Gay Star Interviews with Matt the Great!

Derek da Silva is one of the kinkiest and wildest entertainers in porn today. There is nothing vanilla about him, but under the surface you’ll find a fascinating and very deep individual. He cares deeply for the gay and leather community and works hard to provide a positive image while keeping it wild.

MATT: Hi Derek, how are you?

DEREK: Good. I hope you are too!

MATT: You are really big into the BDSM and the fight club community. How did you get involved with that and what does that mean to you?

DEREK: Well, which one do you want to talk about first because they’re two different worlds.

MATT: Let’s talk about the bondage and BDSM first.

DEREK: Alright, well, I’ve always be into kinky stuff and SM. I remember being interested in it as early as age four. I would take the straps out of life preservers and tie myself up. At the time I was too young to realize this was a little bit kinky and I would be doing this and my mom would walk in on me, but kids don’t know. Before I came out as gay I’d play with girlfriends.  We would tie each other up and stuff like that so I’ve always worked in that realm. So my sexuality is probably more into being into SM than it is gay. I actually enjoy playing with women as long as it’s SM, but my preference is still for men over all. When I first started coming out I was immediately attracted to the leather community and what I saw there.  It was what very much turned me on as opposed to other things. When I first moved to Chicago, after I growing up in Michigan, there was a club here called Chicago Hellfire which I luckily found right away. It’s the world’s oldest gay men’s BDSM club. It’s been around thirty eight years. And I started coming to events and learning more about SM and meeting guys to do really great SM scenes with, and that was really in many ways was the mentorship that I underwent as a young man to really learn how to play safely in this scene and to how to find responsible men to play with. To start out with I was bottoming but as I grew as a BDSM player, I began doing pretty much either role depending on the person that I’m with. It’s very much about interpersonal dynamics. Some guys I feel toppish towards and other guys bring out my need to submit to somebody. Then some guys there’s more of an equal energy where we’re vying for position to see who will come out on top. And depending upon the guy and the energy I have with him different kinds of play might occur.

MATT: Talk about the fight club community. I realize that is something totally different.

DEREK: It’s kind of two different things for me. First of all, I’ve been seriously into martial arts and grappling since I was very young. I started doing wrestling in third grade and wrestled through school, and was actually quite good. I was this little guy that frankly got beat up a lot. And one of the kids that used to bully me a lot was a wrestler in grade school, so I decided I would take up wrestling so I could be a bad-ass too. Of course as soon as I took up wrestling, I was with this kid all the time and we instantly went from being enemies to best buddies. So I learned how to wrestle, but I also found that there was this really great camaraderie among grapplers. I don’t know, there’s something about guys that are wrestlers; just a particular mentality that’s very hard working and physical and it’s also very competitive but there’s a lot of brotherhood that I really like a lot. When I became an adult I had to more from wrestling.  There’s not really a lot of collegiate or free-style wrestling for adults per say.  I mean, there is but it’s not very vibrant. What I found instead was martial arts like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which is kind of like a grown up wrestling in certain ways.  Many of moves that would be illegal in a wrestling tournament are perfectly legal in Jiu Jitsu. So I joined a Brazilian Jie Jitsu academy. Pretty much the only place I’ve ever been closeted is in the context of my academy. Many of the guys there are straight. Some of them are homophobic but many of them are very cool. Really the energy I get from them is different, even though they are hot men; it’s about great fighting technique, all that… there’s no sexual energy there. It’s more the camaraderie and brotherhood that I get out of my Brazilian Jujitsu buddies. Now on the other side of that there are also gay guys that are into fights and wrestling and there’s a whole kind of community around the fetishes about that. It’s actually hard for me to switch from one energy to the other because one is more about competition and the other is about sex. And to me when you’re fighting as a sexual thing it’s a very different head space.  So when you’re in training six days a week it’s hard to say, “it’s OK to lose or submit,” to go with the sexual energy.  But if you’re always competitive in a gay wrestling scene it never gets very sexual. So it’s a matter of learning to play against those different energies. Actually a lot of the gay men that I’m best friends with tend to be other fighters. They have a very different mind set than other gay guys that I’ve met. They are very much like the straight men that I hang out with from the academy. There’s just this very straight up, no nonsense raw masculinity that really fun and refreshing. There’s not a lot of bickering or backstabbing or bitchiness. It’s like, you know, you’re a warrior, a grappler and that’s that. It’s nice to be around as opposed to mainstream gay culture which can tend to be… I don’t know, I’m trying to think of the correct word that doesn’t sound mean. Gay men don’t always treat each other very well or in a brotherly fashion.

MATT: So in other words there’s a lot of drama involved.

DEREK: Yeah, there’s a lot of drama and cattiness.  Being around straight guys or gay fighters there’s a nice ribbing that you might do with each other, but you have a different kind of spirit and energy than the kind of bitchy fighting that you get around some cliques of gay guys. And I kind of like the “hey, I’m your brother and I’ve got your back,” kind of mind set. There’s something beautiful about that. It makes me feel happy and included… just a really good energy and dynamic. I really love these guys, you know the straight guys that I fight with and the gay grapplers.  They’re just a wonderful bunch of guys.

MATT: Shifting gears a little, your first movie was “Breaking Point” with Shotgun Video. What made your decision to get into porn and secondly how did you find your niche, or was that something that came natural to you?

DEREK: The idea of doing porn was always something that turned me on. Especially for someone like me that enjoys the idea of being used and put on display –  porn fits really nicely into that mentality. You know when you’re being objectified and directed and told what to do there’s this particular energy in the way that you’re used in porn that’s very complimentary to the mind set of a sadomasochist or a sub. So I always had some fantasies about doing it. I think I talked to Titan when they were first starting when they were up at IML (International Mister Leather).  They talked to me about doing and skateboarders versus bike messengers thing but that movie never actually got shot so it was quite a bit later before I actually got to first video, which was for Shotgun. The way that happened was I was at a party that Joe Gallagher, a former IML was hosting, and I was with a club brother from Hellfire. We were watching the videos that were playing and I said to my club brother that I would love to play with Roger, the guy that does these videos for Shotgun. He’s really hot and these are the only porn videos I really get off to. He said, “You should talk to Roger. I know Roger, he’s a good guy and he would love to play with you.” I was like, “Really?” Of course playing with Roger doesn’t mean having to be in a video but since it came with it I was like, “Sure, you can turn on the camera. Let’s do a video.” So we shot that video and there was this really long, intense several hour session. By the end of it my balls were swollen to the size of pool balls. I actually break into tears in the video. The way I remembered it (before I saw the video) was like he beat on me and I broke then pulled myself back together real quickly and went on. But watching it on video later, I see myself slowly self-destruct as I’m trying to stay in there and trying not to break. It’s pretty intense watching it… how I try to hold it together and then gradually fall apart. That was my first video! Pretty fucking intense stuff right out of the gate. From then on it was like, hell, that was kind of fun. It is like this altered state of consciousness, doing porn. You’re out there for a few days and your only purpose and your only reason for existence – your job – is to have sex and to express your sexuality as much as possible for the camera. You get to do this and get paid for it, have great sex and have fun. With that said, I really wanted to focus on the kind of sex that I enjoy which is fighting, BDSM, wrestling and just your general rough sex too. Because there are certain acts like fucking or cock sucking, which you can make into pretty brutal acts as well. And that’s pretty much what I do. I wouldn’t do a movie that I wouldn’t get off to or that I wouldn’t enjoy doing. I’m not doing this because I need to make money, although there are porn stars that do need porn to money. But, typically they don’t make their money off the porn so much as all the other things that go with porn, like making appearances and things like that. I don’t do a lot of that kind of work. I do the porn because it’s something I enjoy doing. It’s a way for me to show my sexuality as a positive thing to other guys. You see it and you think, oh my God, I’m a not the only freak or, gosh, you can actually do these things safely. I like being a role model and showing guys that you can have very kinky sex and still be safe.

MATT: Now you just hit on something there that I want to talk to you about. You and Tony Buff have done and still do classes on safe sex education and teach classes on BDSM and safe ways to practice that. Why don’t you talk a little about that.

DEREK: We don’t use the word “safe.” We say “safer” because there is a risk in almost everything you do whether it be crossing the street or anything else. So we always talk about how to mitigate risks to the point where they are reasonable to take – and everybody has their own risk profile. Our big thing is we want people to really understand the risks they are taking and to take them as educated adults that really know what they’re talking about and that have no illusions about what’s safe and what’s not. Our focus is on safer BDSM techniques. There’s a lot of BDSM stuff that… well, it is a contact sport and there is a risk of physical injury. We try to really reduce those risks. We also try to reduce the risks of disease transmission because there’s a lot of diseases out there that are potentially life threatening; ones that most people are familiar with like HIV and ones that some people are less familiar with like hepatitis C. We don’t want people to get sick or to have to combat a disease unnecessarily because the healthier you are, the better your sex is going to be, the more fun you’re going to have, the more cash you’re going to have to buy new sex toys instead of buying medicines. There are things we want people to be able to do and the way you get there is by really knowing what you are doing and being well educated. It’s kind of a passionate thing for both of us. We’ve lost so many friends over the years. We don’t want anyone to have to go through that stuff.

MATT: I’ve noticed with the leather and BDSM communities that bareback sex is creeping back in at an alarming rate. It’s almost becoming associated with leather and BDSM.

DEREK: It’s taken a lot of us by surprise because for many years the leather community was really the leaders in safer sex. The club I belong to, Chicago Hellfire, went out of our way to set guidelines. We include poz men – which during the early years of the AIDS crisis was important since many turned their backs.  We have rules that say that we will never exclude anybody based on their HIV status and we also have rules that say you will play safe. I think both messages are really important to get across.  It’s important to play safe whether you’re positive or negative and it’s also important to include everyone regardless of what their status is. The problem that has come into the leather community of late is that some poz guys have gone off and decided that they can do whatever they want, that when you become HIV positive there’s no other harm that can befall you, which simply isn’t true. There are other diseases and when you’re compromised you do want to watch out for them. But that kind of trend has crept its way into the leather community, and the leather community has always been open to alternative sexuality and as such there are these guys that are open to this idea that barebacking is a valid form of sexuality. It’s very emotional to talk about and I’m not articulating this well. I’m sorry.

MATT: No, you’re fine.

DEREK: Let’s see if I can address this better. Initially the leather community was the vanguard of safer sex and also of including our poz brothers without discriminating against negative guys or positive guys. We really took on a leadership role early on in the epidemic. So it is kind of shocking to have this barebacking trend creeping into it. I think there’s a lot of baggage that has come with it. A lot of people don’t want to talk about it because it appears to be coming down on poz guys, which it just simply isn’t.  A safer sex stance is a good thing because HIV is not the only disease out there which can be prevented through safer sex. In the leather community we’ve always been big on monitoring our own community to keep out those that are dangerous players. We don’t want to go to the outside and tell people to monitor what we do because frankly a lot of what we do looks completely crazy to the outside world. But actually we have been very careful about making educated decisions along the way. Sex is a raw, primal emotion. We’ve been trying very hard to be sensitive to the pos guys and letting them know that they are included and we are not judging anybody. In particular we are not judging anybody because if someone decided their risk profile includes barebacking and they are fully aware of the risks, then it’s up to them.  But at the end of the day, as community leaders we still have to set an example, especially for the younger guys coming in and who have been getting very poor messages. Basically most of the guys coming out today have had eight years of abstinence education and they don’t really understand what HIV is and AIDS is, and a lot of them think that the whole thing is cured and that there are pills that have no side effects and they’re free. And that you get free steroids too, and they’re hearing things like this so they sometimes think that becoming positive is a good thing because they don’t have to worry about it any more. All of that is creeping into the leather community and the leather community has always prided itself of being nonjudgmental about sexuality, but I think that the open-mindedness has gotten ahead of our willingness to say we monitor our own and educate our own. People think that everybody knows that condoms prevent these things, right? Well, just because my generation was educated well doesn’t mean that these kids just coming out know these things. And as I go out to these events and practically every kid I talk to in their twenties is already positive.  That’s upsetting to me. They may not have to live through what I lived through in the 80’s and 90’s, losing just an insane number of friends – but the impact of HIV in their lives is real. Perhaps for me the impact was a little more intense when I was young, but I still have friends in their twenties who are getting sick. Most likely they are going to recover and live nice long lives, but being sick for six months or two years, it’s not a way you want to spend your twenties or any part of your life.  We are doing a poor job as a community of educating people and I think the leather community has really got to step up and do a good job of taking that responsibility back.

MATT: I don’t think it’s just the leather community. I think the gay community as a whole has dropped the ball on HIV and safer sex education. When I was growing up in the 80’s and 90’s that’s all we heard about. And now it has come to a practical dead stop. You just don’t hear as much about it any more.

DEREK: The more you talk about it and push it the way Tony and I have… there are a lot of people who get really hostile with you about it. We’ve been around doing a lot of safer sex campaigns and there are those that get really hostile about the idea that we would suggest using a condom. And especially if you’re a negative guy that’s out there pushing condoms.  I’m negative and I’ve always been extremely safe but there are always risks in everything I’ve done, so it’s not a superiority thing on my part when I say I’m negative – as a sexually active gay man I know that safer sex isn’t 100% effective and I too could seroconvert despite all my efforts. We all know that playing safe doesn’t always mean that you won’t become positive. There’s an attitude that you often get that, “I don’t want to play with condoms. I don’t want to use a condom if I’m going to have sex with you.” It’s the negative guys that get into this shit as well as the poz guys that want to play safe. I prefer the idea that you assume that everyone has these diseases and that you protect yourself by wearing a condom so you don’t have to worry as much. There are still risks, but you don’t have to worry as much. It’s a really great mitigation factor.

MATT: Now you really do take good care of yourself, practicing martial arts and yoga. How did you get into yoga?

DEREK: How I got into yoga was kind of funny. There was a performance artist named Ron Athey who I was kind of seeing a little in the mid 90’s. He does a lot of stuff with piercing and blood and there’s an HIV subtext to all his work because he has been HIV positive since I think the late 80’s. There was a performance he was doing in Mexico City that was filmed for the movie Hallelujah. So I’m down there with Ron acting as an assistant in his crew. At that point I was too shy to start performing. As a warm up before the show a member of his company named Julie led us through some yoga. I kind of remembered doing some yoga as a kid and I had done some meditation, but this was the first time I’d done a full yoga practice and it felt really amazing. So even though I had been curious about yoga and yogic meditation since grade school, I had never really taken it too seriously until suddenly I was stuck by this. It was something I wanted to do because it physically made me feel better and helped me focus my mind.  Yoga helps me deal with the crazy shit in my head and helps me calm that down. And so I took that on and a few years after taking that on I decided to become a full practicing yogi which involved things like vegetarianism among other things. There’s a whole bunch of practices that a yogi does and one of them is vegetarianism.

MATT: You are a very philosophical person. Talk about that part of yourself.

DEREK: As a kid I had certain ideas about how I thought the universe was constructed and so my whole way I look at philosophers is really looking for ones that better articulated the feelings and hunches I had about how I saw the world. The first philosopher that made me say, “yeah, he’s got it right,” was a guy named Spinoza. He was a Portuguese Jew that was exiled to Amsterdam and later was thrown out of his synagogue for heresy, but his philosophy was that the whole universe was made of one substance and that is God. Just the way that he saw things made a lot of sense to me; just a very materialistic view of the world where everything has a substance and all you can do is manipulate it and change that substance over time. When I first came into that I thought that was great. I don’t see this thing where you have these spirits floating around apart from physical bodies. There maybe some kinds of waves that are transmitted across the fabric of the universe, but there’s a physical fabric that encompasses everything and anything that is a spiritual occurrence occurs within that physical fabric. Later on I came across Nietzsche, which at first when I read him he said kind of cool things that I didn’t entirely understand but as I started studying him more I could see where he was really predicting the whole modern condition. He was so far ahead of his time that it was crazy. I realized that this is someone who really speaks to me in a big way. Then more recently I started getting into a philosopher, Gilles Deleuze . He started out his career basically analyzing different philosophers and really using other people’s philosophies to expound his ideas about philosophy. Of the three people that moved him most the most were Spinoza, Nietzsche and another philosopher I hadn’t heard of named Bergson . So as I started reading his stuff and the way he reinterpreted these guys.  I thought this guy is pretty intense and pretty cool, although very very technical and hard to understand. The thing about Gilles Deleuze is that he makes up his own technical language to talk about everything which can be good on one hand because you’re not confusing his ideas with other words that have other meanings, but on the other hand you have to learn this whole new vocabulary to talk about everything. When people hear you talking about things like “rhizomes” and “paths of flight” and “deterritorialization” and all these technical terms, they look at you like you’re crazy. So it’s really hard to explain it to other people but just reading him I’ve found him to be very provocative and he really makes me think about how I live my life. How can I step outside the bounds of society in a way that’s more effective and really advances what it means to be human? Really, the people that step outside the well known paths and actually start to push new ideas out in different ways and start to cross the well worn paths and take on different ways of thinking, these are the people that create progress for humanity. And this is really what Gilles Deleuze is about. How do you live a life that is new and progressive and inventive and fun? That’s what his philosophy was about, just the art of living and living in a way that is marching to your own drummer.

MATT: Let’s talk about your music as both a musician and a producer. Which came first, your porn career or your music career?

DEREK: The porn career is very recent. I didn’t start my porn career until my late thirties whereas music, I started playing piano in grade school. I was classically trained in piano and trombone. I was in a punk band at age thirteen; that was like when punk was still rather new. I played keyboards, trombone and harmonica in a band that was played punk, ska and new wave – this was a long long time ago. So I’ve been doing music for an extremely long time in the classical and jazz realms as well as in the rock and roll and punk rock areas. In the 90’s I did a lot of work promoting queer punk rock shows.  I was one of the early people along with people like G.B. Jones, BruceLaBruce, Tom Jennings, Larry Bob, Vaginal Davis and others that created this early queer punk movement. Myself and my friend Joanna were kind of the ones that got it up and running here in Chicago. That was pretty cool because we got to book a lot of bands that we really love and got to hang out with them. Along the way I started my own band called Heterocide which was kind of a joke band that pissed a lot of people off. Straight people took it very seriously. The whole point of Heterocide was that we were pretending to be this overly zealous gay supremacist group; so on one hand we were satirizing some of the extremes of some of the activist movements of the 80’s and 90’s where things could be a little too shrill and over the top. On the other hand, we were kind of poking and pushing at overly sensitive straight people and turning the tables, making everyone a little unhappy. It was intended to be a little more provocative to make people think about activist movements in general and their relationship to the mainstream society. But mostly people were just offended, which makes it punk rock I guess. More currently I’m in a band that’s a straight up queer punk band that plays mainly for straight audiences. Usually when we play gay clubs they don’t quite get us and they get mad at us. They’ll storm out of the room screaming and they think we’re crazy, which we are – unless you are really into old school punk rock you might not understand the band I’m in now. It’s very much aimed at the punk community. It’s not like a queer punk band. It’s just a punk band that happens to do all queer songs. We are incredibly faggy on stage and just gory and raunchy.  We try to start fights in the audience and everything else. It’s more about audience confrontation than it is about the music because we really suck as musicians.

MATT: Did you just say that you try to start fights in the audience?

DEREK: Oh yeah!

MATT: So it’s not about the music, it’s about the violence.

DEREK: We’re going for a very 70’s version of punk rock. That’s part of why we’re really well loved in the punk community because myself and the lead singer, really everyone in the band, loves the original 1970’s wave of punk bands both in the US and in England. And those bands would get in the audience and fucking start shit, they would get in the audience’s face and the audience would get right back at them. It would get wild and out of hand and you never quite knew what was going to happen. We don’t really plan anything, we just read what’s going on and think of ways that we can cause trouble and get this audience going. We had this one show where this big fucking straight skinhead broke a bottle over his head and knocked himself out in the middle of the floor, rolling around in blood and glass. The next thing I know our lead singer is on top of him humping and I’m like, “No, no, got off of him, you don’t know what this fucker has!”

MATT: You realize you have just made Sid Vicious very very proud.

DEREK: Oh, it’s not Sid Vicious. It’s Iggy Pop. Iggy was cutting himself up way before Sid.

MATT: Oh, that’s true.

DEREK: Iggy’s my man, OK. I love Iggy. I was really upset when Ron Ashton died earlier this year but I was very happy to hear that we’re going to get to hear James Williamson with the Stooges in next May in England. I’m already planning my trip to see the Stooges with James Williamson doing the Raw Power album which is one of my absolute favorite albums of all time. I think all three of the first Stooges’ albums are favorites for me.

MATT: Your site, www.derekdasilva.com, is not so much a porn site. What will your fans find there?

DEREK: It’s just me trying to show another side of BDSM and porn I guess. Most porn star sites about about naked pictures and they tell lot of stories about doing drugs at wild parties. All that’s fine, OK, and while I’m not big into doing drugs and I don’t judge other people that do them as long as they keep it under control and don’t become addicts. But there’s a whole other side to people that do porn and there’s a whole other side to people that are into BDSM, and that’s a little more thoughtful – I’m really trying to talk about that stuff. So that said, my site is probably boring to most people. I try to talk about serious issues. I talk about how to play safely, I tell stories about the BDSM community, I talk about what the BDSM community means, I talk about how do we move forward. I talk ad nauseum about safer sex because frankly safer sex is really important to me. I talk about strategizing and how we can do better as a community to promote safer sex. I talk about what does it mean to be a porn star and do it in a pretty straight forward way rather than try to glamorize it. I try to talk about what the actual experience is like and what is involved if you want to do it. I have another essay about the practical matters for prospective porn performers. These are things that are not that sexy but I think are interesting, at least to me they are.

MATT: They are interesting. I’ve read your essays. I think they’re very well written and very thought provoking and I think very educational is the most important thing.

DEREK: Right. And this is stuff to get off with your brain rather than your nuts. There’s very little on the site that is sexually provocative. There’s very little on the site that actually talks about sex in very explicit terms or in a way that’s intended to be erotic. I’m talking about sex because sex is something that’s interesting to talk about and if you want to have a good time and be good at it then you need to know a lot about it. Then when you go to do it you put all the intellectual stuff out of the way, because you’re well practiced and you’re going to go in there and be safe and know what you’re doing and you can be fearless and have lots of fun.

MATT: I for one love the site. I think it hits at the heart of the matter that we are all sexual beings, but do really understand where that comes from and how to use it responsibly? So, I encourage anyone who reads this interview to visit your site.

DEREK: Well, thank you so much. I enjoy when people give me feedback on their thoughts. A lot of these issues I’m still working out myself. In many ways me throwing out my ideas I’m looking for other people to give me their ideas about how we can do this stuff better, especially about safer sex. I’m really kind of intense about how can we as a community get better about educating people about how to be safer both in their BDSM play and in condom use to mitigate risks of HIV, Hep C and other diseases. Of course the other thing I care about is that the leather community is changing in a pretty radical way too because of the internet. A lot of the old institutions that kept the community going like the bars and a lot of the social events have fallen by the wayside because everybody meets online, and I kind of have a problem with that, because it destroys us as a community.  We need a real community that teaches each other and looks out after each other. With the internet the community aspect often disappears. So that’s the other thing I’m always looking for answers to. How do we bring back this idea of a leather community as opposed to these people that go out and have kinky sex and order out online.

MATT: I know that we have the Folsom Street Fair, CLAW and other events, but I think the attendance has been dropping.

DEREK: I don’t know that it’s dropped – they have great turnouts.  But I think that a lot of these events have just turned into big parties. I like the big party but it’s not the same as having a sense of community and brother and sisterhood, camaraderie and teaching each other how to do stuff. Some of these events do it well, like CLAW has a good educational component. Mid-Atlantic Leather has a good social community component. IML, there’s so many things going on there; my club has a big weekend there that quite frankly all I do for IML is really the stuff focused around my club except for the stuff like the Grabbys and that kind of thing. My club is a very old club, and I’m always trying to figure out how to bring new guys into it and see that there is something valuable about having mentors around to teach you how to do all kinds of cool, kinky things.

MATT: I have one last question for you. What was it like setting Scott Campbell’s chest on fire?

DEREK: It was a lot of fun. I wish we had more footage of it because it’s not one of those things where you can just do it over and over again or we would traumatize the poor guy. And getting good camera coverage always tricky because a lot of the things you see in porn is done repeatedly for the camera. But certain things you can’t do over and over again, like setting someone on fire. I was pretty happy with that scene because as a BDSM player I don’t want to just copy things other people have done. I want to invent new things. And Steve Cruz, who was the director, said, “I want to do something with electricity,” and I was like, “Well, electricity is something really hard to depict on video.” So I started thinking of ways to make it more interesting, and I know sometimes people will use a violet want as part of a way to ignite a fire scene. Well, that’s OK, but that’s still a little too dull just waving a glowing purple wand over someone’s chest and wiping them with alcohol. I wanted to do something a little more interesting so I eventually came upon this idea of actually having this swinging electrified chain that’s hooked up to this violet wand directly.  Rather than using the glass part of the violet wand I could use the chain as the electrode and the metal table as the ground and of course when the metal chain swings across his chest, it sparks. To make it ignite I used rubbing alcohol on his chest. I took 70% isopropyl alcohol and just repeatedly lit these X’s that were ignited off arcs from this swinging, electrified chain. So it was pretty cool.

MATT: I guess we want to point out to people, don’t try this at home because setting people on fire, although it may look cool, may not always have the best results.

DEREK: Let me take what you’re saying and make it a little more explicit. Learn from someone who knows what they’re doing. This is why I am so big on things like events that teach or clubs that teach or individual mentorship and why I think community is so important in BDSM. You shouldn’t learn these things on the internet or try them without someone knowledgeable showing you in person. These activities are all very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do know what you’re doing and you’re been taught properly they’re just a little bit dangerous, and that’s the big difference. Make sure you know the rules and what precautions and mitigations you have to take to do the scene safely. What you didn’t see on camera for that scene is that I had someone off stage with a bucket of water, with a wet towel in case Scott really started on fire. The guy was ready with the wet towel to put on him to makes sure he wasn’t seriously burned. We also had a fire extinguisher nearby and a whole bunch of other precautions. These are all things that I was taught by my club brothers in Chicago Hellfire: this is how you do an electrical scene safely, and this is how you do a fire scene safely. You should learn from a skilled practitioner on how to do these things safely. Don’t do them at home until then!

MATT: Is there anything that you want to add?

DEREK: The only other thing that I can think of now is that I am beginning to look at directing. When I start directing it’s going to be a little different from what people might expect. I’m not looking at directing porn videos per say, but instead doing extremely pornographic art videos. There’s a lot of porn out there, but there’s only a few people out there that are doing really beautiful art work that happens to be pornographic.

MATT: Something along the lines of like Bruce La Bruce?

DEREK: Not exactly.  The touchstones for me are things like an early BDSM film by Fred Halsted called “LA Plays Itself”, or the Christopher Rage movie “My Masters.”  These movies are porn, but they work more as art than as porn. I mean, I get off when I watch My Masters but it also puts me in this trancey head space that’s far more intense than just watching a porn movie. There’s a meditative intensity and an artistry to it. It’s more like going into an art trance when you’re looking at a beautiful painting in an art gallery and you can’t tear yourself away. That’s the feeling I get from these movies. It’s kind of like the same feelings you get from having sex, so I want to look at ways to actually recreate that feeling of having sex rather than just depicting sex. I want to create artwork that really pulls you into the idea of sex. I’ve been playing around with cameras and techniques and lighting and using a lot of the new technology that’s out there to really manipulate the way sex looks in ways that are both artistic and erotic. I don’t mean erotic in, “Oh, it’s a pretty looking body.” I mean erotic as in it turns you on. It makes you want to jack off but it’s still art. I don’t know, it may be a while before anything comes out but I’m still playing with it, so hopefully it will be good.

MATT: Well, good luck with that. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

DEREK: Thank you so much for letting me talk.

MATT: Thank you. I really appreciate the interview.