LEASH

The technology of lesbian bondage carried to the limit: Far stronger than DeLynn’s Don Juan in the Village (1990), and written with a cool that lacks any shade of porn purple.

The storyteller, sometimes called Chris, finds herself at loose ends when “Current” goes off to Stockholm over the summer recess. Curious, but failing to be picked up at West Village S/M bars, she puts a personals in the Village Voice and soon is caught up in a bizarre bondage tie with an anonymous dominatrix who makes “Chris” her slave. Chris goes up to an East Village roof to meet her mysterious new partner, who makes her wear a blindfold, then puts her through some arousing victim poses and mild tortures, without bringing her to climax. Then she must leave. She waits for further contact, which doesn’t come. When it does, she’s led deeper into bondage and again told to leave, unfulfilled. Really hungry, she writes long letters to “Box 392”—waits—then gets truly drawn in, submitting to the germy tongue of her partner’s dog and agreeing to a slave’s contract and to wearing a locked metal collar that won’t be removed until a week before “Current” returns from Sweden. Chris must spend days on the floor in her apartment, or cuffed to her radiator, and be abased and humiliated, eat and drink from bowls, with no masturbation or even sexual thoughts allowed. No reading, no television, a green plastic pail for a toilet. As meetings go by, the still-blindfolded victim is degraded further, made to swallow urine, a huge dildo, her master’s fist, take a black-pepper enema, and be told that this is all being filmed. Worse comes, and she winds up chained, leashed, turned into a dog, fed dog food, made to use a litter box, later be auctioned off at a dog show—and all for love.

Commandingly abysmal, masterfully observed.