Director's Statement

When I first dove headfirst into the leather world and discovered the grit, profundity, laughter, and nuance there, I knew the next film I was going to make would be something about BDSM. This was because I looked around - got my hands on every BDSM film I could get my hands on - and saw nearly none that did justice to my experience or went beyond BDSM 101. Sick: The Life and Death of Supermasochist Bob Flanagan was one of the few that stood out for me at the time.

I had no idea then that five years later, I'd have made this little film, about a fetish I hadn't even heard of at the time, and that the journey would be such an intense, personal, and spiritual one.

When I first met Pup Tim and Master Skip, I was most blown away by the fact that I could be helping them with a flogging demo on stage at a huge leather title contest one night, and, less than twelve hours later, be sitting next to them, singing beautiful music in church. I was moved to witness two lives in which such seemingly disparate elements coexisted with peace, playfulness, and ease.

It made me see how much disjuncture I harbored in my own life as a kinky woman who wasted much energy gauging who to tell or not tell what to in her own life. For several years, I had been actively exploring the BDSM world and most of the things I was most excited about during this time were related to the growth I was doing in the 'leather world'. And yet what I saw in the media, and what my immigrant-generation Taiwanese-American parents understood of that world, was so negative and misinformed that I automatically hid my life. The cost of choosing to wear masks all the time is intimacy. If you're not "known", it's hard to feel loved for who you are. I think that is most painful with those you most love and want to be close to.

So the process of creating this film about two men who live the integration of sexuality and spirituality in their own lives has come hand-in-hand with the process of integrating those arenas in my own life.

I think that is one of the gifts of the film.

This is a film not just about a little-known fetish or contest in a sub sub culture, although it is happily about those things too. Ultimately, it is a film about love; about living integrated and whole -- "real in our own skins"-- as Master Skip put it once; and about the unexpected places where we can find spiritual practice and joy.