TABLEAUX images shot in Chicago by Steve Diet Goedde. Left: Midori (1997); right: Anna (1996). TOP BANNER IMAGE: Selene (1995)
Tableaux: Dominic Jay’s debut novel with pix by Steve D Goedde
JUNE COVER STORY: Forty years on from the modern fetish scene’s birth in London, fetish photo-book publisher Circa Press dips into the fiction genre with Tableaux. This debut novel by Dominic Jay, set partly in early London fetish clubs and partly in New York’s Hellfire, is a roman à clef based on the author’s real experiences. Reprising a hybrid format used for a 1980 collection of short stories by Anaïs Nin, Tableaux’s deft evocations of past times, people and places, paired with Steve Diet Goedde’s early fetish photos, gave Tony Mitchell a strong nostalgic buzz. But, he says, you don’t need to have been around in the ’80s to enjoy this fetish odyssey
TABLEAUX
Dominic Jay (author)
Steve Diet Goedde (photography)
(Pub: Circa Press, May 31 2023 at £19.95/$29.95)
Reviewed by Tony Mitchell
After moving, in 2019, into publishing high quality fetish photography books, London-based visual-book publisher Circa Press made a second genre jump at the end of May 2023.
That’s when Circa published its first novel: Tableaux, a BDSM-themed story based on events in London and New York in the first half of the 1980s.
Written in the form of a roman à clef — literally a ‘novel with a key’ describing real life events overlaid with a façade of fiction — Tableaux marks the debut of a previously unknown author, a former arts journalist writing under the pseudonym Dominic Jay.
Whether by design or not, this book’s year of publication is also the 40th anniversary of the beginnings of the modern fetish scene, as defined by the launch of the original, shortlived Skin Two Club and its successor, Maitresse. (These seminal events have recently been topics of considerable celebration in fetish circles, and I warn you: there’s more to come.)
You might well expect that my own involvement with the launch in London of Skin Two Club in 1983, then with Skin Two magazine’s various ventures from 1984 onwards, combined with same-era exploits on the New York scene, would predispose me towards engaging keenly with the Tableaux project.
But I was initially somewhat hesitant, for a couple of reasons. First: the skills involved in choosing the right authors and topics for visual books are different from those required for publishing fiction. So I was worried that Tableaux might be an ill-advised diversion for Circa, whose move into fetish photography books I’d been pleased to support on The Fetishistas.
Second: what if Tableaux warranted the same kind of critical panning the Fifty Shades trilogy so richly deserved? (One possible answer to that, of course, is that Circa boss David Jenkins would be on his way to becoming a multi-millionaire who could afford not to care if the entire fetish/BDSM scene thought he was peddling specious rubbish and hated him for it.)
What finally enabled me to overcome my misgivings was my discovery that Tableaux was going to incorporate something that made it not just a novel but a collectable artefact.
It was going to include a section featuring some of the early black-and-white fetish photography of Steve Diet Goedde (whose book Extempore had been Circa’s fetish publishing debut in 2019).
This made it a different proposition — and not just because I’m a longtime fan of Steve’s work. Circa’s Tableaux concept would reprise a format that I hadn’t seen used in ‘serious’ publishing since 1980.
That was when I first encountered a new edition of Anaïs Nin’s erotic short stories Delta of Venus (first published just after her death in 1977). It was retitled The Illustrated Delta of Venus, and included a set of images by a young, up-and-coming photographer with a keen eye for kink. That photographer went by the name of Bob Carlos Clarke.
I’d been aware of Bob’s fetish work since the mid-1970s, but this was his first actual book. And it winked at me almost daily, as I walked past it in the window display of Stanfords bookstore on Longacre, on my way to work in Sounds’ offices in Covent Garden.
So while you might read in Circa Press promo blurb that Tableaux combines art and storytelling “in a new hybrid form”, this is not strictly accurate. But it might as well be true, given that, as far as I know, nobody else has revived that format in the intervening 43 years!
But what of Tableaux as a piece of fetish/ BDSM literature? Well speaking as someone who is extremely sceptical about a genre that has been a repository of so much rubbish over the years (more of a suppository, some might even say), I was delighted to discover it really is the superior read I was promised.
I would attribute this, to a great extent, to Dominic Jay’s writing style. It employs a journalist’s eye for narrative and description — enough to capture and keep one’s interest without ever veering into the realms of breathless detail beloved of the genre’s myriad one-handed typists.
This is, of course, greatly assisted by the fact that Jay is telling a story featuring actual events, places and people — the latter disguised where necessary but including a number of real-life characters.
Some, no longer with us — such as novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin and Daily Telegraph editor Bill Deedes — are fully identified, while others such as Tim —— and Peter —— are easy enough to guess if you know something of kink’s earlier movers and shakers.
It also helps enormously that Tableaux has not been created as an aid to self-pleasuring, except of the purely intellectual variety. It is primarily a fictionalised memoir of real events experienced by its author in 1984/’85, reprocessed as the experiences of his fictional protagonist, journalist Oliver Woolf.
Yes, it is an exploration of Oliver’s journey of sexual experimentation and his various brushes with BDSM culture. As such, it begins with his chance encounter in London with Candy — who turns out to be a dominatrix and becomes a focus of enduring interest. And yes, it includes well-described visits to real clubs such as Maitresse in London and Hellfire in New York.
But the author’s descriptions of successive scenes (which presumably suggested the book’s title) are all presented with a lightness of touch and sense of balance that are so rare in the genre. As a result, the story unfolds in a way that feels genuinely organic and uncontrived.
It carries you along with the energy of a whodunnit, but one where the main purpose of its search for answers (in this case, about the sudden disappearance of Candy) appears to be purely that of leading the reader through further kink-tinged episodes. Warning: this may lull you into a false sense of security.
It seems only fair to mention that my enjoyment of Tableaux was almost certainly heightened by how the story resonates with my own memories of the very times and places it references.
Even the book’s 20 early Steve Diet Goedde images have considerable personal nostalgia value for me. I knew several of Steve’s early models featured in Tableaux from the same 1994 Chicago trip that introduced me to the photographer and his work, and led to his print debut in Skin Two 15.
And the book’s cover model Midori was a good friend; in 1996 my then wife-to-be and I ‘pre–honeymooned’ at the fetish superstar’s San Francisco house.
So yes, of course I realise that memories of that kind place me in a pretty privileged position when it comes to Tableaux’s ‘relatability’. But I’m also very confident that you don’t have to have ‘been there, done that’ to enjoy what Tableaux has to offer.
In fact, I’m sure it will be appreciated by a wide readership, not only for its authentic evocation of early fetish scene optimism, but also for its reminder of the dark storm clouds gathering over many lives during the same period.
Tags: Book Releases, Fetish Fiction, Fetish History, Fetish Photography
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