Are you out, or are you closeted?

Are you 'out' about your kink, among people you know and see face-to-face on a regular basis? I don't mean like, do you shout it from the rooftops, but just, do you feel free not to hide it? Or are you totally in the closet?

Me: about 80% in the closet. I frequently make jokes among friends that might possibly be picked up on by fellow kinky people, but I still always feel like it's not something I can just say outright, including during conversations that are specifically about sex (which women my age have very often, men will be horrified to know...).

If you feel that you are free to be out, how come? And how do people react? If you're not out, do you wish you could be?

(Edit: Hmm, I'm gonna say more like 90% in the closet. I have no logical scale to explain how I measured that, except that I am pedantic and 80% seemed low somehow, on this imaginary scale I pulled out of nowhere.)

Hi

I am out to a number of people. I have had some surprises like telling my closest friend from university and he responding that he had been an active top for years. He told me he had dropped occasional references to spanking, such as news stories, into the conversation for years and enjoyed watching the way I reacted. I thought I was hiding my interest well.

I decided to talk to two senior members of my Buddhist order some years ago as I was not sure about the ethics of spanking and one responding that he had tried it and it was not his thing. The other was not phased by the topic either and thanked me for my honesty. Since then I have told about a dozen fellow Buddhist friends over the years as self disclosure feels safe. I have not talked to other friends but I would if the conversation went that way.

I talked briefly to my ex-wife about it and she was amused as she had never guessed I had an interest during our 23 years together. (I started playing soon after we split up). Since then I have talked about it to everyone who I have been in a relationship with or where there was a prospect of a relationship as I did not want to go back in the closet. A few have said they were not interested in it but no one has been strongly disapproving.

I am a bisexual guy who uses gay contact sites and one even has spanking and S&M boxes to tick on ones profile if one wants to indicate to others what one is interested in. It is only on these sites that I have had two negative responses. I remember one guy who had a major car accident and was still in a lot of pain after a number of operations who berated me for finding pain fun. The other was a guy who fancied himself as a vigilante and wanted to out me for my tastes. He went away when I said I was not bothered if he did.

The only people I would not want to know are my children. There again, one would not want ones children to know anything about one's intimate life and vice versa.

I think I have been lucky in having the opportunity to talk to the people I have. I would always advise people to be cautious about disclosing anything until a sense of mutual trust has been developed.

98% out of closet. I don't announce my kinks at business meetings, but my family and close friends know about it for ages.

You might be surprised how LITTLE men talk to each other about sex. And don't worry ladies, they will rarely (if ever) get into explicit details about what they do with their sex partners.

Perhaps that "male silence" makes it easier for men to stay closeted?

Oh, in any sexual relationship for sure! (No way I was gonna sleep with someone and not get what I want...)


But wouldn't everyone knowing eventually bleed into business contacts also knowing, at some point? I guess I shouldn't assume that would be a bad thing for any career... It would definitely be very bad for mine, though.

I did know that, my husband told me Forty-year-old women, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and there are no limits to how raunchy it gets. (We've all had kids; after going through that, all decorum goes out the window.)

However, most conversations involve talking about how they're 'done', and sex is nonsense and they're just not interested anymore. (And I have to sit there glancing away awkwardly like a harlot in church. Their collective problem is, they're not kinky, that's what it is.*)

* see one of my other posts where I preach that 'kink is right and vanilla is wrong'.

I have locked myself in the closet and thrown away the key (of course, it rebounded off the wall and hit me in the head, but still...)

Why?! Don't all of you sex-crazed Scandinavians shower with your family members and go around fornicating random people in the streets all the time???

(Just kidding. I get an eye twitch when people say that...)

Using the little-known but long-established SADI (Spanko's Auto-Declosetisation Index) scale of 1 - 6 (where 6 is the best, liberated-wise), I'd put myself at about 3 (so...50% -ish).

I came out to my parents aged 23, and 2 of my brothers about the same time (the latter confessed similar fantasies - good boarding-school survivors all!); to some but not all girlfriends through the years; to my ex-wife early on (none of them remotely interested - sigh); and to another brother and a handful of friends latterly (i.e. since I joined here and started seeking RL interactions). My current partner is vanilla but game for a lot (she won't mind me saying).

Most wonderful was to discover, in the moment of greatest crisis when my marriage was breaking up (the catalyst for which was at least partly my unwillingness to be alone with my kink any longer), that the brother I turned to seeking sanity-confirmation revealed he'd been 'playing' for the past fifteen years and would I care to join him on his next film-shoot! And it wasn't as if we hadn't seen each other fairly regularly, or been quite close during that time, either - he cautious, I unobservant.

I second what Curiouserto said above about ensuring a mutual trust and feeling safe with the person before coming clean - and clean is how it feels when you do.

I am not. I have told one close friend, but she is the only one.