The dominatrix all too often appears as a solitary figure, a tightly sheathed empress ruling a
landscape peopled mostly by males - from her cowering slaves to her transvestite maid. This has
been her loss, for there's not mere safety in numbers, there is power in them too: If one latex-clad
female is goddess-like, a dozen are truly sublime.
Enter the House of Domination, a New York City sisterhood of women who play off dominance and
submission as theater, as personal style, and to varying degrees, as a way of life. As an
identifying stripe, they take the common last name of "Domination".
There is great
variety within this "girl gang": The youngest Domination has just turned eighteen,
and the oldest is in her late forties. A handful are professional dominants, many make their
living as go-go dancers and strippers, and others have started bands or businesses. While some
never stray from the classic domina's wardrobe, many more favor Supervixen looks and
exotic shoes and boots. Smaller subgroups within the house are cross-dressing lesbians
and a handful of submissives.
The House of Domination was founded in late 1989 by Kitty Boots, the designer and former co-owner
of London's Kensington Market "Pure Sex" latex boutique. She had just moved to New York,
armed only with a suitcase of rubber dresses and extremely high-heeled boots, when she met up with
Chi Chi Valenti, a journalist/instigator and fixture of New York's nightlife scene. Valenti had
written extensively on Harlem's "vogueing houses" for Details years before their dance
became a household word. With Valenti, Ms. Boots visited the vogueing "balls", marathon
fashion competitions among members of rival "houses", or gay fashion gangs.
The Harlem balls were too male-dominated for her taste (women were forbidden to compete in most
categories), but in the loose family structure of a house Kitty Boots found the germ of her next
great idea. She established her all-female House of Domination with a half-dozen go-go dancers
and that one over-stuffed suitcase of latex clothes. Her dream was to bring to life the classic
fetish imagery of visionaries like Irving Klaw and John Willie, and to close the gap that had always
existed between two-dimensional and three-dimensional S/M.
For decades, S/M as performance had generally been a witnessing of dominant acts - onstage
piercings, whippings and the like. Ms. Boots and her fledgling House began to develop a different
aesthetic - leaning away from the cartoon domina, into territory more fetishistic and less purely
sadistic. House performances quickly came to resemble the super-eight films of Klaw's Movie Star
News, with their kittenish bondage and catfighting.
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