London Munch and KinkFest

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Posted by Tanos on Tue 2 Aug 05, 12:42 AM

There's been a lot written about KinkFest2 on IC already, and here's my contribution about the biggest BDSM event so far this year

We set off from Manchester by train after work on Friday, and made it to the hotel (near Tower Bridge) and back into the city, to get to the London Munch by 9:20ish. I'd been to the old White Horse munches in the dim and distant past, but not to the Princess Louise ones runs by MsGoth before: meet and greet on the door (it's a private room) and certainly none of the old #submissionuk's "hi New Person, you have to guess who we are" type "welcome."

So we dove in, and started putting faces to names with the help of some of the locals we've met elsewhere (you know who you are - thanks again )

We headed back after 11ish, ready for the long day on Saturday.

KinkFest and the after party were both in SeOne, in some of the arches under London Bridge railway station. I'd got a hotel a few minutes walk away, so we walked round in the morning with our stall-in-a-bag kit.

Unfettered had given free stall space to community groups like the SM Dykes, the Spanner Trust, the Sexual Freedom Coalition, and the Kinklusive event in Manchester that lili and I are helping with.

(It also has to be pointed out that Unfettered repeatedly offered a stall to SM Pride - as Fuschia thanklessly also did at KinkFest 1 - but she was knocked back again, just as she was when she offered to include SM Pride in the organising of the original event last year.)

Holding KinkFest 2 at SeOne is a move away from the Conway Hall where KinkFest 1 and the Pervfests had been. There have been BDSM / Fetish / Sexuality events at SeOne before, but after Unfettered booked it, Torture Garden and the Rubber Ball have also decided to use it. I think it's a much better venue for this kind of event: it's more gothically atmospheric, but also very flexible because the spaces can be subdivided, put together, or turned into wide thoroughfares with things going on. And since it works as a club venue as well as workshop / demonstrations space, they could also use it for the after-party without it having all the atmosphere of the disco after a wedding reception

Kinklusive's stall was in the community area, right next to the bondage demonstration area that went on all day. Again, the venue allowed a lot more possibilities than the conventional meeting room for 2 hours that we could have for the bondage sessions at KinkFest 1. The middle of the space had a small, central stage, with a suspension frame, with a timetable of demonstrations nearby so people could check what was coming. Then round about were smaller demonstrations going on in a more ad-hoc way. Since the whole area was a thoroughfare from the community area to the workshops, it got a lot of people through without being disruptive - although all the bondage was rope-based this time.

(And of course, the location meant lili could sit and watch the ropework from the stall )

In the run up to the opening time, we got the stall set up, laid out the flyers, and stuck the "Kinklusive - Manchester - 12 Nov 05" letters to the wall behind. We were also next to the stall for SM Dykes Manchester / South East, and the whole set up worked very well (especially when Moira and Yaz were staffing both stalls!)

KinkFest was also the day we launched our flyers: the flyer design was done by Yaz, using a logo done by lili (and using a triskelion from my smooth curves triskelion maker program.) Most of the front of the flyer is a collection of pictures donated by IC members: it's really striking and worth tracking down one. As well as shifting about 400 or 500 of them at KinkFest, they're in Manchester BDSM/Fetish shops now, we're going to drop some off at events we go to, and MsGoth very kindly offered to take a box of 1000 for her munch, the LFF and other London events

Of those several hundred flyers handed out, popi must have done more than anyone, whilst MG, sera, Deek and MrBoo also took turns on the stall and with the flyers.

(As well as the flyers, we also had some IC black and blue ribbons, and 70 people came up and asked for one.)

During the day, I did nip out to the railway station to get some drinks and snacks, and noticed there were two policeman on the door of SeOne with submachine guns, chatting to the venue security guys. Quite a turn up to have a BDSM event being guarded like that, even if it was only for a few minutes: they'd gone by the time I got back. (There were a lot of police generally in near the stations in London, following July's tube and bus bombings.) Later on, some of the police were invited in, and seemed to be enjoying themselves as they had a good look round. Things do seem to be changing.

I didn't get chance to go to many of the workshops and demonstrations, but there was a good range of subjects, mostly about physical BDSM - especially SM and bondage. (It's can be quite hard to do workshops on D/s subjects, for instance, since they're not very visual.)

I did get to a good look at the stalls, bought a couple of things, and also got to see some of the stage show, especially Rosie Lugosi of Club Lash in Manchester, and Laurence's talk about his ongoing employment law case (being sacked for being involved in BDSM/Fetish clubs - he's the leading figure behind Roissy Workshops.) He made an increasingly rousing speech about it, and the most important aspect is that the appeal to the European Court is now being carried forward by Liberty (who are the experts in all this, of course.) If he wins, then we all get the protection of the law against being sacked for having our perfectly consensual fun.

The only reference I can find online for more about this is development is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BDSM-HumanRights/m... but if you see Laurence at a club, go up and shake the man's hand!

After the day time event finished, we went back to the hotel (rather than to the munch in SeOne) and then back for 9:30ish. The after party used the same spaces as the day time - due to the number of people expected, they were able to hire more for the evening than originally planned. (1000 in total for the day event and party, apparently!)

It did fall between two stools of hot play area with nowhere to sit, and loud dance / seating area, so not so good for talking (I do say that about most clubs though.) Despite all this I enjoyed myself, and lili also did some ropework with arwen - who was also the sub that went for the most in the slave auction (some of the couples/tops went for more) whilst still wearing lili's rope harness.

So KinkFest 2 was definitely a succcess. I want to say a big thankyou to everyone in Unfettered and the volunteers who put in so much work to make it happen. There are too many to mention (and I'm on the outside looking in this time, so I don't know ) but Fuschia needs singling out, since it was all because of her initial determination to do something after SM Pride dropped the ball last year. But instead of just organising a KinkFest to fill the gap because of no Pervfest, the UK scene has another world class event where before it had a village fete.

On Sunday, lili and I went to the London Dungeon, which I've not been to for years. It used to be a bit like a bigger version of the Clink (that we went to after KinkFest 1) but in a railway arches space like SeOne that you could mill around in. Now it's a virtually a theme park ride, with you taking one long fixed route through a variety of scenes with actors trying to spook you. (No more peering at waxworks figures displaying different instruments of torture in use...)

Then after a short bookshop-crawl up and down Charing Cross Road, we headed back to Manchester for a long sleep

Edited Tue 9 Aug 05, 4:02 PM by Tanos


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