WHAT PROTOCOL IS
Protocol, for those of you who don’t know the word, is etiquette. It’s the rules that govern behavior in a leather relationship - more broadly, the rules that govern behavior within the leather community. For example, in vanilla life, you never introduce a higher-ranked person to a lower-ranked person (“Billy, may I introduce President Bush to you?”). It’s always the other way round. Likewise, the higher-ranked person always offers their hand to the lower-ranked person to shake, not the other way round.Vanilla etiquette (and, to a certain extent, heterosexual DS protocol) is rather complex, because it’s so much gender-based. I own a book called Service Etiquette, and much of it is devoted to explaining when not to follow gender-based etiquette, because it would conflict with rank-based etiquette in the military.
Gay leather protocol is simpler: it’s merely rank-based. The only complication it offers is that it’s primarily relationship-based rather than community-based. Individual couples decide how they will conduct their protocol, and sometimes leathermen within the same social circle or club will agree on a particular protocol, and sometimes enough people in the leather community will practice the same protocol that it becomes a generally accepted protocol. But even then, individuals can opt out, except in situations where protocol is required for particular events or places. Leather bars, for example, often have a dress code, which is a popular form of leather protocol.
The purpose of leather protocol - like much of vanilla etiquette - is to emphasize hierarchy. The sir and his boy both have protocols to follow, but their protocols are different; it’s similar to dancing, where one person takes the lead and the other person follows. Unlike in dancing, though, the follower’s protocol tends to be more active than the leader’s. When I walk into a room, I receive the enjoyment of seeing my apprentice stand up for me, but he’s the one who has the actual fun of standing up for me. My role is passive in comparison to his. One of the reasons I departed from tradition where door protocol was concerned (more about that below) was that I wanted to share in at least a bit of the fun of actively following protocol.
From the perspective of someone who has never experienced hierarchy or has only done so under negative circumstances, protocol can appear horribly degrading. Even my apprentice says that he would find it difficult to practice protocol in any deep manner with a dominant he didn’t respect. But when the dominant and submissive have great respect for one another (as my apprentice and I do), protocol takes on a whole new layer of meaning. By my own request, I was trained as a sir in a traditional leather manner, by starting at the bottom, so I can testify that protocol rules which appear from the outside to be dull and demeaning to the boy can actually be great fun for the boy to put into practice, if he likes the person he is in service to.
My apprentice and I worked out our protocol together. We started by looking at other people’s protocols: medieval manners, church ritual, early twentieth-century etiquette, and the M/s protocol that I learned when I was in training under a leather master. Then we determined which of these elements worked for us. We ended up drawing most heavily upon M/s protocol, simply because it was something that we knew we could practice in leather space in harmony with others. (Much of M/s protocol is also practiced by DS folk.) Yet M/s protocol - not by coincidence - overlaps heavily with vanilla etiquette, so most of it was also things we could do in vanilla space without drawing attention to ourselves. (The one giant exception I’ll mention toward the end of this entry.)
As the visit progressed, we tried out the protocol we’d put together before the visit. We discussed which rules worked and which didn’t, and I adjusted the protocol accordingly. On both sides (because I’d told my apprentice I wanted it this way), there was a certain amount of spontaneity, of trying out new patterns of behavior to see whether they could be incorporated into the protocol. But we also got into regular rhythms of doing protocol.
Here is our protocol, as it stood at the end of my apprentice’s visit. Our original protocol only consisted of about half a dozen items; the rest grew organically out of the particular circumstances we found ourselves in. Without a doubt, the rules will undergo further refinement and growth the next time we meet face to face.
CLOTHING
At leather events, the mentor and the apprentice will dress appropriately.“Except when we go to the bar, I’ll be wearing vanilla clothes during your visit,” I told my apprentice beforehand. “Only a masochist would wear black in August.”
My apprentice (who is not a masochist) turned up at the airport in a white tee-shirt, black jeans, and black leather boots - a traditional leatherboy outfit. With daily changes of shirt, he proceeded to wear this outfit during his entire visit.
Did I mention that my apprentice is wonderful?
STANDING
The apprentice stands when his mentor enters the room.This is one of those nice overlaps between vanilla etiquette and leather etiquette. Alas, I was never taught this particular bit of vanilla etiquette as a child - that I should stand when my superiors entered the room - but I ought to have been.
I don’t have any rules for my apprentice about when to stand, other than this. Of his own accord, my apprentice has a tendency to stand unless I wave him into a seat, or unless his boots tire his feet so much that he asks permission to sit down. But standing isn’t something I require of him most of the time; I simply told him to do whatever helps him stay in the proper mindset, as long as it doesn’t adversely affect his health.
When standing in a formal manner, the apprentice adopts a “parade rest” position: the feet are parted to shoulder-width, and the hands are crossed behind the back.
That’s the way I was taught it, anyway. Darned if my apprentice didn’t end up doing this more correctly than I was taught (he placed the hands at the small of his back). There are multiple advantages to taking on a boy who went through Junior ROTC.
Legend has it that most of the early members of gay leather clubs were World War II vets. As one observer has pointed out, since most of the early leather clubs started in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it’s more likely that the vets would have been returning from Korea. Regardless, all sorts of bits of military protocol made their way into the leather world, and this is one of them.
WALKING
When the mentor wishes to talk with the apprentice while they’re walking together, the apprentice walks alongside the mentor, to his right. Otherwise, the apprentice normally walks half a pace behind the mentor, to his right.According to leather tradition - and the vanilla tradition that preceded it - the superior takes the position of honor, on the right. Forget tradition; I’m right-handed, so I want my apprentice on my right, where I can easily turn to him.
My apprentice experimented with being either a half pace or full pace behind. Since I couldn’t see him walking behind me, it didn’t matter much to me how far behind he was, though I figured that, the closer he was, the easier it would be for me to turn to him. Being half a pace behind meant he couldn’t match my stride, and he said he found that this produces a more natural walking rhythm.
This “walking behind” protocol only applies in situations where we’re walking without talking to each other - for example, when we’re making our way in or out of a subway station, when we’re on our way to or from library stacks, when we’re making our way through a leather bar, etc. Regarding other occasions, I told my apprentice, “I don’t want to have to talk to you over my shoulder.”
There are also occasions when I’ll want my apprentice to walk first. We stopped at the grocery store on a couple of occasions, so that he could buy food during his visit. It would have made no sense for him to follow me, since he was the one who knew which food he needed to buy, so I told him to take the lead.
When the mentor and apprentice are walking alongside one another, and the path narrows due to an obstacle (such as another group of people walking in the opposite direction), the apprentice slows his pace in order to allow the mentor to step in front of him.
This rule follows from the previous rule.
SERVICE
The mentor may ask the apprentice to fetch or carry or prepare something. The apprentice may offer to do so when not asked.My apprentice loves service, so I offer him as many opportunities to serve me as possible. On an emotional level, the times when service means the most to me is either when it’s connected in with something that has inherent emotional meaning to me (such as my apprentice carrying books for me in the library; that evokes childhood memories of me being mentored by my father, who took me to libraries) or when, well, it involves kneeling. We both really, really like him kneeling.
When the mentor is standing, the apprentice bows his head when offering a drink. When the mentor is sitting, the apprentice goes down on one knee to offer the drink, which he holds with his right hand while resting the drink on his left palm.
Let me offer this advice to fellow dominants: Let your submissive come up with new bits of protocol on his own. I’d suggested the kneeling to offer the drink - it was part of the M/s protocol I witnessed while in training - but it was my apprentice who came up with the exact manner in which to do so. He does it beautifully.
DOORS
The mentor opens doors for the apprentice.If you ever want to get a lively discussion going between DS folk, ask them about The Door Issue.
My impression has been that gay male dominants tend to require their submissives to open doors for them, as a form of dominance, while heterosexual male dominants tend to open doors for their submissives, as a form of dominance. There you can see a prime example of how vanilla, gender-based etiquette has influenced heterosexual DS.
I wasn’t keen on having my apprentice open doors for me, but neither was I keen on adopting a gender-based model of dominance. What I chose instead was a nurturing-based model of dominance. Folks who are in a position of nurturing - mentors, teachers, etc. - have a tendency to open doors for folks that they care for. Not invariably; sometimes the person who is being cared for opens the doors as a form of respect for the person caring for them. But there was enough of a tendency of “door opener as nurturer” for me to feel comfortable adopting that model for our protocol.
SITTING
While eating, while in vanilla space, and while in places where it would be inconvenient to do otherwise, the apprentice sits on a chair. Otherwise, he sits on the floor.The last sentence of that protocol was my apprentice’s choice. Despite the fact that I’ve spent half my life sitting on floors, I felt nervous about this particular bit of hierarchical symbolism, because I initially thought of it as being a degrading manner of treating one’s boy: to deny him one of the most common comforts of Western civilization, a chair.
In actual fact, the sitting protocol makes things much easier between us. I’ve held conversations now when I and my apprentice were both sitting in chairs, and I’ve held conversations when I was sitting on a sofa and he was on the floor. The chair/chair conversations were good, but the sofa/floor conversations were very good. Partly this was because it provided us with a constant visual reminder of our hierarchical relations to one another. Partly also it was because we could more easily touch each other. You just can’t manage to place your apprentice’s head in your lap if he’s sitting in another chair.
Yet again, this is why it makes sense for dominants to let their submissives suggest protocol rules. My apprentice and I would have missed out on the pleasure of this practice if we’d gone with my original instincts.
GREETINGS, FAREWELLS, AND MOMENTS OF CENTERING
In vanilla space, the apprentice greets the mentor by kissing his hand.Both my apprentice and I derive our primary inspiration, not from military models of hierarchy or Victorian models of hierarchy or any of the other models that are common among DS folk. Our primary source of inspiration is medieval models of hierarchy. My apprentice came into this relationship after years of dreaming about master/apprentice relationships. I was seeking something quite similar, a mentor/protege relationship, and I had a background in church ritual that is based on medieval etiquette.
The custom of kissing hands (known in Italy as baciamano) has survived from ancient times to modern. When a Christian meets a high-ranked church official in certain denominations, he kisses his ring. In the British coronation ceremony, the hand of the king or queen is kissed. And everyone here has seen The Godfather, so we all know how this custom ended up in modern vanilla life, don’t we?
So my apprentice and I incorporated this into our protocol, though it has no precedent in gay leather protocol.
At the beginning and end of the day, or after they have been forced by circumstances to act in a vanilla manner toward one another, the apprentice kneels down to the mentor, bowing his head. The mentor says something appropriate to the apprentice and then kisses him on the forehead. The apprentice kisses the mentor’s hand and then rises.
What I say is usually terribly banal. I’m not good at spontaneously coming up with words of wisdom. But this brief exchange helps both of us to center ourselves, and to remember what we are to each other.
WRITING AND SPEAKING
Letters between the mentor and apprentice are begun and ended with an appropriate greeting and farewell that acknowledges their relations to one another. Within the letter, the apprentice will periodically address the mentor as “sir” or by a title.This is the first protocol I suggested - quite tentatively, because I was new to my role and was afraid that suggesting I wanted a little more hierarchy in our correspondence than we already had would cause my new boy to run screaming from me. Those of you who have had submissives or slaves will not be surprised, I’m sure, to hear that my apprentice responded by thanking me for allowing him to address me more formally.
In spoken conversation, the apprentice will address the mentor as “sir” or by a title at least once every time he responds to the mentor’s remarks or raises a new topic.
It turned out that spoken protocol wasn’t as easy for my apprentice to maintain as written protocol. We ended up having two conversations on the first day of his visit about why he wasn’t maintaining protocol. He was as distressed by the situation as I was, because him addressing me formally was a protocol we’d both agreed beforehand that we wanted him to follow. Much of the fault for his failure to do so lay with me, for not acting in a dominant enough manner, but we agreed that me giving him a set structure for when to call me “sir” would be helpful to him. As a side benefit, me periodically correcting him thereafter helped with the “not dominant enough” problem.
After he’d gotten into the swing of things, the only time I was likely to remind him of this rule was when he forgot it so many times in a row that I became aware of the absence of sirs. Usually this awareness took the form of me having the uncomfortable feeling that my boy didn’t respect me any more as a dominant. This was ridiculous, because I believe him when he tells me that he respects me at all times, but it shows how much I depend on the “sirs” to receive subliminal reassurance that my apprentice regards me as his dominant rather than as an egalitarian companion.
I’m not as good at remembering to call him “boy” and “apprentice” periodically. This is something I need to work on.
In talking about the mentor to others, the apprentice will refer to him as “my sir,” “my mentor,” “my dominant,” or “Mr. [Last Name].” The mentor will refer to the apprentice by his first name; as “my boy,” “my apprentice,” or “my submissive”; or, in formal situations, by his last name.
We’ve talked a lot about titles. A lot. I wasn’t satisfied with any of the leather titles available to me, because I didn’t think any of them fully described me. I was much more comfortable with being addressed by a vanilla title, but I had to explain to my apprentice all the emotional resonance that being addressed by a vanilla title and last name has for me. Once he understood that, he liked the idea enough to suggest that I sometimes address him by last name alone. We haven’t been in a formal enough setting yet for me to do so, but I anticipate that next year’s M/s Conference will be such a setting.
The mentor or the apprentice may choose to use special titles for one another at private moments.
Essentially, what this means is that he can call me “master” in private. I asked him not to use that title for me in leather space because, while he means “apprentice-master,” most leatherfolk would assume from his use of the title that I’m a slave-master. Since I’m not, I didn’t want that sort of misunderstanding to arise. That’s also why I’ll rarely use that word at this blog, though in fact it’s the title for me that we’re both most inclined to use when we’re corresponding.
In vanilla space, both the mentor and the apprentice will keep their voices discreet, no matter what the topic is that’s being discussed.
This rule arose because of the problem I’ll mention below. The conclusion I finally reached about vanilla-space conversations was that neither of us could possibly know what topic might offend people nearby; for that matter, there might be someone nearby who wanted to read or nap and would therefore resent the very fact that he had to listen in on our conversations. So I made a flat rule that we should keep our voices low at all times. This is hard for both of us, as we both tend to raise our voices when we get excited about our subject matter.
In the presence of the mentor’s family, the apprentice will refer to the mentor by his first name and will avoid gendered references.
My parents know that I have a writing apprentice. My partner knows that my writing apprentice is also my leatherboy. But my family has a fairly traditional view of me, so this rule is for their sake.
This is a very hard rule for my apprentice to follow. After spending six hours straight calling me “sir” every time he responds to me, he finds it quite difficult to suddenly drop into egalitarian speech in reference to me. Despite that, he did well during his visit.
In the presence of other vanilla folk, the apprentice will address the mentor as..
We’re still working on this one. Unlike some leatherfolk, I find nothing odd about being addressed formally in vanilla space; I’ve been in plenty of vanilla settings where I and other people addressed each other formally. The problem is a gender one: I just don’t look like a Mr. or a sir. And while my apprentice comes from a part of the country where gender-variant references are so common as to be socially acceptable, they aren’t acceptable in my part of the country. So I’m trying to figure out some gender-neutral way for him to refer to me formally, short of me going back to school to get my doctorate. (Any suggestions, folks?)
EXCEPTIONS
Regular protocol is dropped when it would cause unnecessary discomfort to unwitting bystanders, when it would cause hardship for the apprentice or mentor, or when it conflicts with the higher duties of the mentor or apprentice.While I was preparing this entry, I ran across the following passage from a 1953 issue of Time: “Like other Roman Catholics, the Pope confesses. He does so in a small confessional in his private chapel. His confessor is a German Jesuit. Afterward, as the two men emerge from the wooden booth, the confessor kneels to the penitent and kisses his ring.”
This aptly reflects my feelings about leather protocol: It doesn’t fully reflect the complexity of real life.
In real life, there will be times when you have to drop protocol because following it would unnecessarily hurt someone. And in real life, I am not simply a dominant, and my apprentice is not simply a submissive. Both of us have more complex roles, both in relation to one another and in relation to our wider communities.
Some folks in the M/s community make a distinction between submission and service. A slave, they say, must always be in service to his master, but sometimes this service requires him to take a dominant role. Likewise, sometimes being a mentor requires me to take a submissive role to my apprentice. At several points during his visit, I submitted myself to seeking his advice on various topics where he had expertise and I didn’t. He told me afterwards, “Often, when I’m giving you advice, I feel that I’m most in service to you.”
While him offering me advice didn’t require us to break protocol, we did need to break protocol when we visited my old church, because there he didn’t kneel to me - he knelt to the altar. I simply don’t believe in a two-person model of leather hierarchy, wherein I’m never submissive to anyone else and my submissive is never dominant to anyone else. There will be times when, because of our roles in the wider community, we’ll have to relate to other people in a manner that reflects those wider roles.
Any sort of rigid protocol that failed to recognize these wider obligations to each other and to our communities would be certain to fail. Our protocol is designed to be flexible enough to take into account new and unexpected situations.
THE PROTOCOL IN PRACTICE
We were at a leather bar together. I had given my apprentice money and told him to fetch drinks for both of us. Now, some time later, he had asked my permission to sit beside me, and we were both watching the eye candy in the room.I decided to go to the restroom. I asked my apprentice whether he’d prefer to stay here with the eye candy, and he said, No, sir, he’d prefer to accompany me. So we made our way through the bar, with him half a pace behind me, while I took care to stay on the left side of the path so that he’d have room to stay on my right.
When we got to the restroom, he turned and took up a guard position outside the door, standing in parade rest. The “guarding” turned out to be quite literal at one point; it’s a one-person restroom, and somebody tried to get into the room while I was there. My apprentice stopped him.
When I came out, I simply swept past my apprentice, who was standing next to the door, on my left, because that had been my right side when I entered the restroom. My apprentice magically managed to get back on my right side, and we made our way back to where we had been before.
My apprentice said this was the best part of the evening. Having made this particular journey on dozens of occasions before - alone, without a boy following behind me and keeping watch over me to protect me from intruders - I heartily agree.
But if his visit had just been this - my apprentice serving me - something essential would have been missing for me. My dominance primarily takes the form of instructing, advising, and nurturing; without the nurture, our relationship would fall apart. So, for me, the power of this service moment was matched by the moments when, at other points in the visit, my apprentice needed my comfort, and I placed my arms around him.
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