Sometimes you can know too much about your parents. When I told my mother I was gay [I still am, coincidentally], her mental image of me was that I’d have a handlebar mustache and strut around in leather chaps all the time.
I blame The Village People for that one, so I let it slide.
Fast-forward, and I’m settling in at college when my mom starts asking about my sex life and how I’ve been getting dates. I tell her that I had a boyfriend whom I’d met on the internet.
She then tells me that she wants to get herself online.
By next winter my mother tells me she’s started visiting chat rooms. She then abruptly asks me about using duct tape for bondage. I warily tell her I know a guy who has some wrist restraints and likes to be spanked, but hadn’t really gotten past the furry handcuffs. Why was she asking?
She said ‘someone’ had said something about it in of her chat rooms. I told her to be careful.
Summer of the following year, I was back home visiting my mother. I ask if I can use her computer to check my email while she made lunch. I sit down and open up her laptop.
Suddenly, this chat window opens up:
“Mistress, did You receive my insignificant tribute to Your glory?”
Some random spam message—I figured—about to tell my mom to put money into an offshore bank account in exchange for future glory and a larger penis [I’m not sure either would do her any favors], so I open the chat client to change the settings for her so she won’t get these messages.
I suddenly take notice of her username: MI$$TRE$$ followed by my last name. It wasn’t the usual cutesy mumsy flowery screen name I usually see when I chat with her.
“Erm… mom?!”I call through to the kitchen hesitantly while she’s making sandwiches.
“Yes, darling?” comes her sing-song reply. I wonder whether this is really the voice of the MI$$TRE$$ I’m hearing?
“You left your chat client open.”
“Oh, just click it down. The X in the corner.”
“You got a message, though, I don’t know if it’s important.”
“It’s probably your uncle!”
“My uncle Hornyslave4U?”
“Oh.”
I hear her put the tray down. “Oh, fuck.”
“I’ll get the kettle on. Give me a minute to reply to him.”
I smile as I walk past her into the kitchen. “Assuming it’s a him, of course!” I say.
It turns out that when my mother got online she started off talking innocently to parents of gay kids, then started doing searches for stuff about human sexuality. She wound up “accidentally” looking at some “Introduction to the S&M Scene” articles and thought it would be ‘funny’ to join the message boards. From there she moved on to the chat rooms, first as a joke, telling men what to do while she chuckled into her morning coffee.
She soon found that the men weren’t joking and that she played the role of the strict schoolmistress well. I grew up under that withering glare of disapproval, so it’s not that great a leap of logic. Soon enough, she’s got herself guys who send her presents through the mail, rich men who put money in her account to watch her sneer at their generosity by webcam, millionaires who pay off her credit card bill every month in exchange for stern words about masturbation.
She told me about someone whom she jokingly told to sandpaper his nipples until they bled to atone for not being quite fawning enough towards her. Photos in her inbox and money in her account followed. She’s got videos of a guy who runs a top law firm dressed as a baby doing cutesy dances for her mocking pleasure. It could ruin his career, and that’s half the fun of it, apparently.
I decline her offer of showing me her “work folder” on the computer.
“Have you met any of these guys?” I ask, thinking all the crazed axe murderer scenarios she must have thought of when I said I’d met guys online.
“Oh yes,” she says, breezily, “Two weeks ago, one of my slaves bought me a ticket to New York and took me shopping,” she furtively shows me a necklace and some earrings in her drawer. They look expensive.
“Are they diamonds?” I think about the inheritance.
“Don’t tell your father,” she says, a hint of the mistress stern coming through. “My boy took me out to dinner, then to the opera and then we stayed at a very plush hotel. It was all very civilized.”
I look around at my mother’s small apartment. “Did you…?”
“Oh, dear God no, I’d never let these men have sex with me. He’s handsome and fit and all, but I just stood my high heel on his scrotum for half an hour while I drank a glass of champagne that he brought for me on his knees, then I slept in the bed and he slept on the floor, chained to the foot of the bed.”
I nod, wondering if I’d rather she’d just fucked him.
“I’m so glad I’ve told you, son, I knew you’d understand. It’s such a weight off my shoulders not to have to keep this a secret from you any more; I’m a remote-control internet dominatrix… I feel so much better now that I’ve told you the truth.”
I’m really not sure I do.
If there is a moral to this story, boys, it is this; spare a thought to your poor mothers when you come out to them as gay. Beware, too, the ways she could repay your honesty—one day she might come out to you as something far queerer.
