A Brief History of the Black Rose of Washington DC (1987-2005)

The Black Rose was born under the vigilant eye of Nancy Ava Miller, an SM activist whose own emergence as an SM participant had been a life changing revelation, one she felt compelled to share with others. After attending several meetings of The Eulenspiegel Society (TES) in New York, she founded a similarly structured group in Albuquerque New Mexico, she rented a space, put out advertising, chose the name People Exchanging Power (PEP) and held an educational forum for any and all people curious about SM. Later she repeated that winning formula in DC. Nancy's own coming out story was the subject of the first ever-educational lecture of the club that is now Black Rose. It was June 1987.

Our first meetings took place in a rented room of the Unitarian Church of Rockville, MD. The meetings were small but successful, with newcomers arriving every week. Nancy had judged her market well. There were a lot of people in Washington DC that wanted to know more about SM. It was quite a different vibe from the Black Rose of today. There was little or no fetish wear, zero dungeon equipment, a throng of men, a mere smattering of women, and a hardly anyone experienced enough to teach or perform demonstrations. Nancy Miller herself, by todays standards, was a comparative novice. Jonathan K was Nancys right hand man in organizing the many monthly events that took place. The now famous Black Rose socials began as simple mixers with no preplanning on the organizers part. Their purpose was to give the meeting coordinators one night off a month.

Real estate was a problem from the start. Our stay at the Unitarian church ended abruptly when a member of the church showed up for what happened to be a presentation on fistfucking. When we had told them we were a support group for people into dominance and submission they had just assumed we were a twelve step program. Our next home was the Gay Community Center, at 1638 R street where we met Harry Stock, a pastor in the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church. We got a lot of help from the gay community in those early years; we probably wouldnt have made it without them. Black Rose would rent from Reverend Harry for the next ten years.

Nancy quickly moved on to greater challenges: siring other for-profit PEP organizations across the land and starting a highly successful phonesex empire. The name Black Rose emerged in the wake of her departure, as did the name for our newsletter Petal and Thorn. The first elected board codified the priorities that still hold today, weekly educational discussions, monthly socials, and annual elections. Other players and presenters stepped in to help run the meetings. The men of Sigma were regular attendees of our meetings and more often than not provided the educational content of the meetings. Most newbies arrive at BR today completely unaware that they are students of students of students of the fine men of Sigma. Among our great SM educators was Vaughn Keith who wrote the crossword puzzles for a local paper and had a crossdressing alter ego named Vikki. His slide show of sadoerotic art was a revelation to all who were lucky enough to see it. Vaughn passed from our world in 1989 one of the clubs first casualties of the plague. The annual educational awards are named in his honor.

After the Gay Community Center shuttered its doors we continued meeting in Reverend Harrys church, which by now was a cramped rented room on R street near 17th. It was packed to the rafters on Tuesday nights when the Black Rose sadoeroticists took over. If you didnt get there early you had to watch from down the long narrow hallway. The first person many of us remember was Chris Fast, our

treasurer and door monitor. Chris was a fierce looking butch lesbian with a blonde crew cut, tattoos and piercings at a time when they were much less common than they are today. She had a stare that could bend metal and a smile that could set even the most nervous newbie at ease. Black Rose was smaller in those days, the friendships closer, and attending the Tuesday night talks felt edgy, transgressive, and thrilling to be part of. After the meetings, we would troop down the block to the Italian Kitchen on the corner of 17th and R. Head counts would be taken at the cigarette break for an estimate of the party size. Sometimes mini-scenes erupted in the restaurant itself, especially when they gave us the private room on the second floor. Later when Harrys church moved to a bombed out neighborhood just north of China Town, Black Rose tagged along. The dinners moved also, alternating between the second floor of the Schezwan Gardens where the staff spoke no English and clearly thought our sadomasochistic antics were hilarious, and a dive across H street, with the hopelessly apt name Big Wong.

Black Rose held its socials at a rough trade gay bar called Badlands near Dupont Circle, across 22nd St from an infamous gay cruising route known as P Street Beach. Badlands was a grimy, dimly lit, dive with a low ceiling, several large barrels full of peanuts, at the top of a narrow stairwell. Barry, a kinky restaurateur, provided catering. It took years before Frank P and Leather Bob thought to start lugging their home-made dungeon equipment along so people attending the socials could actually play. Humping equipment up and down that narrow staircase is a formative memory for many of us around at that time. Even play was different then. This was a time before singletails and Japanese rope bondage became commonplace, before the glut of SM texts, published in the mid nineties, before our own safety program was so much as a twinkle in our eye.

Friendly haunts remained a challenge for our club. We remained renters from Reverend Harrys church until his retirement demanded

we seek lodgings elsewhere. For a short while, we held our Tuesday meetings in a Holiday Inn at Federal Center Southwest but got booted after only a month. We had always been careful not to leave incriminating lecture handouts lying around the presentation room after a meeting, but one night (after a tutorial on genital piercing), the copiously illustrated handouts into drew the attention of the Ethiopian waitresses in the hotel restaurant. They alerted the shift manager who came out to refill our water glasses and have a look for himself. He alerted the hotel manager and we were orphans the next day. The socials bounced around from venue to venue depending on availability. Bars never liked us because we really arent a boozing crowd. We even spent several months at the highly fashionable Club-Z which looked like a set from Blade Runner before management booted us for not drinking our expected quota. After two years of almost no socials at all, Mitzi, a mere volunteer at the time, surprised everyone by bagging us a contract with the Newington Virginia VFW. We held socials there for two years until, once again, a management change at the lodge deprived us of a friendly point of contact and we were homeless once again.

With social spaces always a problem, private homes were the primary site of sadeoerotic encounters. Specifically, the home of Jack McG, became central to the social life of Black Rose throughout the nineties. Jack was a larger than life figure who elevated the educational bar on Black Rose presentations with his giant collection of SM paraphernalia and a museum worthy collection of metal bondage devices (he started collecting them at Gun shows). His home contained the first total concept dungeon space many Black Rosers ever saw: ample equipment, roman arches, medieval dcor, beautiful sound system and otherworldly mood. Oh there were a few other prodom houses with nice dungeons, but none like Jacks. And he made that dungeon available to virtually everyone: mens only nights, womens only nights, wide eyed newbies and close friends alike. If you wanted to throw a dungeon birthday party all you had to do was ask. Many of

the friendships Black Rose enjoys with scene celebs from coast to coast began with Jacks parties.

Attendees of the annual Black Rose conferences might be surprised to know that our first attempt at a large scale gathering was a complete and utter flop. A year late, and staged at what now is DCs 9:30 club, Black Roses 5th anniversary celebration was attended by a mere smattering of guests, and a bunch of equipment hammered together that afternoon. We did get a lot of visits from the law: curious patrol cops first, then their desk sergeants, then over the course of the evening, increasingly senior brass who came by to gawk.

Black Rose X, in Nov 1997 was a whole different story. We conceived it as our answer to TES 25, a festival many of us DCers had attended with envy and awe. The club didn't have the five grand required by the hotel as a deposit so Frazier B, a relative newb at the time, wrote a check for the whole balance. We planned for 300 people, 800 came. With day passes, we cracked the 1000 barrier on Saturday night. Wed never even heard of a dungeon that big or so amply stocked with equipment. Delta, Sigma, and every prodom house from here to Baltimore contributed equipment to help make it happen. We had no organized DM training to speak of, and Ill never forget the deer in the headlights gaze of our poor DMs trying to monitor several hundred scenes simultaneously. And just how did one monitor, say, a top in full fencing gear carving up his sweetie with a regulation foil? It was an amazing weekend, and for better or worse, the decision to make the festival an annual event has become the central decision in the past decade of BR history, and the event has become the principal economic engine that drives all club operations.

The year after BR 10 proved to be something of a turning point for the club. Rose and Jack, our two undisputed leaders of the time,

elected not to run in the highly contentious election. Instead Rose spearheaded the effort to incorporate Black Rose as a nonprofit organization, while Jack participated in the launch of NCSF and the growth of the then fledgling Leather Leadership Council. The board meanwhile, embarked on a series of new initiatives: inaugurating the Emeritus Board to encourage past leaders to stay involved in the club, chartering one of the earliest TNG special interest groups for kinksters of 35 and below, and offering the first of the annual club awards including the Vaughn Keith award for superior educators in the SM Artform. Greg put before the board his proposal to stage something he called Leather Retreat.

Frazier meanwhile had started helping to organize a monthly play party at a long gone gay club called the Edge. We met on Saturday afternoons, and had to clear out by nine but there was a private outside deck allowing us to play outdoors in total privacy. Kinsters from the Carolinas to Lancaster County would converge at the Edge every month, many of them for their first exposure to SM. I personally, was the first to speak to a charming couple of first timers attending one sunny afternoon, who introduced themselves as Bill and Jackie, better known today as Waxman and Waxgal. Unhappy with the shortage of dungeon equipment, Frazier started fabricating rocksolid and innovative pieces of his own. A whole generation of players learned SM strapped to his hardware. In time Frazier developed a dedicated space and holding weekly events at a club he named the Crucible. And me? As education Czar, I inaugurated the Black Rose weekend workshop series where the attendees themselves perform the demos and learn scenes by doing them under expert supervision. We also drafted BRs first, formal DM training guide and educational program, very likely only the third ever written and more comprehensive than either of the other two, It has gone on to serve as the foundation for clubs across the country if not around the world.

On the national stage, The Black Rose enjoyed a remarkably low profile until the early oughts. On Thanksgiving Day 2002 one of our longest standing members was outed on the front page of the Washington Post over his long time involvement in Black Rose. It was such an ugly and gratuitous smear that the Post ombudsman published an apology later on. And then there was our fateful decision in 2003 to host the annual event in Ocean City Maryland. What should have been a fun beach bondage bingo variation on our now almost routine annual bash, was capsized when religious fundamentalists started mobilizing protests against our being there. For the first time, ever the club drew headlines. Time Magazine wanted to do a feature about us, but we turned them down. And with the prospects of camera crews eager to out participants as they arrived, we decided to let discretion be the better part of valor and retreated to New Carrolton Ramada where we held a smaller and more intimate celebration.

Over the past twenty years, BR has usually erred on the side of playing a conservative and risk adverse game. This hasnt been to everyones liking but it has produced a solid legacy of achievement, and comparatively few major screw-ups. We have been in the lucky position to provide fiscal help to those who need it: Seed money for the Phoenix Society of Baltimore, rent for the late, great Lesborados, helping out NCSF and GMSMA in their hours of need. Our beloved friend Joel, through his cunning and innovation has single handedly pioneered the actuarial arts of getting leather events and conferences insured. His work will serve as the basis for BDSM insurability in the decades to come. We have seen one time newbies mature into toymakers and manufacturers of dungeon equipment, pair off and marry other BR attendees. We have also seen some of our brightest and best like Vaughn, Hop, Tammad, Jack,Tillion Rod and Big Mark move on to the great BDSM holiday camp in the sky. Of those still with us, many include staffers of Leather Retreat, Camp Crucible and Dark Odyssey. Many have published articles in Prometheus the Newsweek of kink, and an increasing number of BR members are receiving recognition as authorities, and instructors

in the sweet science of sadoeroticism. Our members also serve on the staff of organizations like Woodhull and NCSF, working to build a better world for people whose sexual tastes run to the left of center. We have hosted an entire roster of scene luminaries like, Joseph Bean, Fakir Musafar, Cleo DeBoise, Midori, Barbara Nitke, Jack Rinella The list is long.

And every week since 1987 BR has offered something to the curious and brave individuals who venture out to our meeting places, to learn, to see friends, to meet loved ones, to give back to their community. BR has changed over the years, not entirely for the better, but it has remained an oasis for the open minded, the passionate, and the ever so delightfully twisted, as we traverse the desert highways of life.