Author: Miriam Green

For the last year, Wicked Grounds has been offering “community coffees” (and other basic drinks) for free to anyone who asks. Here’s the way we describe it on Facebook:  Queer & Trans & Kinky folks who need coffee in a safe space – Wicked Grounds currently has dozens of pre-paid coffees or herbal teas available to you, absolutely free, just for the asking. Just ask for a “Support Coffee”. Several of our customers have already bought you coffee, so that everyone can afford a quality beverage in a welcoming environment. Whether you want to come in to rabble-rouse for the queer revolution, attend one of our events, or just need a space to hang out, please do not hesitate to come in and ask for a “support coffee” or tea. This is good as long as supplies last. (Given the generosity of our community so far, we expect to have these available for the long term.) The project started the day after the 2016 election. Several of us were honestly in shock, and figuring out how to mobilize to support and protect our local community. Some baristas and patrons wrote signs of support and hung them throughout the cafe. (You can still find them on our political action wall near the bathroom.) We were desperate to think of more tangible means of support.  Zane Rose (whose Patreon you can check out here, and who later became the 2017 Ms SF Leather) said they wished there was a way to buy free coffee for folks who might need a safe space but couldn’t afford it. As Mir struggled to figure out how that would work, Zane and Johnny the Barista hashed out details on a simple way to ring up and track the drinks. The first seven “support coffees” were added to our whiteboard wall with little hearts, and the movement was started.  Word got out quickly, locally and around the country. Wicked Grounds customers started buying pre-paid drinks for the wall in person, via PayPal from Texas and Oregon, and even by grabbing us in the hallways at the Dark Odyssey conference the following weekend. The wall began to fill with so many pre-paid drinks, we couldn’t imagine giving them all out.  That changed quickly. Over the last year, we’ve given out literally hundreds of drinks through the generous support of our customers.  Many are to regular customers from the LGBTQ/ kink communities who are having a rough week or just struggle to make ends meet in the difficult SF economy. Many more are to our local SOMA neighbors who are homeless or housing insecure and just need a hot or cold beverage to get through the day.  The support coffees allowed us — quite unexpectedly — to participate in a Bay Area general strike on January 20th, 2017. As you may already know, Wicked Grounds has a policy to stay open every day of the year to ensure that our community always has a welcoming environment to be with friends and chosen family. The general strike posed a challenge: how to stay open and closed at the same time? The support coffees made it possible. Our owner, cafe manager and previous owner volunteered to serve just support drinks all day — no money exchanged, no staff scheduled, but we met our mission to keep the doors open throughout a day when many really needed the space.  As we come up on the first anniversary, we want to give a huge shout out to everyone who made this possible — to Zane for the idea, to the baristas who created the system, to the community who bought and consumed the drinks, to the Trans and Queer Bay Area Free Pile group which allows the local community to share resources, and everyone else who has made this small gesture of support possible.  In honor of our first anniversary, we will donate one support coffee for each and every Patreon subscriber at the end of November. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you. If you are not yet a subscriber, consider joining now to make your support even more valuable to the broader community.  And everyone: we love you, ok?  xoxo Mir and the team at Wicked Grounds  PS: Do you want to contribute more drinks to the support wall? You can help by either asking your friendly barista to ring up a community support drink on site, or sending funds by PayPal to Mir@WickedGrounds.com with a note specifying that they are for community support coffees. (Each coffee is $3.30.) Or join our Patreon at the Support Coffee level to have a coffee added to the wall every month like clockwork! 

Hello Patreon peeps!  One of the many projects made possible through your generous support is the Kinky Queer Revolution podcast.  If you haven’t yet had a chance to listen, go check out the link and click “Follow” to keep up with new episodes as they are launched. So far, we’ve been recording every two weeks like clockwork, as we explore new topics in the kink community.  Do you have a topic you’d like us to explore? A comment to share? A question? Email those to AskWickedMir@gmail.com and we will get to them as we can in future shows!  xoxo Mir

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To view this content, you must be a member of Wicked’s Patreon at $1 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.

To view this content, you must be a member of Wicked’s Patreon at $1 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.

In my avid-news-reading life, I’ve found just a couple of publications that I’ve budgeted to subscribe to this year. (Trust me: I’d sign up for ten if I could make the budgeting work! News media are important to me.)  One of those is running a subscription drive right now to vastly expand their newsroom. Because I subscribed last fall, I often glaze over their fundraising pitches — but lately I’ve been paying a bit more attention, in part because Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is significantly better at multi-tasking the whole asking-for-support-and-creating-content-at-the-same-time thing than I am.  Drawing on his own “talking points”, I’d like to quickly call on the value of why supporting Wicked Grounds via Patreon is important, especially as we build this thing:  A regular Patreon support stream allows us time to accept the kinds of projects that we might otherwise have to ignore in the hustle. So far this year we’ve launched a regular quarterly play party at the SF Citadel, authored several advice columns, brought on several new kink artisan vendors, sponsored IMsL, done several new interviews, and have started exploring re-launching the Wicked Grounds Podcast. None of that would be possible without knowing we have a small stream of budget to carve out time for these kinds of projects.  A growing Patreon support stream helps us grow. Your support builds not only new education and online products, but allows us to support new artisans, authors, munch leaders & educators.  Most importantly, subscriptions — whether Patreon or our legacy VIP program — build predictability into our operations. Knowing that Patreon subscriptions will reliably cover the X in our budget means we can focus on building the shop for event season and weathering the slow season equally well.  It’s hard to believe, but the “slow season” is just around the corner. The shop stays busy through September, then tends to slow down every winter. With your help, with your continued support, we can use that time to build better education for kinksters everywhere — write more content, build the podcast, do some videos, maybe even get out to more conferences beyond the Bay Area. Instead of the yearly belt-tightening, we can spend our energies making something even greater for the full kink community.  This August, we’re going to launch a “back to school” membership drive to our community, with assertive goals to make sure the Grounds is sustainable for a long time to come. So here’s my brief request:  If you’re reading this, and you’re not yet a patron, sign up at any level. Even $1/month helps us know that you’re here, you’re listening, and you value our content.  If you’re already a subscriber and you value us and what we’re doing, tell a friend about us! Because we are adult content, you cannot search for us on Patreon. You can only find us with a direct link. So tell your friends about us and then share the link so they can check us out!  If you’re already a subscriber and you’d like to do more, you can always increase your subscription level. The VIP level, in particular, comes with some very sweet online and in-store benefits throughout the year.  You’re here and reading this because you already love us. Please help us do more of what you love.  Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who is already supporting us. (If you’ve signed up for VIP packages, we have some swag coming your way!!!)  If you haven’t yet jumped in, and you’ve been considering joining, please do it now. It will take less time to set up than you’ve spent reading this article. I promise.  xoxo WickedMir 

Next Wednesday – join us for the first bi-weekly recording of Kinky, Queer Revolution – the new Wicked Grounds podcast. Join your hosts Mir, Cyn and Abraham as we explore the ideas, venues, topics and subcultures that make the kink community so unique and interesting! This first live recording will happen right in the back room of Wicked Grounds. We expect to start recording at 2:30, so join us at 2 to settle in and be part of the live studio audience. We warmly welcome all Patreon subscribers to join us if you’re able, since we truly couldn’t be doing this without your support.  For this maiden voyage, we’ll be talking about kink community spaces, and specifically a bit about what it’s like to run a kink cafe in the heart of San Francisco. It’s also Mir’s birthday, so there may be shenanigans! Or cake! We’ll see!

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Wicked Grounds has just returned from a whirlwind of activity at the 31st annual International Ms Leather Contest & Weekend in San Jose. What a blast!  The weekend was filled with classes, play, socials, a fantastic vending area (if we say so ourselves), three days of competition, and a lot of camaraderie. In addition to being a gold level sponsor of the weekend, we had a double booth to show off some of the best in locally made gear. We especially made a point to bring the widest range of books we’ve ever made available off-site, and were thrilled at how many Leather folk from other communities were able to bring new titles back to their local community libraries.  We are proud of what we’ve accomplished this weekend, and want to thank YOU for making it possible. Your Patreon support fuels our increased education and outreach efforts, helping us bring Wicked Grounds to a much wider audience than we otherwise could. We could never have sponsored IMsL at the Gold level without your support. All this to say: thank you! From us, and from Leather folks from around the world. 

Hi Wicked Mir, I’m new to the kink community and have considered myself a bottom in most of my relationships. I have also been a sub. I don’t like the word slave and was wondering if you wouldn’t mind clarifying the difference between the 3 terms. One more thing,if you don’t mind, wondering the difference between a service bottom and a sub. I appreciate your knowledge and time!💖 Thank you,L   Hi L –  Thanks for your questions, and for taking the time to write me!  As the old joke goes, you could probably ask 12 kinksters about these words and get 14 answers! And there are certainly nuances about how these words get used in different sub-cultures within kink land. That said, I’ll give you my answers based on what you can expect to hear most often.  Bottom/ Top tend to be the most all encompassing terms. The bottom is generally receiving the action; the top is generally guiding the action. The top flogs; the bottom gets flogged. The top spanks; the bottom gets spanked.  The rope top ties; the rope bottom gets tied. Often you’ll hear this in a BDSM context, but you also hear it a lot to describe sex roles in the gay community. The top fists; the bottom gets fisted. The top fucks; the bottom gets fucked.  You can think of the bottom and top as participants in a dance where both roles are critical and need to be in sync — no matter what type of dance you’re doing. You can think of Fred Astaire as the top, directing the choreography. But as the old Frank & Ernest comic put it, “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, …backwards and in high heels.” To sum up, bottom/ top in most usage are very inclusive terms that can be used to describe the leader and follower in a variety of dynamics — including the sexual roles in relatively vanilla relationships, active/ passive roles for bondage and domination play, dominant and submissive in D/s dynamics, and giver and receiver of sensation in Sado-masochistic dynamics.  One cautionary note from my personal perspective: Because these terms are relatively inclusive, they also have their limits and can get confusing if you don’t know what type of play we’re discussing. You may also be a bottom in some contexts and a top in others — even within a particular relationship. For example, I might be a dominant, and still order my girl to beat or fuck me. Even though I’d be technically a bottom for the sensation or sexual play, that doesn’t change the fact that I’m the Dominant giving the orders. Because of this, I like “bottoming” and “topping” more as verbs than I like “bottom” and “top” as nouns. It’s more useful for me personally to think of bottoming and topping more in terms of what you do than what your general role is.  For more on these dynamics, The Topping Book and The Bottoming Book by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy are excellent.  Submissive/ Dominant (or sub/ Dom) describes these roles within the context of consensual power exchange. In D/s, the submissive willingly cedes some form of agency to the dominant through their dynamic. The dominant is calling the shots in some specific way and the submissive is giving their trust, willingness, and vulnerability for that to happen.  For me, D/s is all about the mental and emotional play between the submissive and the Dominant. There is a deep power and energy for me as a Dom in holding a strong container for vulnerable and hot play, and bringing a submissive’s desire and actions in line with my own. No matter what else we’re doing — rope or canes, sexy times or watching a movie, or just getting my toenails painted while we lounge in bed — I’m the one calling the shots and my submissive is the one trusting me to do that.  There are probably as many styles of building D/s dynamics are there are dominants and submissives. Some submissives only submit during scenes or playtime; others cede control over some or many aspects of their day to day lives.  You asked specifically about service submissives as well. Service submissives give acts of service as part of their submission. A service submissive might take on specific duties or chores for their Dominant. Those acts of service might be fairly kinky — perhaps bootblacking or serving as a sissy maid in a frilly outfit. Or, they might be relatively vanilla tasks that become an act of service because the Dominant wants it. For example, I once had a service submissive who helped me with large garden tasks for my permaculture design work.  Not all submissives are interested in acts of service. I’ve dated submissives who specifically did not want to engage in acts of service but were submissive in other ways. If you’re into service, it’s a great way of deepening your submission. If you’re not . . . it will probably annoy you. No submissive “has to” do service to be a “true submissive.” There are no rules about how to structure D/s relationship — only agreements.  Anton Fulmen’s The Heart of Dominance is my current favorite book on D/s from a Dom’s perspective. There’s also a great book called Conquer Me by Kacie Cunningham that explores submission from a woman’s perspective.  And then we come to Master/ slave dynamics. This one gets a little tricky, because there are a few different usages going on.  I personally don’t engage in M/s dynamics, and when I was less involved in the kink community, I thought of slaves as some kind of uber-submissive. As I’ve learned more, I’ve been surprised to learn that’s not always the case.  Some folks use Master/ slave to refer to a 24/7 power exchange dynamic — but otherwise they’re basically in a Dominant/ submissive relationship. I’ve also noticed that I tend to hear this usage