The Name Game

As anyone who’s been to the legendary Berlin nightlife fixture Berghain knows, gay BDSM bears are actually really nice guys. The one time I was admitted into the techno club’s hallowed halls, I accidentally stumbled into the “dungeon room” and almost ran into a buttcrack that was blooming out of one of the bear's assless chaps. Even though he was in the middle of getting polished off by a young, kneeling submissive, and I was more insignificant than the wallpaper to his methamphetamine-dilated eyes, he gave me a friendly smile and pointed me to the bar. Such a sweetie! Since then, I’ve harbored a deep curiosity about these men and their manly ways.

Luckily for me, I managed to find a gay romance novel (with a cover designed by Next Media Animation?) that answered all of the questions one might have about the LGBTBDSM lifestyle. Do they use safe words? Yes. Who does their laundry? Slaves. What is their favorite animal? Bunnies.

Turns out that underneath their nipple clamps, these latex-loving fetishists have hearts of gold. Dilo Keith’s The Name Game is a heartwarming yarn about a week in the life of Eliot, Michael, and Jamie, three kinky co-lovers. Michael plays the Big Daddy, Eliot the versatile, and Jamie the submissive twink. (If the names get a little confusing, I recommend doing as I did and substituting your friend’s faces while reading.)

Keith’s writing really sucks, but I’ve accepted this as the standard for romance novel authors. Pretty much copy-and-pasting character descriptions, he describes Jamie as “half Michael’s age and several inches shorter than his six feet.” Eliot, on the other hand, is “several years younger and a few inches shorter than Michael.”

The book opens with Jamie cleaning the house wearing only a shimmering neck-chain (we are told that his pubes are trimmed to Michael’s specifications). Michael, meanwhile, is browsing the National Geographic site and reading about bunnies. He decides to “deeply humiliate” his slave by nicknaming him Bunny Butt, or B.B. for short. Jamie deliberates over whether he should use the safeword to get out of this undesirable predicament, but decides instead to whine about it to Eliot over a salad dinner.

Eliot takes revenge when he next fucks Michael, refusing to “press his swollen head against Michael’s eager opening” until he accepts his own pet name—Snoggle Tush (S.T.). Michael balks at first, but eventually relents, and the two consummate their bond with simultaneous orgasms and an exchange of I Love Yous.

Drama strikes when Michael finds out that Eliot told Jamie-the-slave that Michael himself had a humiliating moniker. In revenge, Michael paddles Eliot’s ass, but halfway through the spanking, they catch Jamie spying on them from behind a laundry basket. Michael and Eliot gang up and give him his own punishment—a tickle attack! The book wraps up with the three boys exchanging presents of stenciled boxers. One has “You Suck, I Watch” printed on it. Another is emblazoned with “B Is For Big.”

You get the point. The Name Game goes out of its way to portray these paraphiliacs as cutesy tickle-monsters, guided more by bunny whiskers than Thanatos. The type of sado-masochism here is less Lacanian perversion and more the kind you see on Japanese game shows.

The most interesting aspect of this story for me was how gay threesome bondage sessions completely skew the sex role expectations of male/female dominance/passivity. I’ve always suspected that hetero guys who love paying dominatrixes to urinate on them only get off because their submission is framed as fantasy—and ultimately, their wallets keep them in control. The ability for Jamie, Michael, and Eliot to reverse and re-reverse their power structures is a refreshing change, even if the sex scenes are a snooze-fest.

This versatility feeds back into psychoanalytic theory on BDSM. Freud believed that sadism and masochism are component parts of the same sexual instinct—the enjoyment of receiving pain is the inverse of our primary instinctual aim to inflict it. In other words, no one can be a masochist without being a little bit of a sadist, too.

The fact that none of these three guys ever stick to one role makes their kinkiness more playful than perverted, which is probably part of Dilo Keith’s larger project. I suspect he’s trying to portray sexual fetish as a fun, healthy lifestyle choice, rather than a sign of childhood trauma or moral decrepitude. But what happens when you take the sad out of sadism? You get a bunch of Snoggle Tushes and Bunny Butts squealing over new underwear.

Rating: 3 dildos. This is what happens when you combine sex education with fan fiction. Don’t believe me? Read it for yourself here.

Previously: Cloudy With A Chance of Marriage