Lenny Waller, Owner of the Hellfire Club, at Cinekink's screening of Michele Capozzi's "Pornology."

Lolita Wolf and Lenny Waller, Barbara Nitke's Smooth Operator Opening

Although I moved to Manhattan in the 1980′s, I never mustered up the courage to visit the Hellfire Club, where Lenny Waller was the manager. I later got to meet him when Cinekink screened Michele Capozzi’s Pornology. Lenny was a pillar of the leather community and organized the annual AIDS Candlelight Vigil.

• Vanishing New York’s obit
• Lolita Wolf’s post
• Lenny’s Google Profile
• “Lenny and Leather” (Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York)

Wrapped for Pleasure: Easy Bondage for Steamy Sex

Date: Sunday, May 24th; 8pm – 10pm
Location: Babeland SoHo, 43 Mercer Street
Tel: 212.966.2120
Cost: $60/Couple

Want to bring sizzling, sexy, fun, and easy erotic bondage to your bedroom? Don’t want to bother with expensive gear or complicated ropes? Let¹s combine sex with super easy bondage with stealthy scarves! Learn fun positions, techniques and how to change positions quickly. Midori will teach you safenon-rope ties for sex in various positions, making the best fitting dildo harness ever, sexual sensation enhancement with good positions, and more. There will be lots practice time so bring some a beach towel or yoga mat, a pillow or two if you like, and wear comfortable clothing. (All the exercises will be fully clothed.) Bring scarves if you like. Otherwise equipment and scarves will be provided. Couples or intimately comfortable friends encouraged!

Art of Feminine Dominance

Date: Tuesday, May 26th; 7:30pm – 9:30pm
Location: Museum of Sex. 233 Fifth  Avenue (@ 27th Street) New York, NY 10016.
Tel: 212-689-6337
Cost: $10 members / student, $12 general. (18+)

Elegance, power and confidence… Do you want to know how to be a dominant without being vulgar? How do you find a sexy and effective style of dominance that authentic to you? Using a special technique she developed Midori will help you to find your inner power femme archetype, allowing you to pursue erotic fulfillment of sensual power play. Not your typical how-to class, you’ll discover the difference between constructive and destructive desires and point you towards ways of bringing satisfaction in play for both you and your partner.

Midori will share with you her secrets of the feminine art of dominance. She will discuss the psychology, politics, practical exercises, techniques, fashion and more. This class is not limited to a gender, but for all who harbor the powerful woman within! Something for everyone from the novice to the experienced player.

Aural Sex: Seduction by Voice

Date: Wednesday, May 27th; 7:00pm-9:00 pm
Location: The Pleasure Chest, 156 Seventh Avenue South, New York, NY 10014.
Tel: 212.242.2158
Cost: $60 single /$100 per two people
Special class limited to 15 spaces

The brain is the biggest sex organ and the voice can be the most powerful tool to create the hottest scenes. Midori will show you how to use the hypnotic magic of the voice to seduce your lover long before you enter the bedroom. Learn how to suggest, command, tease and take control with the art of voice. Enjoy practical exercises, tips and secrets of aural seduction. Most of the class will address fundamentals and skills applicable to all sensual encounters. Then bring the magic of Scheherazade to your bedroom. Incorporating seductive voice techniques learned in this class to heat up the bedroom and add spice to your erotic life. Mesmerize your lover and transport both of you to an erotic landscape. Learn how to build and enrich a powerful fantasy, practice effective voice techniques and spellbinding.

In this hands-on workshop style class you’ll learn techniques of finding out yours and your lovers fantasy, practice story telling skills and improve them with Midori’s gentle guidance. There will be a specific section of the class dedicated to voice and command techniques to enhance your SM and D/s scenes. This class applies to SM players and non-SM players alike.

JoyStick Secrets: How to Thrill a Man

Date: Thursday, May 28th; 7:00pm-9:00 pm
Location: The Pleasure Chest, 156 Seventh Avenue South, New York, NY 10014.
Tel: 212.242.2158
Cost: $60 single /$100 per two people
Special class limited to 15 spaces

The Pleasure Chest will close its doors to the public to offer you this intimate, women-only affair. Learn sensual tricks to blow his mind and make the pleasure last for a long time. This is an intensive practice class to enhance techniques with hands, mouth and more. Wine and cheese will be served and, for dessert, Midori will show you how to practice your technique on fruits, veggies and ice bars.

More about Midori: http://www.fhp-inc.com/

Come and celebrate the awarding of the first Sex-Positive Journalism Awards! The awards will be MCed by Lolita Wolf.

The first 100 attendees will get a gift bag of goodies from the Sexies sponsors. There will also be a silent auction and raffle to support the awards, which will include fabulous prizes including original art by Julio Aguilera, Sophy Naess, and David Steinberg; signed copies of books by winners, judges, and supporters; sex toys; gift certificates for sexy pleasures; and more!

Meet the judges and the winners. Judith Levine will talk about her experiences with media coverage of sexual topics when Harmful to Minors was released. Carol Queen will be there. See a full list of winners, judges and more.

The party will be Saturday October. 4, 6:30-9:30pm, in the downstairs lounge of Splash, 50 W. 17th Street, NYC. $5 cover.

Would you like to volunteer and get in free and be guaranteed a goodie bag? Volunteer shifts are only one hour. Contact Susan Wright at wrightnyc at aol dot com

from Marriage Equality NY

GET INVOLVED- Gov. Patterson is polling support for his marriage decision as opposition takes legal action!

Gov. David Paterson told state agencies on May 14 that New York must recognize same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts, Canada and other places where they are legal. The directive should provide gay couples with as many as 1,300 rights afforded to married heterosexuals, including the ability to collect health and pension benefits, being admitted as “close family” in a hospital room and transferring a business license.

On June 3rd, a Christian legal organization says it has sued to stop New York from recognizing same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. The Alliance Defense Fund says it filed its lawsuit Tuesday in a court in the Bronx. Several Republican state senators are named as party to the suit. The Arizona-based legal group filing the lawsuit has intervened elsewhere in gay marriage and religious freedom cases.

WE MUST STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS NOW!
Governor Patterson is doing a poll on whether people support his decision. Take 5 seconds to lodge your support, just call 1-518-474-8390. You will talk to a live person from the Governor’s office during business hours.

Just say “I support the Governor’s position on same sex marriage,” then give them your 5 digit (New York) zip code.

And, after doing that, join us for pride, for our annual wedding march in September (add it to your calendars), and donate so we can do more (like our “walk a mile in our shoes campaign” and our Albany event Monday of this week) to show these groups we will not accept anything short of equality!

Happy Pride!
The Board Members of MENY

Here’s some video from Wednesday’s play piercing workshop at Arena Studios

Click To Play

Lolita Wolf taught the workshop and did the piercing
Wendy Blackheart was the piercing guinea pig
Audacia Ray shot and edited the video

“By that which one falls, by that shall one rise.” Aghora means “without fear.” In this workshop we will discuss some of the more extreme Tantric practices in which social and personal boundaries are consciously crossed for the purpose of spiritual evolution. Tantra recognizes that one pathway to opening up higher consciousness is through shocking the system. Practices such as piercing, meditation in cremation grounds, and imbibing of mind altering substances are traditionally practiced. Along with these traditional rituals, we will discuss ways in which the Aghoric approach can adapted and employed in modern, Western society. We will also discuss the often misunderstood fierce aspects of the deities Kali and Shiva.

Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson are co-authors of The Essence of Tantric Sexuality (Llewellyn Worldwide). They have been teaching Tantra and Kriya yoga together since 1999 and have been featured in many publications, including The Village Voice, Now, Jane, Rockstar, Breathe and Redbook.

Date: Fri. November 9th, 2007
Time: 8:45 -10:45 PM
Location: 250 West 26th St. (7th & 8th Ave)
Cost: $8 per person ($4 for DSF & affiliate members)

More info & registration

The young gays and lesbians stream from subway stops dressed in their flashiest gear: rainbow sunglasses, 6-inch-high gold wedge sandals, a fatigue-printed hoodie, a rhinestone-studded pink Playboy bunny bag.

Hundreds of them make their way through the West Village — home of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s — toward the pier overlooking the Hudson River, where a drag queen in a platinum-blond wig and gold bamboo-style earrings swishes past a group of boys in baggy jeans. One shouts, “Hey, baby!” and she stops. With her backside facing the boys, she bends over in her pleated denim miniskirt and flashes them.

They come to this Manhattan pier at night from Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, New Jersey. The black and Latino gays and lesbians say this is the only place where they can be themselves. Here, boys in Timberland boots and fluorescent sweatshirts know they won’t get beaten up for kissing each other, and girls with cornrows beneath backward baseball caps are not embarrassed to cuddle other girls.

“This was like the first place I could really be exposed to people of my kind, without having to worry about getting bashed,” said Cliff Jones, 20, of Harlem, whose neighbors don’t know he is gay.

Jay Jeffries, 65, is white and gay. He has lived for 40 years in the West Village, where he participated in the first gay rights marches. From his second-floor window, he watches the roller-skating boys with boomboxes pressed to their ears and the fistfighting girls wearing do-rags and jerseys.

He has never felt so out of place.

Residents like Jeffries say they want the gays of the hip-hop generation to take their rowdiness elsewhere. They have demanded stricter curfews at the pier. They have lobbied to close a train stop on weekends to make it more difficult for people from New Jersey to travel to the West Village, and to ban loitering in their neighborhood. They have suggested that park patrol officers — who police the pier — carry guns.

For decades, the West Village has welcomed gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual people of all backgrounds. It was here that a police raid — which happened frequently in gay bars in the 1960s — at the Stonewall Inn set off the most famous gay riots in this city’s history and fueled the start of the national gay rights movement. But old-timers still living in the West Village are more subdued now. While there are those who accept the young gays who flock to the village in the spring and summer, others can’t relate.

“They’re all out with their radios,” Jeffries said, “and they’re just hip-hopping all over the street.”

Most of the gay teens and 20-somethings who flirt, kiss, smoke, dance and gossip on the pier, across the street from apartments and brownstones, don’t know about the Stonewall riots, Jeffries said. “They’re another generation. These are the people who got the rights” because his generation fought for them.

“There’s no willingness to interact,” Jeffries said, “or to really treat us with the respect we deserve.”

(more . . . )

A major archive of papers relating to the early gay-rights movement in America has been donated to the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division. The Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs consist of letters, photographs, handbills, manuscripts, publications, and ephemera accumulated over nearly 50 years by the late activist and writer Gittings (1932–2007) and her life partner, photojournalist and author Lahusen.

Gittings’s papers document her activities on behalf of gay and lesbian rights from 1958, when she founded the East Coast chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization. Her writings influenced the American Psychiatric Association’s December 1973 removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. As a longtime leader of the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force (now the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table), Gittings was influential in developing programs to highlight the availability of gay materials for use in libraries. She was awarded an ALA honorary membership in 2003.

Lahusen’s extensive photographic collection includes images of early protesters, portraits of prominent lesbians, and photos chronicling gay activism through 2005. “Barbara and I always wanted our papers and photographs to be cared for and made available in a secure, world-class repository,” Lahusen said. “And we wanted our letters and photos to be surrounded by those of friends and colleagues in the cause. The New York Public Library’s marvelous archive division was the obvious choice.”

“The collection donated by Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen,” said NYPL President Paul LeClerc, “is a remarkable firsthand chronicle detailing the battle of gays and lesbians to overcome the prejudice and restrictions that were prevalent prior to the activism and protest movements that started in the 1960s.”

[via fellow librarian badfaggot]