Home . . . . . . The DVD . . . . . . "The Difference Between SM & Abuse" . . . . . . Links . . . . . . Send an Email to Dante
|
Updated April 2, 2012
May 26-June 3 - Maryland
June 16-17 - Winnipeg, MB
July 21 - Indianapolis
July 26-29 - Redwood Falls, MN
August 3-6 - Winnipeg
September 22 - Calgary
Presentation and demo
From The Horse's Mouth Interviewer: Is there a practical use for a whip? Harrison Ford: Depends on your girlfriend. (From an interview in Maxim Magazine, June 2003)
About Robert Dante
Former publisher of Boudoir Noir, the non-fiction alternative lifestyle magazine, Dante also is author of the mainstream book 'Let's Get Cracking! The How -To Book of Bullwhip Skills,' available at Amazon.com.
"Ich Dien"
|
"It was a pleasure to see you Saturday evening at our 20th Anniversary Celebration Ball.
On behalf of the entire Board of HPEP, I thank you for coming to be with us, and to share your recollections of our early days.
Harry, March 2012
"Thank you again for coming down (to Houston) & helping to make the ball a success."
"I wanted to drop you a note to thank you so much for your work in New Orleans.
Your presentation was very informative for the novice and more experienced alike.
I thoroughly enjoyed both days of the presentation and learned so much more than then I ever imagined I would..."
"I was at the seminar you did in Phoenix a while back. I enjoyed it very much! Hope you can make it by here again."
"I admire your work and the energy you have put into whips and S/m..."
"Thank you for the wonderful workshop. I enjoyed it and it inspired me in some other off beat ways. Not only did I walk away wanting to master the throwing of the
whip but I walked away with some thoughts that never really occurred to me...I enjoyed watching your work and feeling it. It helped me immensely."
"I had a great time at your bullwhip class yesterday. Thank you very much for the instruction,
demonstration, and inspiration."
"Thank you for the class! You are such a perfect gentleman - thank you for the kind words.
Great that you found NYC enjoyable. Hopefully, it means that we will see you here more often ;)"
"Thank you for a great class in New York! We had a wonderful time -- and we learned a lot!"
"It was a pleasure to attend your classes at Thunder. I've been a fan for a number of years, and am enjoying your DVD." David, Thunder in the Mountains, Denver CO, 2010
"I heard you speak at Thunder and it was like I was hearing where I've been and wondering if it is where I'm going.
(I'm) in search of the spiritual side of SM, and you hit the nail on the head with your bull whip magick class." V
"Many years ago when I was very new to the scene I attended my first BDSM event. I had read a lot of books on
the subject, experimented in the cyberworld with it etc. However I learned more in five minutes watching you play than I did from all the other material I had read.
A light went on in my head and heart. I am forever grateful for that and I want you to know how happy I am to
have met you."LR
"High lights of my visit to Kinky Karnival 2010: No. 1: Meeting Robert Dante and his lovely companion. I was in awe of his whip skills, humor, easy manners,
friendliness and professionalism. He taught me the reverse crack which I had difficulty learning all these years."
"Ooh, shiny!"
Highly Recommended. I own several of his pieces- RD |
|
This is transcribed from comments made by Robert Dante at the Houston People Exchanging Power (HPEP) 20th Anniversary Ball on March 31, 2012.
I would like to thank the Board, especially Rose, for inviting me to be here tonight.
I seem to have spent my life opening doors and empowering other people. Technically, I may have founded Houston PEP 20 years ago, but for me to take any credit for what it became would be like an obstetrician taking credit for an infant growing up and graduating Cum Laude.
What HPEP has become in this city is due to the people here tonight -- You, each and every one of you. You are Houston PEP in the present tense.
The birth of an entity like Houston PEP was inevitable, it would have happened one way or the other. It was the right time for it. I just happened to be slightly ahead of the curve. I was in the right place at the right time.
As background, I had been charged some time before with assault by a woman who cited my open interest in SM as evidence of a predisposition to violence, using the argument "Where there's smoke there's fire."
My public defender looked at the facts and defended me heartily, equating their argument to saying that if I liked oral sex I would savagely bite people at random on the street.
I introduced into evidence the National Leather Association's Statement on Domestic Violence, one the first documents showing the Leather Community knew the difference between consensual SM and non-consensual assault. After considering the actual evidence, the jury found me not guilty.
But I was now very publically outed, and stigmatized by the stereotypes, so the damage to me already had been done. I resolved to do battle with these sterotypes and prejudices on behalf of other people in the future who might find themselves being blackmailed the way I had been.
I already had kinky friends, but I decided to see who else might be out there, looking for a place to fit in as I once had. Since I was already "out," I put a small ad in Public News, inviting like-minded people to meet at Charlies on Westheimer and Montrose. When the night came, I expected to meet four or five folks.
More than 30 people showed up, all ages, all sexual orientations, all fetishes and levels of involvement. All seemed to be curious to see who else would show up. What they saw were people like themselves. I think some of them saw, for the first time, they were not alone. The door was open.
I knew a group like this would grow. I also knew if anyone imagined, no matter how incorrectly, that my being the public face of this would give me some illusory "power," they would think it was because I had somehow taken some "power" away from them personally. This was why I chose to use the umbrella of the People Exchanging Power concept, created by Nancy Ava Miller.
I liked that each group was autonomous and took on the flavor of its membership.
I was supported in this by wonderful people, some of whom are no longer with us: Ken Fontenot and his boy Eddie, Bob ("Dungeon Trash"), Michael, The Colonel, Officer Wes, Sharon and many others who made this thing work.
I started by opening my home on Binz Street to parties, and I exerted effort to create a space that people would feel safe to play in, from the living room to the kitchen, from the room behind the French doors to the airless playroom with the carpeted walls and the screened-in small side porch upstairs.
There was a learning curve highlighted by epiphanies along the way. At one party, I was checking to see that everyone was okay, and I met gay leatherman Michael, a hell of a whip Top, upstairs in the hallway. He looked disturbed. When I asked him what was wrong, he motioned for me to peek with him through a partially opened bedroom door. Inside, I watched a grandmother-type spanking a huge sissy-maid with a little hairbrush. Michael and I stepped back into the hall. He quietly said to me, "I don't know why, but that really turns me on -- And that bothers me!" At that moment, I knew HPEP would work.
Laurie, who was renting a room from me in the house at the time, watched this all closely and learned, accepting stewardship of the group and continuing the parties in the same house after I moved to Toronto with my slave mary in 1993.
Since that seminal period, I have been blessed by my bullwhips with a career and a lifestyle that allows me to pass between the Scene and the Vanilla World without the need for excuses or apologies.
I was positioned to see this was a trend, not a fad, and the years have proven me right.
I saw in other countries this is a legitimate lifestyle, while in the US we are still considered little more than a subset of the porn industry.
I saw that Kinky was okay, Crazy was not, and there was a difference.
I saw it was the easiest thing in the world for one person to hurt or humiliate another person, but that it was SM when they both enjoyed it.
I saw this was my preference, not my pathology.
I saw that SM was not some dark little corner of the sexual experience, but rather the other way around. I saw SM was the Surrealism of sex, encompassing the infinite variety of the universe itself in its eroticism.
For me personally, the bullwhip became the epitome of SM, as I wrote in the bullwhip chapter in "Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns" -- the whip experience is still for me profound, powerful, graceful and light-spirited at times. I saw it could be a Door into the Absolute, taking its place legitimately alongside other religions, philosophies and belief systems.
With the advent of HPEP, I saw romantic ideals made real, as with the submissive man who knelt naked and watched his Mistress blow up balloons, kiss them with her bright red lipstick and toss them toward him as he masturbated, luxuriating in the recognition that this was the breath of his Mistress, encased in latex, a concept that filled him with ecstasy.
Twenty years ago, I dared to open the door to my home on Binz Street to this nascent community, and people saw there was a safe space to be who they really were, and that they were not alone.
Even such an ostensibly small realization can be incredibly empowering, creating a ripple effect into every part of a person's life. It can be liberating, on many levels.
Over the last 20 years, Houston PEP has been a door to many people, through which they could pass to discover themslves, to create other groups, and to find a richer, broader experience of life than they'd had.
I am grateful I had the privilege, and honor, for a short while, of being the happiest doorman in North America.
Happy Birthday, HPEP!
Robert Dante
|
