emotionally sustainable, significantly safer from harm.
These are the stories of people who have learned how to tell you the stories you want to hear, especially the ones that hurt.
The title Love Not Given Lightly comes from a song by my favorite musician, Lou Reed, who died not long after I finished the first draft of this book. The song is “Venus in Furs,” named for the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel of the same name, both of which are notorious odes to the erotics of domination and submission.
I used to play this song in session, slithering around to the pace of the tambourine, reveling in how weird it was and how much it made my clients squirm.
Maybe Lou Reed was a sadomasochist, or maybe he just enjoyed scandalizing people. Either way, Lou totally got it. He got the literary value, he got the irony, and he wrote a line that has always encapsulated both BDSM and sex work to me.
Taste the whip, in love not given lightly
Taste the whip, now bleed for me
I met the subjects of this book because we were all different kinds of professional lovers. For our clients, we provided intimacy, satisfaction, entertainment, adventure, and therapy—that kind of love. I learned early on that the best way to give what I gave at work without draining myself was to find love with my co-workers. We gave each other lust, camaraderie, support, humor, and care—that kind of love.
Being Tina Horn introduced me to myself. Being Tina Horn introduced me to many of the people who have shaped my life so far.
These are love stories. Not the love of default programming, or heteronormativity. They’re stories of the way love transforms us. A transman learns to love his body. A fetishist learns to love his own cravings. A queer woman and queer man find platonic friendship as they are renting out their intimacy by the hour. An ordinary house becomes the threshold to a world of fantasy.
Being Tina Horn taught me how to love by teaching me the value of my body and my talents. It took years of actual labor for me to realize what she was trying to tell me.
You gotta labor for love. You gotta work hard to understand how love can pass through a whip, how pain can be transcendent. When you know your way around the economy of love, you know that you have to earn it.
gender
James Darling
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