Black Rose is a pansexual educational and support group for the BDSM community in the Washington, D.C. area. It was founded in June 1987, sat at the center of the local BDSM scene for almost twenty years, and is still running. Jack McGeorge was one of its founders. Black Rose was also one of the founding coalition partners of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, which launched in 1997. For kink readers outside D.C., this is one of the East Coast’s long-running pansexual education clubs: classes, hotel conventions, play parties, and a board elected by members—not a bar brand and not a closed leather house.
Hotel conventions, Pantheon awards, 25th anniversary
From 1997 through 2012 the organization held hotel-based conventions that mixed educational sessions, vendor rooms, and play parties. For much of that stretch the events were annual, and by 2000 they had grown into some of the largest gatherings of that kind on the East Coast. Annual events continued through 2009. The group’s last large event was in 2012, thrown to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary. In 1998, Black Rose X received the Large Event of the Year award as part of the Pantheon of Leather Awards. Also in 1998, and again in 2000, Black Rose received the Large Club of the Year award from the same Pantheon of Leather Awards. A 30 November 1999 Salon Health piece by Virginia Vitzthum, "Crashing the Black Rose," described 1,500 players gathering in a suburban Ramada Inn "to teach and discuss the sexual art of power and pain." That is the scale the hotel years reached: a teaching convention that doubled as a play weekend, large enough to draw national write-ups.
Jack McGeorge, Hans Blix, and the 2002 Washington Post story
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2002, an article in The Washington Post publicly highlighted cofounder Jack McGeorge’s leadership in the Washington, D.C. BDSM and leather community. McGeorge had not tried to hide that involvement. His full name was already prominent on websites, and he said as much to the Post and other media. He did offer his resignation to Hans Blix, hoping to protect the credibility of his organization—the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, UNMOVIC—before the weapons inspections in Iraq. Blix refused to accept the resignation. Later, Hua Jiang, spokeswoman for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, said that being into BDSM was no more likely to be a cross-cultural problem in the Middle East than any number of other issues. The episode is still one of the clearest public collisions between a visible kinky résumé and high-stakes international work, and Black Rose is the club whose cofounder was in the middle of it.
FetLife, The Crucible, SIGs, and how the club is run
The rise of the internet, and especially the founding of the social networking site FetLife in 2008, let alternative-sexuality groups multiply. That growth cut into Black Rose’s old position as the default center of Washington BDSM, though the group remains a significant presence. It is an especially important resource for newcomers, because an education-first door is both practical and less intimidating than other ways into the scene. Black Rose still hosts regular educational classes on BDSM activities, issues, and safety, currently at The Crucible, Washington’s longstanding BDSM club, in Washington, D.C. For most of its history it has also hosted monthly socials, which have swung over time from hands-on educational workshops to social play parties. A board of directors elected by the membership governs the group. Special interest groups inside Black Rose include Bondage; Cultural, Arts & Theatre Social (CATS); Domination & Submission (D/s); Hypnosis; New and Curious Kinksters (NaCK); and Tethers and Feathers, for people interested in tickling. Among its other work, Black Rose grants annual awards: the Jack McGeorge Excellence in Education award and a Membership Service Award. Sibling organizations in other cities include TES in New York City, the Society of Janus in San Francisco, and the Portland Leather Alliance in Oregon. Further reading includes Sadie’s It’s Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the Bdsm Scene (ISBN 1-4120-0183-8), plus the group’s official site and The Crucible. For BDSMWild readers, Black Rose is the D.C. pansexual education club that helped found NCSF, ran East Coast-scale hotel cons with classes, vendors, and play, survived the FetLife-era splintering of local scenes, and still teaches safety and technique at The Crucible—with McGeorge’s public UN fight as the reminder that a teaching club’s leadership can end up on the front page.
