Interview with Hadrian Temple

Greetings, blog followers!

Today we’re going to do something a little different. You might remember that last week I featured a book called Leather God Descending by Hadrian Temple— well, something really caught my eye when I checked out Hadrian’s website to find out more about him. Hadrian genuinely identifies as a Leather Dom, as well as a FinDom, and writes fiction that accurately portrays the gay Dom/sub lifestyle, based on lived experience.

I invited Hadrian back to the blog to have a quick chat about Dominance, leather, FinDom, fiction, and more.

CDJ: Hi, Hadrian! Welcome back to the blog! Let’s jump right into this — how should I be addressing you? Should I be using “Sir”? Or is that only necessary for submissives?

HT: Should you call me Sir? It depends. Do you want to submit to me, boy?

Flirting aside, no. Hadrian is fine. In general, I only expect ‘Sir’ from guys who want to be submissive to me. Calling a dom ‘Sir’ is one of the easy ways to indicate that you’d like some level of power exchange with him, even if only socially.

CDJ: I see from your bio that you’ve identified as a Dom for about the last ten years. However, it also sounds like you’ve known this about yourself for a while before, if perhaps you didn’t acknowledge it. Can you tell us a little more about that journey of self-discovery?

HT: Looking back over my life, I can see all sorts of ways that my dominant side tried to emerge when I was younger, but for some reason it just didn’t click with me that I was kinky. I remember with my first boyfriend, early in the relationship there was an incident where we were kissing and I just said, “Get on your knees.” I don’t know why I said it, but it felt right to me. He freaked out and that was the end of any exploring of power exchange with him, and I think it discouraged me from exploring those instincts for a really long time.

When I was 40, my partner of 8 years suddenly dumped me in a pretty shitty way. That was a really shattering event for me, and it broke me out of all sorts of patterns I had been in. In a way, it cleared the ground for me to make a lot of changes, and recognizing I was kinky was one of the most important of those changes. When I had that realization, I got lucky in that one of my friends was friends with a very experienced bondage dom who agreed to mentor me. So I didn’t have to explore gradually; I got to jump into the deeper end of the pool with someone to keep my head above water. He taught me a lot about bondage, leather traditions (at least as he knew them), and power exchange. It was sort of like taking an accelerated course in kink.

I particularly remember the first time he dressed me in his leathers. It was like a home-coming. It just felt right. A real ‘where have you been all my life?’ moment. He looked at me and said, “You look more comfortable in that in 5 minutes than a lot of guys look in 5 years.” He was a uniform fetishist too and dressed me in a cop uniform. I’d always fantasized about stuff with cops, but when he did that, I suddenly thought, “Holy crap! You mean I get to be the cop? Hell YES!” I’ve never looked back.

CDJ: How does leather fit into all of this for you?

HT: For me, there is something remarkably powerful about leather. It’s a total sensual experience—it looks sexy, it feels sexy, it smells sexy, it tastes sexy, it even sounds sexy. Good leather is slightly restrictive, so it takes a bit more force to move in, which encourages me to be more aggressive. I have a 1950s German police leather trench coat. It weighs about 25 lbs, so I really have to move assertively. It’s like wearing pure sex. But at the same time, some leather is really revealing. When you put on chaps, your crotch and your ass are totally exposed. You can’t not feel sexual in chaps. So wearing leather has this performative element to it. Put it on and you’re on-stage as a kinky, highly sexual person. The question is what role you want to play, the dom or the sub?

CDJ: And about the FinDom aspect of your role… can you first tell our readers what FinDom is? And how did you discover your place as a FinDom?

HT: Findom is Financial Domination. The sub gives the dom money in exchange for things like verbal abuse, humiliation, and control. It’s sort of like flogging the sub, but the pain is financial loss rather than physical impact. Depending on how you frame it, it’s essentially a form of sex work, but one that doesn’t necessarily involve actual penetrative sex. Like many other forms of kinky sex, it’s about power exchange. The usual rhetoric is that the sub is serving an obviously superior dom by giving them money. So the dom can be extremely demanding. And for me it’s incredibly arousing to receive a finsub’s ‘tribute’. It’s not the money itself; it’s what the money symbolizes.

I started exploring it because I had a couple guys contact me through my dating profiles (which make it clear that I’m kinky) and offer to be finsubs for me. The Findom scene is huge on Twitter, and when I started actively promoting my erotica, I set up a Twitter account and it just seemed natural to explore findomming more than I had previously.

CDJ: From your bio and from following your Twitter stream, I’ve noticed you talk a lot about ethics, particularly when it comes to FinDom. Can you tell us a bit about these ethics and why they are important to you?

HT: When you’re doing BDSM, a lot of the things that happen raise ethical questions. How can I justify hitting my partner? Isn’t that domestic violence? I just told someone he’s a worthless faggot. How is that ok? The answer is consent. It’s ok because my sub consents to receive that treatment and in fact actively wants it from me. So answering these fundamental questions forces you to start thinking about ethical issues. BDSM is sort of confusing by nature—we hurt the ones we love. Without an ethical foundation, it becomes really easy to get lost in a hall of funhouse mirrors where up is down and cruel is ok. It’s very easy for doms to do really harmful things to subs, and unless they understand the principle of consent, a lot of subs wind up injured or worse. I’ve heard some absolute horror stories from novice subs who didn’t realize they could say no to a dom.

So I put ethics front and center in my writing—both my erotica and my blog posts—because I want to help kinksters who didn’t get the really solid grounding that I got when I found kink. Porn almost never shows things like consent and safety practices, because that’s not seen as sexy. I’ve read a fair amount of erotica on Amazon that was obviously written by people who don’t know much about BDSM, because it shows the characters doing things that serious doms and subs would never do because they’re dangerous or emotionally destructive. 50 Shades of Grey is the really famous example, but it’s far from alone.

Findomming is a good example of the ethical dangers. It has a bad reputation among kinksters in part because in the past few years a whole lot of people discovered that you could make money by advertising as a findom, and these people often don’t stop to think about the responsibilities doms have to subs. I’ve seen findoms talk about pressuring their subs to take out loans, which is wildly inappropriate. Not long ago, I saw a video some idiot findom posted in which he was encouraging the finsub to smoke meth, because it would get him high enough that he wouldn’t control his tributing to the findom. That really infuriated me. It’s absolutely wrong and shit like that makes things worse for everyone else. On the other hand, the ethical findoms genuinely care about their finsubs. They offer the subs emotional support, guidance, and affection. One findom I know banked some of the money he was given by a finsub and after several years gave it back to the sub to help him achieve a goal they had set together. To me, that’s exactly how an ethical findom should act.

One of the basic rules of being a dom is that the more control you have over what’s happening, the more ethical responsibility you have for whatever negative consequences might arise. As a dom, if I actually harm my sub in some way, I’ve done something really wrong. So it’s the dom’s duty to know what he’s doing and to stop the play before damage is done. If I agree to accept a finsub, I discuss his finances and set a limit to what he’s allowed to give me. Typically, I require his tribute to come out of his entertainment budget, so there’s no risk of him not being able to meet his rent or something like that. In other words, his dynamic with me takes the place of going to a movie or other discretionary spending.

CDJ: Now for the big nature versus nurture question — one I acknowledge may not have an answer. Do you feel that people are born to be naturally Dominant and/or submissive? Or is it a learned behaviour based on sexual desire? Or is it a bit of both? What do you think?

HT: This is the great question of kink, isn’t it? Why do we like the things we like? I don’t know that there really is an answer to that.

A lot of findoms declare that they are just naturally superior and that gives them the right to demand money from finsubs. In my opinion, that thinking logically leads to fascism. Nazism is rooted in the idea of a biologically superior ‘master race’ after all. So I pretty strongly reject the idea that dominance and submission are something inherent. I only become superior when a sub agrees to be inferior to me. It’s the concept of consent again—the sub has to want to be my inferior.

That said, I can’t tell you exactly why I enjoy being dominant and some other guy enjoys being submissive. I can point to very deep parts of my personality that are related to being dominant—a desire to teach people, for example. And there definitely are a lot of subs who feel very profoundly that they were born with an inherent inferiority. They feel like they’ve always known they were supposed to serve.

If I have to give an answer, I’d say that it emerges from things deeply rooted in childhood. I was the youngest of four siblings in my family, so I didn’t have a lot of power growing up. That might have made me more receptive to the idea of having a lot of control. But why it comes out sexually, I couldn’t say.

CDJ: If someone thinks they might be a Dominant or a submissive, what would you recommend as their first step in discerning if this is who they are?

HT: I would suggest doing a lot of reading about BDSM. Like I said, BDSM is sort of a hall of kinky funhouse mirrors, and it’s easy for newbies to get confused unless they have a grounding in the basic ethical issues. My blog has a Bookshelf page where I list a whole lot of basic works that offer a good introduction to BDSM. I blog about various issues like why honesty is fundamental to kink or how to frame verbal abuse so it’s less likely to be psychologically damaging to the sub.

CDJ: Let’s switch to your writing! How does your lived experience get reflected in your writing?

HT: One issue is my concern for ethics and safety. In most of my longer fiction, I try to include references to safety practices. If my character ties someone up, he’s probably going to check to make sure the ropes aren’t too tight or something like that, because that’s what a good dom does. In my novel Leather God Descending, the main character, Adam, negotiates scenes with two different subs. He finds out what the sub does and doesn’t want to experience and sticks within those guidelines. I liked the idea of showing a novice kinkster what they should be doing before they actually start playing.

Another issue is that my characters have sex pretty early on. There’s a lot of M/M romance written by women, and in that genre, the gay characters often take ¾ of the novel to actually have sex. This stuff frustrates me because that’s just not the way most gay men have sex. Most gay men that I know will engage in sex very quickly if they think the other guy is hot. When I meet a sub, I almost always meet for coffee first. That’s when I negotiate. I’ve had guys get really frustrated that I wouldn’t just instantly hook up with them—that’s how fast a lot of gay guys will have sex. So a lot of the M/M romance I’ve read just feels unrealistic, as if the characters were monks trying to decide if they should break their vows of chastity. Straight people often look for emotional compatibility before having sex—they want to know that the other person could be relationship material before they move to having sex. Gay men, at least in my experience, look for sexual compatibility first. They want to know that the other person is sexually well-matched before thinking about relationship potential. So that’s how my characters generally do it. They have sex and then they try to figure out whether they want a more serious relationship.

A third way my lived experience comes out is that I write from the dominant perspective, because that’s what I know best and what really appeals to me. The vast majority of BDSM erotica is sub-centric. It’s all about the novice sub meeting a highly experienced dom who takes control and initiates them into submission. The emphasis is on the sub’s emotional journey, their fears and desires, and the things they have to overcome to be happy as a sub. My novels are much more about the dom’s emotional journey, his doubts and fears, and the obstacles he has to overcome in order to take charge of another man.

I started writing this stuff in part because I got frustrated that my own experiences weren’t being reflected in the erotica I was finding. It would have been easier for me to really embrace my dominance if I had seen other doms struggling with various issues. So I hope that my novels can show novice kinksters that it’s ok for us doms to have doubts and confusion.

CDJ: What’s your most favourite scene that you’ve ever written?

HT: There are a lot of scenes I like. Almost all of them are sexual fantasies I’ve had, except for some that were based on scenes I’ve actually done. Claiming the Slave is based very heavily on a series of real encounters I had with a sub I really clicked with. There’s one scene where the narrator breaks through an emotional barrier by doing a very aggressive play session with the sub—erotic torture, verbal abuse, and very rough sex. That was a very important moment in my own life, so that’s probably the most meaningful scene I’ve ever written.

In terms of the one I find the most arousing, it would be the climax, in a literary sense, of my novel Bull and Cuck. It comes when the bull Brady has sex with the cheater Tyler on Tyler’s wedding night, while Tyler’s new husband David just watches, feeling both humiliated and aroused by what’s happening. There’s something about it that just trips my trigger in a really intense way. I’ve had a number of cucking enthusiasts tell me that the scene just blew them away. They felt that I had really captured a key facet of what cucking means to them, which I feel is a huge compliment.

CDJ: If someone is new to Hadrian Temple books, and perhaps new to genuinely-depicted gay BDSM books — which of your books would you recommend a newbie start with?

HT: Leather God Descending. I really tried to explore kink ethics in that one. Adam, the dom, talks about healthy kink at several points. He screws up a couple of times, which illustrates why the ethics matter. Adam and Riley, his novice sub, are trying to build a genuine Master/slave relationship, and I explore issues that have come up in my own relationship with my slave.

In the fantasy, being a slave is all sex all the time. In reality, being a slave is 95% stuff like domestic chores and paying bills. So there’s a scene where Riley doesn’t want to do his chores and Adam has to decide whether to cut him some slack or push him to submit. For a dom, that can be a much harder question than it sounds like. These are things that real doms and slaves run into a lot more than which size dildo to use or how long to keep the sub in chastity. There’s still a lot of sex in the novel, but hopefully you’ll come for the sex and stay for the education about kink.

CDJ: For the readers of this blog who are also writers, particularly the ones who write (or want to write) gay BDSM fiction — what would be your top tips for “getting it right”?

HT: Part of me wants to say “try it for yourself before you write about it.” There’s a lot to BDSM play that you just won’t understand if you’ve never done it. But that’s true of a lot of things people write about, and people still write about them.

The critical thing is to realize that what kink looks like from the outside—from the spectator’s perspective—is really different from what it feels like from the inside—the participants’ perspective. I call this the Outer and Inner Layers of Kink. On the Outer Layer, it looks like the dom is being a cruel, unreasonable asshole. On the Inside Layer, the dom is very concerned with what his sub is experiencing, or at least he ought to be. He’s not just taking. He’s giving to the sub by taking. If at the end of a scene, I feel like the sub hasn’t gotten some of his needs met, I feel like I’ve screwed up, no matter how much I enjoyed what happened. The sub might not always physically enjoy what happens (although they usually do). Sometimes the pleasure of being submissive comes from knowing that you’ve given the dom what he needs, that you’ve served well. But a sub who doesn’t get something out of a session is a sub who probably won’t come back for a second session. So, basically, if you’ve written your dom as a heartless selfish asshole, you haven’t written a dom. You’ve written a heartless selfish asshole.

Also, throw away your copy of 50 Shades. Everything in it about kink is wrong. Like, dangerously wrong.

CDJ: Hadrian, thank you so much for stopping by the blog today to answer some burning questions!

HT: Thanks so much for the interview!

Thanks for reading along, blog followers! I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did and learned as much as I did!

To find out more about Hadrian and his books — or if you want to pay tribute to him as a FinDom — click here to visit Hadrian’s website.