Verdicts Without Witnesses

The Counter is an essay about the things that can't be shipped: the fitting, the code, the judgment of an older man who has decided you are ready. Writing it, I kept running into a second subject that belonged next to it and didn't fit inside it. The essay is about how knowledge moves through a community when the counters close. This is about what moves through it instead, which is mostly talk, and about my own part in that traffic.

The essay has to survive strangers. This doesn't, so I can be plainer here. Here is what I cut, and why.

Verdicts without witnesses.

Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who estimated how many people one mind can keep track of, also argued that language began as a cheaper form of grooming, a way to tend many relationships at once by talking about the people in them. His group found that something like two-thirds of the time people spend talking goes to talking about other people. Gossip, on his account, is the oldest tool a small group has for knowing whom it can trust.

It works at the scale it evolved for. Inside a band of a hundred and fifty, a story about someone can be checked against the someone. Past that size it travels through more hands than anyone can trace, and each pair of hands bends it a little. What arrives at the far end is a verdict without a witness: a judgment about a man from someone who will not say it to his face, carried by someone who did not see what was judged. Commercialization made our community larger than any one of us can know, and the gossip went on working as if it were still small.

I cut this from the essay because it would have read as a complaint, and an essay that sounds aggrieved loses the stranger it was written to persuade. It is a complaint, partly. It is also, I think, true, and here the two can sit side by side.

The minority view.

The essay argues that the more people who can see a signal, the fewer of them know how to read it. I had a paragraph saying the rule holds for opinions as well as bandanas, and I cut it because it was the one place the essay stopped being about the shops and started being about me.

My politics run to the classical liberal side, which in most leather rooms I know puts me in the minority. A minority view gets noticed the way an unfamiliar hanky does. The more people hear it, the more of them take it as a statement about the speaker's character before they weigh it as an argument. In July I wrote here about how a group rounds a man to the nearest category it can act on. A political first principle is very easy to round, and the category it lands in is usually a moral one. Once that happens, the remedy on offer is that the man keep his views to himself, and the people who did the rounding are rarely asked to adjust anything.

I want the same rule for everyone. If a room has decided it doesn't want politics at the bar, I will keep mine in my pocket gladly, as long as nobody else gets to describe my side as a moral failing while I stay quiet. That is the whole of the request.

The fair part I owe the other side is this. Some of it may be how often I bring politics up and how hard I push, more than what I believe. I am a lot of person in a small room. I can work on how often. I would like the room to work on how it hears me.

Investigative over beat.

Journalism was my first love, until I learned how much a story deadline leaves hidden. A beat reporter files what he has by six o'clock. An investigative reporter keeps pulling at whatever he wasn't told, and I have always been the second kind. I float through social circles the way an ethnographer would, taking notes I don't always mean to take, and I will nearly always find the thing someone was keeping back. I told a friend recently that it is my superpower and my curse, and both halves are true.

The superpower is the easy half; it is how these essays get written. The curse takes longer to see. A man who goes looking for withheld information usually finds some. Now and then he finds some that was never there. In a community where so much goes unsaid, and some of what is said is meant to mislead, the habit is useful and exhausting at once, and it can turn a room I love into a room I am investigating.

The only cure I know is the one Dunbar's numbers imply. Ask the person, in the room, at the size where asking still works. I don't always manage it. I am writing it down so the people who know me can hold me to it.

A protocol for the secondhand.

The essay says I don't believe in the Old Guard, and I don't. What I do believe in is protocol, the small rules that grow up between particular people because they work. Leather is full of them: how a boy addresses his Sir, where he stands while his Sir is talking. Nobody decreed any of it. It got copied where it worked.

So here is one I would like to see copied. When criticism of someone travels secondhand, it travels with what the person actually saw, or it doesn't travel at all. "He's difficult" is a label, and nobody can change a label. "He interrupted me twice at the meeting" is a behavior, and a man can work on a behavior by Tuesday. The first kind of message costs the sender nothing and leaves the receiver nothing to do but feel insecure. The second asks the sender to have been a witness.

I want this for myself, because the verdicts that reached me without their witnesses have cost me more sleep than any honest criticism has. I also want it for the next boy, who will hear things about himself secondhand long before anyone tells him to his face, and who deserves at least to know what he is supposed to fix.

The wrong time.

I lost an hour this week to a video about Carl Jung and the person you meet at the wrong time. Most of it I would cut. It insists the universe arranged the meeting on purpose, and I have just spent an essay arguing that nobody designed the leather world. I am not about to hand the job to the cosmos instead.

One idea in it does belong to Jung, though, and it survives the editing. He called it projection: we see in other people what we have not yet recognized in ourselves, and we feel it as a pull long before we can name it. The person who undoes you is often carrying a picture of who you could be. The video's version of this ends in a greeting card, with the lost person as a messenger and the heartbreak as a lesson plan. I would rather end it where the essay ended, with Mauss. A teacher you cannot keep is still a teacher, and you still owe him a return. You just pay it to someone else.

The video asks what the universe meant by it. I would rather ask what the men I admire from a distance are showing me about the Dom I am trying to become. Some of what I want from them, I suspect, is what a boy will one day want from me.

Borrowed eggs.

The Counter keeps Deirdre McCloskey's case against materialism and cuts the argument that sent me back to her. Lea Ypi, the Albanian philosopher who wrote Free, argued in a recent talk, as one listener reported it, that agency is social: alone, a person has almost none. The shortages of communist Albania forced neighbors into ties, the borrowed eggs and the children minded down the hall, and those ties gave people a sense of power. Capitalism, she said, swaps them for the mini-mart and the paid sitter, so that people end up with more things and less agency than the market promised.

I believe the first half of that completely. McCloskey's answer to the second half is that markets are social too. Trade runs on conversation and trust, and the shopkeeper is a relationship. Much of the old neighborliness was forced by scarcity, and in Ypi's Albania the neighbor could also be the informant, as her own memoir makes plain. Ties you cannot leave look more like dependence than agency. A free society lets people choose their communities instead, a club or a family of men in leather. Where Ypi is right is about the culture. If asking for help has come to feel like an imposition, that is a real loss, and the fix is an ethic of asking and giving, which I am still learning, as a later section here makes plain.

Who named the Old Guard.

The essay says I don't believe in the Old Guard and leaves out the detective work. Here it is. One leather blogger who went looking traced "Old Guard," as the name of a leather generation, to an editorial by Andy Mangels in Drummer in 1989. Guy Baldwin's own essay on the Old Guard pushes the date back a little: it opens by answering an interview with Brian Dawson and mentions that Baldwin had used the label himself a few years earlier. Either way, nobody seems to have called the postwar men the Old Guard until the mid-1980s, forty years after they came home. The same blogger noticed that every generation puts the real Old Guard one generation before its own. I suspect mine will do the same, and that somebody will one day call us the Old Guard for things we only half did.

Rooms.

This fall I hosted a dress rehearsal for a murder mystery at my place, and I enjoyed it more than I expected. I wrote a paragraph about it for the essay and cut it, because next to Megahood and the bulldozers it read like a management seminar. Here is the paragraph. Community is shared space and shared activity, and the design of the space matters, because a room constrains the scale of what can happen in it and the kind of thing people can do there. The purpose of the activity matters too. Building something together costs more than consuming something together, and it leaves a shared pride behind, and a shared pride is what holds a group's internal order together when something from outside comes for it. That is the whole of it. It is also why I keep hosting, and why I came home from the Žižek lecture wanting to argue with him about cooperation.

Asking, and being asked.

At Bad Ass Weekend I turned down six people who asked me for a scene, and I felt like an asshole every time. The same weekend, the scene I most wanted got onto the schedule only after a friend made the ask for me. The essay says asking turned out to be the harder art and leaves it there. Here is the rest. I learned early to frame every need so it could get past the person who decided, which is a polite way of saying I learned to get what I wanted sideways. I have a less polite word for it in my notebook, in capital letters. Being asked is the mirror of it. A man who cannot ask plainly cannot refuse plainly either, because both need the same thing underneath: a belief that the relationship survives the answer. I made one ask on my own that weekend, for a whipping, and it worked. I am counting it.

Two endings.

This essay sets up the next two, on sex as a social currency and on party drugs, and those will say more about me than anything I have published. From here I can see two endings for the series. In one, the first essay was a man talking his way into a room he had not earned, and everything since has been him paying for the ticket, with the work unfinished. In the other, the first essay was just talk, and so was the rest. By the series' own framework those are the Owner's ending and the Guest's. The Guest declares the whole thing a performance and leaves. The Owner stays and pays in installments. I know which one I am writing toward. I also know that writing the other would be the oldest move I have, which is to turn on myself through the institution so I can stand outside it again. The scapegoat is still a role, even when you cast yourself.

These are for the people close enough to ask me directly. If that is you, ask. I would rather hear it from you in the room than from someone else at the bar, and I will try to do you the same courtesy.