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Inside the Mile High Dungeon, Where Denver Dominatrixes (Domina Elle & Mistress Victoria Marx) Bind and Flog

Worldwide BDSM News From The Media Posted on Sun, August 28, 2022 23:12:55

Source: Westword.com.

USA – DENVER – Behind the one-way windows of a squat warehouse on West Second Avenue is the domain of two professional dominatrixes, one of the premier dungeons in the United States, they say, with clients flying in from around the world.

See more and larger photo’s on: Westword.com

And you’d better believe them, or you could be punished.

Mile High Dungeon is a sprawling fantasyland of themed rooms in which these dommes bind clients in various positions, engage them in erotic play, and dominate them during all sorts of kinky scenarios (within reason…and the law). Both transplants to Colorado, Domina Elle and Mistress Victoria Marx have lived here for decades, opening their own dungeons and practicing BDSM – bondage, dominance, sadomasochism – for more than twenty years before joining forces three years ago to open the Mile High Dungeon in this space that had been occupied by a computer-security expert until the FBI raided his business in 2015 after he bragged on Twitter about hacking into the controls of a commercial airliner and flying it sideways.

Between private sessions on a recent weekday, Elle and Victoria agree to give Westword a full tour of their business. Elle is dressed in one of her signature latex suits, which are often so tight that she needs lube to get them on. Victoria, who prefers to stick to leather and lace, is wearing a tight corset. Both sport thigh-high boots with six-inch, elevated heels that look so pointy they could probably double as torture instruments. Neither wants her full name used here.

Each prospective dungeon visitor must send Elle or Victoria an email that lists his or her fetishes. There are different categories, based on the colors of a stoplight. Green lights are acts and fetishes that the would-be client is 100 percent okay with exploring. Yellows are maybes. And reds are no-gos. “Most people know what their reds are first,” observes Victoria. “It’s easy to know what you don’t like.”

A common “red light” is heavy pain (though about 5 percent of their clients are really into heavy pain, Victoria notes). “And then a lot of people say, ‘No marks’,” she continues, in reference to the physical reminders of a common BDSM practice: flogging clients with whips and paddles.

“I am fascinated by people’s behaviors, motives and the history behind them,” says Elle, who adds that every client is different, and it’s her job to help them explore themselves, their sexuality and their desires. “Like, I might ask, what’s the first time you remember getting excited about being tied up?” she explains. “And someone might answer, ‘Oh, I saw that Lucky Charms commercial when the leprechaun gets caught in the net.’ The things you hear people say are fascinating.”

Elle declines to say how much a Mile High Dungeon session costs, explaining that prices are negotiable and that all sessions – typically two hours or longer – are customized to fit clients’ individual needs. And although the dommes always ask clients if they have romantic partners, and encourage couples’ sessions, there are some clients who don’t want others to know about their trips to the dungeon.

Client sessions often begin in the Sissy Boudoir, one of five rooms in the facility. It’s essentially an eroticized Hollywood dressing room, complete with wigs, makeup, footwear, coats and even some rubber horse-head masks. The accoutrements help with clients’ role-playing fantasies, explains Victoria. “And it can range from just heels and lipstick to a full transformation.”

While some clients already know what kind of transformation they desire, others take suggestions from the dommes. Elle started dressing up her male friends in her own clothes when she was a teenager, so helping with clients’ makeovers is second nature. “And playing around with the boundaries of gender, I think, is something that’s natural for a lot of people, even if they’re not kinky with it,” she says. “My favorite is when people have been cross-dressing alone for so long, and finally have the courage to step out of that alone place. Then the intimacy between you and the other person acting out this stuff takes on a whole other dimension.”

The Sissy Boudoir also boasts oversized dressing-room mirrors to assist with the costume changes. Then again, there are big mirrors in just about every room of the dungeon; Elle guesses there are forty throughout the sprawling facility.

“The mind-fuck aspect is definitely a big part of all of this,” she says while observing herself in one of those mirrors. “When you can watch yourself in the act, then you have the visual memory. There’s psychological nuances in everything that we do.”

Those psychological nuances extend to all sorts of physical tools and instruments used in various dungeon scenarios. A medical-themed room looks something straight out of a slasher film, with an old-school X-ray machine, an anesthesia device, a stomach pump and a “birthing chair” from the early 1900s with metal stirrups. Elle found that on Craiglist, and says the widow and daughter of a recently deceased urologist sold it to her. “They gave it to me on the condition that I wouldn’t perform abortions, which I agreed to,” Elle recalls. “But they probably wouldn’t have given it to me if they knew what it was really for…”

Adjacent to the medical room is the Black and Blue Room, named after its paint colors; a large suspension frame at the center can be used to bind and suspend people in all sorts of positions. Next to that is the Goddess Room, a relaxing space with a vibe similar to that of a day spa. And finally, there’s a huge room at the back with ceilings that are at least twenty feet high and projection screens displaying looping slideshows with all sorts of kinky imagery, including a guy strapped down on a bench whose erect penis is the only exposed part of his body. In this last room, colored spotlights accentuate a ten-foot-tall suspension frame with an electric winch mounted on top that can be used to mechanically raise up…stuff. There’s also a spanking bench, an X-shaped cross with straps on each of the arms, and a Victorian-styled bathtub in which clients can rinse off before leaving.

The entire dungeon is immaculate. The dommes always use towels wherever bare skin might touch any benches or frames, so, as Elle notes, “there are no snail trails anywhere.” From the music playing over speakers to the smells to the lighting, “every detail affects the situation,” she explains.

The dommes say it took all of their own equipment, as well as items donated from three other dungeons, to make Mile High Dungeon a reality. A now-deceased mistress who ran a combination B&B/dungeon in Pueblo left some tools to Elle. “I invoke her spirit whenever I use her paddles,” she says, adding that she rarely uses fewer than fifteen different whips and paddles on a client in a session. (She credits another mentor, Mistress Diane, with being “the first professional domme to really put Denver on the kinky map of the United States,” back in the ’80s. Mistress Diane is now retired, but Elle says she still has a few loyal clients who fly in from around the world to see her.)

The instruments lined up in various wall-mounted cases throughout the dungeon include such industry favorites as cock-and-balls torture devices, but there are also some unexpected tools, like a metal clamp designed to hold onto deep-dish pizza containers. Elle and Victoria call such commonplace items “pervertables,” since their standard use is perverted once it enters their realm. “When I saw the pizza clamp, I saw a nipple device,” Elle quips. Target and Home Depot, which they jokingly call “Domme Depot,” are both great places to find pervertables, they say.

While it’s sometimes difficult to tell when the dommes are kidding, they take their business seriously. Both advocate for decriminalization of sex work and rail against the SESTA law passed by Congress this spring that conflates sex work with sex trafficking. Not that what they’re doing involves actual sex; they conform to all applicable laws and regulations.

“We’re in a gray area,” notes Elle. “There are no laws in Colorado that govern BDSM. But there are laws in some states — at least one state – where you can’t even spank someone on their bare ass and take money. Plus, the prostitution penal codes are intentionally vague,” she continues. “They say, ‘value exchanged for sexual gratification,’ but that can mean so many different things. There are people locally who’ve been tried and found guilty when they took money to watch someone masturbate — they didn’t even touch the person. We have to be careful.”

They’re also careful about following city code. The Mile High Dungeon receives regular fire-department inspections; Victoria jokes that during the first fire department visit, there were two firemen, and ever since there have been at least four men at every inspection.

They want to be sure that they’re here for the people who need them. “This is our sacred space. Within this space, lives change. People bare their souls. They bare the most intimate parts of themselves psychologically and physically,” Elle says. “For me, I’m about raising energy up, helping people evolve and grow. And the sexual piece of ourselves — gender, what our boundaries are, what we’re okay with — is a development that has been stifled by shame and weirdness in our society. We really need to get real about sex, period. I think a lot of abuse stems from the shaming and weirdness that humans attach to sex. So we need to back up a little bit and look at, in a reasonable and compassionate way, our bodies and sexuality and all these people who think they are entitled to limit what other people do, whether it’s because they’re gay or sex workers or swingers or polyamorous. It’s time to move past all of that and grow up.”



Rough Trade: COVID-19 Has Put Denver’s BDSM Businesses in a Bind

Worldwide BDSM News From The Media Posted on Mon, November 30, 2020 03:11:35

Source: Westword.com.

USA-DENVER – The pandemic is giving Denver’s BDSM community a flogging — and not the fun kind, says Denver dominatrix Elle, co-owner of Mile High Dungeon, which has closed because of both safety concerns and economic challenges.

While other businesses have found some government relief, Elle says that her operation, though legal, is excluded from federal financial support programs. COVID-relief loans and grants are not available for businesses that are “prurient,” according to most application guidelines.

Now, people in the erotic industry are negotiating an impossible bind: whether to keep operating at risk of spreading the virus, or shut down temporarily and possibly lose their employment permanently.

Elle has been a sex worker for the past 21 years. It’s her calling, she says, and she hopes to hang up her thighhighs and retire as a professional dominatrix when she hits 65 — if COVID-19 doesn’t continue to wreck her professional plans and eat up decades of savings, strapping her with debt.

Her story, which parallels those of many working in the legal sex industry and even underground, is one of liberation. “Through the work I did, I was able to get on my feet and do something amazing and become a healthy, thriving person,” she says.

While the religious right and prudish politicians have targeted sex workers, prostitutes and the publications that advertise their services, Elle insists that the sex-slavery stereotype they’re crusading against is hardly an accurate depiction of her world. And she should know: Not only has she offered her own services as a pro-dom, but she’s been an outspoken advocate for sex workers’ rights nationally as well as in Denver.

She and other dominatrixes opened the Mile High Dungeon five years ago. There, Elle taught clients about the BDSM lifestyle, consent and scene negotiation. She helped people explore their kinks, and even worked in conjunction with therapists to guide their patients in addressing childhood traumas. She’s been part healer, part educator, part kink provider. The experience was transformative, she says, both for the people she dominated and for herself.

Back in February, after watching news reports of the coronavirus upending life in Wuhan, China, Elle worried it might come stateside. So Mile High Dungeon shut down operations, with hopes of reopening in a few weeks. Weeks later, the state implemented a stay-at-home order, and the coronavirus has been flagellating the physical and economic health of people in the United States ever since.

Even as other businesses reopened, the dungeon stayed dark.

While Elle has worked with a couple of customers, observing strict mask-wearing and sanitation measures, she has largely avoided appointments. That hasn’t just hurt her bank account, but clients: Inexperienced people inclined toward bondage, domination and sado-masochism need an outlet and a proper schooling in boundaries and negotiation, she says, so that their sexual desires — often mired in shame and taboo — don’t land them in trouble.

njoyed sex workers’ services. Democrats and Republicans alike have gone after the industry, so the likelihood of a political solution is improbable.

Now, with COVID-19 cases breaking records again in Colorado, Elle realizes that reopening Mile High Dungeon anytime soon isn’t feasible, so she’s reassessing how to move forward until a vaccine becomes available.

It’s not just sex workers who are being hit. The entire BDSM scene, which relies heavily on social gatherings, is struggling. Christine Winnie Wenglewick, owner of the Denver Sanctuary, a dungeon and social club, says that old-timers in the BDSM community have largely stepped back from play parties — or they’re holding private gatherings in their homes. Newcomers who show up to her club’s events, which are operated under rigid social-distancing guidelines that are not exactly conducive to community romps and stomps, are often left wondering what the point is of paying for a party when no more than twenty people are allowed in at a time.

COVID has delivered Wenglewick a double whammy because she also owns Denver’s Dangerous Theatre. Like every performing arts venue, it’s suffered during the pandemic. And Wenglewick’s strategy for covering the cost of her underground plays — funding them with proceeds from the Denver Sanctuary — is now failing.

Long before getting involved with BDSM, Wenglewick was active in the theater scene. In Orlando, she ran a space that served as both a hair salon and performance venue. Shortly after moving to Colorado in 2001 to be near her ex-partner and child, she stumbled into the kink scene and found a second home.

Wanting to introduce newbies to the lifestyle, she started a meetup and play party called Gateway. The group started out meeting at people’s homes, but soon outgrew those and needed a larger spotWenglewick asked the now-defunct Denver Harbor, a BDSM club, if she could hold Gateway parties for newcomers there, and the owners agreed. Three months later, they came up short on rent money and asked Wenglewick if she wanted to take over the warehouse dungeon. At first she was hesitant, but then she realized that she could eventually use the space for experimental theater performances in the early evening hours and transform it into a late-night place for sexual exploration.

In 2007, she launched Dangerous Theatre out of her dungeon. She’s produced more than thirty experimental plays there and also hosted hundreds of workshops, BDSM parties and gatherings where people into kink built community.

“It’s not been a conventional business plan,” Wenglewick says. “But up until COVID, it was one that worked.”

Like most businesses, the Denver Sanctuary and Dangerous Theatre both shut down in mid-March. A sole proprietor, Wenglewick did not consider applying for various small business or arts grants or loans. She was closeted about how the theater and dungeon shared a warehouse, and says she was afraid that potential funders looking at her books would wonder how a small theater that seats no more than fifty could be making so much money.

But not anymore. With both businesses shuttered for months, she found herself $12,000 behind in rent. If she cannot pay that debt by the end of the year, her landlord will give her the boot.

“I can’t fault her too much,” says Wenglewick. “I can’t fault any landlord who lets a dungeon in her space to begin with.”

To raise rent money, Wenglewick has offered some demonstrations and classes in consent and scene negotiation, BDSM 101 and more — though she only charges $10 a pop, hardly enough to pay what she owes. In normal times, the Denver Sanctuary would be hosting workshops in every manner of BDSM play. Now the only hands-on activity that can be done with COVID-19 precautions in place is fire play: teaching people how to light each other on fire…safely.

Dangerous Theatre has also been hosting a handful of productions, from comedy nights to more traditional plays. And now, as Denver again clamps down on capacity, Wenglewick is shifting much of her theatrical work online and streaming shows.

In the weeks to come, she’ll be performing Drunk Storytime With Caroline, during which she’ll get drunk and act out various popular children’s stories, including Dr. Seuss tales and “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs”; she’ll also host virtual comedy, kink nights and more.

“Every time I make a business plan, two weeks later [I realize], ‘Oh, that ain’t going to work,’” she says. “I’m constantly having to readjust.”

Some members know that the Denver Sanctuary is on the verge of being kicked out, and wonder if Wenglewick will try to reopen the club elsewhere. “People are like, ‘Are you going to find another space?,’” she says. “I say no. I’m not going to find another landlord who’s into this stuff. If I were to take another business somewhere, it would be opening another theater, not opening another dungeon.

But even doing that seems uncertain without a vaccine. “Given COVID, I don’t know the reality of opening another theater,” she admits, adding that at least her cosmetology license is up to date, so “I could always go back to hair.”

As Elle packs up the Mile High Dungeon that she and her fellow doms built, she’s been thinking about how sex work has given her so much personally and taught her about the world. “I was standing in my studio the last couple of nights, because I’m saying goodbye,” she says. “I’m thinking back on all the different things I’ve witnessed and the people I’ve worked with.

“I’ve learned so much about myself and humanity and life,” she says. “It’s really powerful work, and I hope one day our culture can acknowledge it for what it is.”

For more information about the Denver Sanctuary, go to Denver Sanctuary’s website. To find out more about Dangerous Theatre’s upcoming online schedule, go to Dangerous Theatre’s website.

See more and larger photo’s: Westword.com.


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