Fetish Dayz: HOTTER, DAMPER… I’D STILL RATHER BE IN TAMPA

Over this weekend a lot of my pervy friends are in Tampa, Florida, attending Fetish Con, the convention which focuses on the US bondage industry and associated fetish businesses.

Now in its third year at Tampa, Fetish Con has become the summer occasion for the gathering of America’s kinky clans (and a fair smattering of international pervs), and I wish I could have been there with them again this year. Florida may not have the most hospitable weather in the hurricane season but I have happy memories of last year’s event and it would have been great to see all my old fetish friends from the East and West Coasts and points between. Not to mention the inevitable pleasure of making new friends, which events like this pretty much guarantee, given the constant opportunities for socialising and the general camaraderie you find when a bunch of pervs take over a hotel for a long weekend.

On the other hand, had I given in to transatlantic temptation and treated myself to a ticket to Tampa, the day I would almost certainly have chosen to fly out to Florida would have been yesterday, Thursday August 10th, the day on which air travel in Britain was brought to a virtual standstill by a full-scale terrorist alert. Anyone expecting to fly from Heathrow to Miami, as I would have been, would probably have ended up just cancelling their trip.

It’s not a great sacrifice to go without a tube of toothpaste or a pair of scissors on a nine-hour flight, but faced with the prospect of repacking the stuff that I normally take as hand luggage on my US trips — iPod, SLR camera kit and laptop — into my checked luggage, I really don’t know whether I would have wanted to take the risk. Even if someone had told me there was a flight leaving that I could get on, I just wouldn’t have been confident that I’d see any of it at the other end. And would my insurance have covered it, if it had been stolen from suitcases which US airport security personnel already want us to leave unlocked?

The current extra security measures are likely to remain in place for some considerable time. So it will be interesting to see how — or if — those in charge of air travel address the potential problem of people deciding en masse that flying without hand luggage is just not worth it.

For the time being though, clear plastic carrier bag manufacture sounds like a good business to be in.

Below: Lew Ruebens demonstrates proposals for new passenger security measures at last year’s Fetish Con (Photography by TM)