private space. Private space as private chamber, not venues. That’s because this is a game, according to the nay sayer, the game is rated to allow under 18 to play. We are supposed to be very very careful with underage sex.
Well,,, if we can’t call this homophobic, it’s a heteronormative space. And a heteronormative space always does what they’re good at. Not allowing the voice of the queers because their voice would suck the air out of the queers.
There was a strong rebuke from the furry community. The furry community, in general, has been in their own fight between sex positivity versus trying to be accepted in a heteronormative world. The person who I was working to made the party happened bounced out after that and decided to make his own venue that didn’t work out.
Meanwhile, some people reached me and told me how I had created the first sex-positive gay establishment in the whole game. I was, okay, that’s cool. I guess I will open this once a month. But then, noooo. You see, typically venue opens once a week in this game. I thought we were in this pandemic, and I just lost my job, so why not.
Since February 2021, The Eagle Dragon Leather Bar has officially opened every week. Since then, I have been energized to let everyone, people around the world, know of the existence of gay bars. We need people to know about them cause once this pandemic is over, we must rebuild everything again.
The community expanded quickly and rapidly. One of the tear-jerking moments I experienced was when at our 2nd party, someone playing from a rural area in the U.K. commented to me. “So this is what a gay bar looks like?”. At that moment, I realized that I have created a queer space for queers that won’t be able to access gay bars even with no pandemic.
The Eagle Dragon has created space for: gay men who have been in the closet, gay men who live in areas away from the main gay population, and FtM who are trying to be among the men.
It also has turned into a beacon of LGBTQ rights. In San Francisco, I always felt that many people here have a strong attitude toward how we should treat people that doubt queers. I realized why. Because outside of San Francisco, things are different. This eventually will turn into one of the Eagle Dragon’s challenges. It was also hit by an obstacle that continued to be Eagle Dragon’s shackle.
Online Bully
Never in my life have I realized how online bullying could be so bad; it was really bad. While the internet has allowed good people to be exposed, and so a really bad people.
The biggest bully and drama that Eagle Dragon has experienced came from this person called ‘PR’. I’m not really sure how trauma can be so bad that it can turn a person really bad, but he was definitely the black hole. From what I understood, he was traumatized by a person, who is actually in the kink community.
In shorts, a person who is in the kink community in the UK has virtually hurt a person who is in the US. It is so bad that PR wanted this guy to be banned from the world. The reality, a queer space couldn’t do that. Unless a nonconsensual act has been done on our ground, we don’t deal with people’s drama.
I have been raped by someone who tied me up and flagged Swastika and recorded the whole scene in real life, but I don’t think I can have that person banned from attending any event because he didn’t do that in public space. I’m sorry, but the #metoo movement doesn’t apply here as much as we can’t have a kangaroo court.
In any case, the decision was not to do anything over that. On top of it, PR exhibit cult behavior where people have to be in his circles; otherwise, they’re enemy. This is dangerous behavior; I wish, as a PoC, he could understand this. But trauma has been applied so severely that he ends up doing what has been done to him to everyone.
Do I think the person that hurt him did something really bad? I imagine he did something very unfortunate. A consent violation is something that often happens in a kink community. However, most of the time is the result of miscommunication rather than ill intent. We are not having a situation of a freak that kidnap someone so they can have their ways here.
Despite all of these things, I simply made one decision. He could come to the bar, but he can’t be our volunteer (‘bar staff). That means he doesn’t have to be a slave to the public; he can have fun as much as he wants in our space. But he sees being staff as a role of influence. That’s not how any organization works.
PR was infuriated by this decision, he sworn that one day he would create a leather bar to his own vision, in which he, in a bullying way, created Eagle Eorzea (basically claiming he got a bigger penis).
Despite those, until the day I decided to pass the ownership to a different person, I have taken the attitude that we have done with the way we handled SF Catalyst. We don’t ban anybody out of people’s drama. If you hate someone, go to court and file a restraining order! If someone really abused you, sue them. If someone did a crime, call police.
This has created a welcoming environment that everyone appreciates. The main rule of running a sex space is no rule or as few rules as we need. Rules force us to judge whether or not individuals violated certain rules, and we are a human, not the omnipotent Jesus Christ (even Jesus tends not to judge people). We can’t judge without personal feelings. And there are a lot of times when I’m forced to judge, and I didn’t judge, instead I slap the ‘victim’ themself for causing noises. I have been the victim myself as I stated in my many stories of the past, but it is what it is and this is the reality.
Homophobic Incarceration
The other time we got was of someone heavily doxed and bullied in the community after a revelation that he is a sex offender registry. The community thought that anyone on the sex offender registry for pedophilia was forever forsaken by the sex community, especially not welcomed in Eagle Dragon. Well, let me tell you that is a very bad idea and I’m proven right about it.
Many of the people in the gay community has been wrongfully incarcerated as a pedophilic sex offender due to homophobia. In the same way that how in the past black people could be lynched for touching white women, gay men can be incarcerated by simply touching an underage boy in public. Homophobic law enforcers can set a trap in online media and dating apps to wrongfully incarcerate gay men.
The ‘Don’t say gay bill’ of Florida is one of the big examples of how a government tries to set a trap for gay men to be in jail. There are no differences between NAZIs and homophobes. As they marked the Jews, they also marked the gays with a pink triangle.
The person on this sex offender list was a real kink person; he is also a furry, and I don’t understand why there’s a furry wiki page that declared him in that sex offender registry. In reality, he was one of the people that got trapped in those things I explained above. Despite lack of real evidence, he pleaded guilty because he didn’t have any resource to fight his case in court. I have other friend that fought his innocence in the court but he end up loosing up all his college money.
This issue infuriated me, and at the time, I was vowing that I would protect this guy and fight for his rights. However, many people close to me told me to take careful steps on this. It’s the same reason why the issue of BLM is so complicated. While there are many people are wrongly incarcerated, there’s no easy way to separate them out from the real bad actors. And I definitely don’t want to get pulled into the bad side of this.
Out of people in my inner core advice, I decided not to ban him out but to ask him to stay low. PR and others were using this to attack me, but I just let that conversation run its course. Things were eventually sliding off, and I was proven right when the dozen anti-gay laws in many states went into effect.
Lucifer
The Eagle Dragon continued to thrive, however, my attitude for perfection started to burned me off. I have to come with a party every week and kept pushing the boundaries of the audience and pushing the staff to the limit. Lucifer was one of the staff that has been together in most part of the journey, his “gpose” skills, the skill to take screenshots in the game with the ability to modify them into a lewd fantasy is considered one of the best in the game.
He is a valuable asset to the bar, however, he also developed a deep relationship with me. Our relationship started very close since I feel he knows a lot of about the leather community much more than the others. He has a connection with a well known player in EU. Towards me, he expressed a bratty behavior as like a slave boy. I felt this is the closest time I ever felt being a dominant and having a slave.
Things went bad with him in that Spring, he broke up with his European partner a month before he was supposed to move to EU for good. His partner gave me a long list of grievance that kinda true to Lucifer’s obsessive behavior but I felt that was overly inflated by a weak person. Things kinda moved on but then not long after that we discovered that he was terminally ill from a back cancer.
I was brokenhearted, I invited him to come to San Francisco. Admittedly many were cautioning me, what if he is a fraud. But I felt I could trust him, and he did came. We had a lot of fun during his time here, and it seems the visit allowed him to get remission from his cancer.
I went to CLAW Cleveland after that where I met another player. He has been in closet bisexual man. I helped exposed him to the leather community to allow him to see what the community is like.
Celebrating Pride
As how the reality in the world out there, LGBTQ+ community only account for less than roughly 10% of the society. It is obvious that the big majority of show runners are straight people. Pride has turned into something that both the LGBTQ+ community and the ‘Allies’ celebrated.
In the game, this has turned into straight allies celebrating Pride among themself with no actual queer people in it. Well,, maybe there are few queer in it, but the party is predominantly straight.
I have been the advocate that the Pride celebration has to be by the queer for the queer. However, the queer community was pretty much fragmented in the game, more so because of the #nokinkatpride movement.
During the first year; with the partnership with a different venue which was owned by one of the Eagle Dragon’s manage; we were able to held a very successful celebration. However, it was successful due to my role on taking over the whole production. This made Mr.Z unhappy however. Immediately after that they broke partnership with me.
Mr. Z is someone who claimed as a person who run kink community in New Orleans. However, I do not believe he is someone from the true gay men community but more of the pansexual community. He is also a parent of his children. This cause him to have a firm believe that there should be a non sexual queer space which in conflict with Eagle Dragon’s spirit.
On the second year, after loosing venue partner to do with, I thought of just doing this with a small amount of venues. However, things took a different direction. A bisexual player reached out to me and asked if Eagle Dragon wanted to run a Pride celebration with them, they run and have experienced in running big events. It turned out to be a trap.
Back then the venue environments were dominated by three block of clouts, AlleyCat, Moonlit Kiss (MLK) and Seven Sins. The Eagle Dragon in general was able to stay away from them and the drama involved since we are a gay bar, we have our own audience. We are a bit leaning under the Seven Sins shadow due to their sex positive attitude but I did made sure we place a bit of distance with them especially when they invited us to join the group.
However, I made a grave mistake when I decided to join the Pride production. MLK was hiding behind the shadow, away from the planning, until when at the last minute they jumped in and almost took over the whole Pride, turning it into straight Pride. Some of the sessions during the whole celebration was the ‘Pride Parade’. The leader of MLK decided that she would be the marshal of the parade on the first one, I personally took over the second parade and push her aside.
Stepping down and the future of Eagle Dragon.
Running the bar once every week was hard. Add that with my perfectionist attitude, this eventually burned me out and pushed the staff to the limit. The opening up of post pandemic also started to pull me out to the reality, I want to be able to go to IRL events again on the weekend.
In April that year I actually felt things are going to be ok. I thought back then my career is going to get boosted, something I later on learn to be complete lie. I thought I would be able to use money to keep the bar running, either by hiring resident DJ or getting my job easier one way the other.
Unfortunately soon later I learned that thing to be false. The Pride celebration that year definitely didn’t help with my high expectations. That Pride celebration also broke open many political issues among the staff and participant as I was running it with some level of political platform. As I mentioned above, the political environment of San Francisco and the rest of the world is so distant. What of a bit of San Francisco little spect political flavor, turned out to be something way too strong for the rest of the world. I found myself being pulled apart by a manager and other staff threatening to quit if others don’t quit.
I remember spending overnight trying to untangle the problem. However, I have came to a conclusion, this was too much of my time and energy. I decided that I would quit. I went to other venue owner go by Femboy Louka. ‘Here is Eagle Dragon, you can take it and run it, or you can close it and merge it to your own venue’ I said. And he decided to run it as a separate venue, something that I’m very grateful to this day.
While it all sound like a rushed decision, there is some reasoning I went to him. I’m aware that a lot of my audience are FtM and non-binary players. I thought it would be a really good social experiment to see what it would look like for a gay men bar to be ran by a femboy. He is also the best candidate that I can think off with experience of running venues. The other manager, well,, obviously he was one of the problems, he also doesn’t heed my advice to see the leather community IRL to push away some negative thoughts.
During my exit, I announced how the many Eagles in the world were founded by many different people. These people may ran it for a good cause or bad cause, however, one thing always prevail. The core family gathered and they decided the future of the space on their own, regardless what the founder believed in. I founded the Eagle Dragon with my own purposes of finding more people to connect and I have found such. I wanted to expand the Leather community and be a beacon to those who were unreachable, and I had done so.
The Eagle Dragon were never the same again after that without my perfectionist flavor. However, it does thrives till now as we recently celebrated the second anniversary.
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