My whole life used to be devoted to h2g2, the Douglas Adams-founded, now BBC-run, alternative Guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It predated Wikipedia, and is different in that it places a premium on authorial voice. Entries in the Edited Guide are subjected to a fairly rigorous peer-review process, and go through a couple additional rounds of editing. It’s as good a way as any to produce a high-quality, yet whimsical selection of encyclopedia articles written by amateurs on the Internet.

But h2g2’s Edited Guide is also surrounded by its rich community, which not only produces the UnderGuide (fiction, poetry, etc.—basically anything that wouldn’t be suited to the EG) and The Post (the community newsletter, which I edited for two years), but also fantasy football and cricket, philosophical and political discussions, and deep, rich, lifelong friendships. People who have met on h2g2 have gotten married or become best friends. Hootooers, as they’re known, meet up in real life frequently, especially in the UK, where a large number of the site’s users (known as “Researchers”) are located.

h2g2 got me through high school—I discovered it at the very beginning of 9th grade, and I quickly absorbed myself in the community. I made friends, I got stalked by one of those Internet creepers sensationalist cable news warns you about, I wrote half a dozen entries for the Edited Guide and sub-edited several dozen more, and for two years, as I said, I edited The Post. h2g2 taught me most of what I know about how to edit, how to manage an amateur publication, and how to talk to adults—I was one of the youngest people I knew on the site, and most of my hootoo friends were adults. I’ve always gotten along better with people older than me, but it’s easier when you’re just a username and aren’t inhibited by a small body that isn’t allowed in pubs.

I left h2g2 towards the end of senior year—I was burned out by putting The Post together every two weeks, and I was getting ready to start college. I thought of h2g2 as an aspect of my teenage life that I was putting behind me, particularly since I was starting to write for money and couldn’t make the time to do too many things. I barely thought about h2g2 at all through this busy school year, but in the past couple months a few incidences have come up to remind me, most of them related to my Anglophilic tendencies and my relative cultural literacy about UK stuff. Since a disproportionate number of h2g2’s Researchers are British, and since the site uses UK style, I’d learned to write in a British way and became familiar with the names of politicians, celebrities, TV programs (or programmes, as they would say), and all sorts of other things. I learned the basics of cricket and became familiar with the concept of the Eurovision song contest (which happened today, and that’s a whole nother post). Believe it or not, editing for UK style does teach you how to write as if you’ve been in British schools all your life pretty damn fast. To this day, I can go back and forth pretty easily. Thanks to h2g2.

I’ve been checking the site every couple days, the past week or two—not with the multiple-times-daily frequency I used to have, but certainly more than I have in the past year. And I’m thinking about writing entries for the EG again, because I thought about it this way: every entry is really just a mini-lecture. It’s an opportunity to present information in a way that’s easily accessible and interesting to a fairly wide audience, and you don’t even have to have any academic credentials to do it. I was writing for the EG when I was 14—I can certainly do a better job now, at 19, after a year of college and vast improvements in my writing skills. So. I’m turning over entry possibilities in my head, thinking about how I would approach them—how I would “teach” something like “Howl” or Hair or anything else I know about. It’s a very different style from the academic papers, creative non-fiction, or news analysis I usually write, but it’s worth doing.

But more than anything, it’s weird to think how one comes full-circle. In part, this is peculiar to h2g2—the folks on the site like to quote the Eagles, saying “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave,” and it’s true—very few folks I can think of who left the site in my time there really left for good. How can you just write out something that was such a huge part of your life? I know I can’t? But it makes me happy, and relieved, that this is just one of a number of things from the first half of my teenage years that I’m returning to. It means that all that time, all that energy, wasn’t pointless.

Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, might recall that I wrote before about KinkForAll, an open-source, “unconference” model dedicated to fostering dialogue between members of the kinky, queer, and sex-positive communities. The first iteration of KinkForAll was held in New York City in March, and the next is going to happen in Washington, DC this summer. The folks putting that together haven’t announced a date yet, but since I’m going to be in DC for the summer, I’ve signed up to attend (as should you, if you’re interested in this sort of thing).

Anyway, the process of deciding to attend and eventually attending the New York KFA caused me to do a lot of thinking about the philosophy behind this whole “unconference” thing, and a “kink” conference in particular. What is the role of the “conference” model? How do you make something like that, which seems so intrinsically academic, accessible to a wider community that hasn’t had an academic background? How do you bring together a lot of disparate communities who have little in common but a penchant for talking about sexuality and get them to have a conversation? What form should that conversation take? There’s a lot of politics to be dealt with here, particularly when considering the role of the BDSM community in all this: a lot of the folks who attended KFANYC came from within New York’s BDSM community, but that’s a largely underground space, without the level of public visibility, public comfort, and publicly-constructed community identity that, say, the LGBT community has. It’s tricky. Very tricky.

Part of what’s tricky is the name “KinkForAll” itself, and actually in listening to one of KFA’s primary unorganizers and evangelists, maymay, talk about this, I’ve been able to develop my understanding of what that word is doing there. When I initially heard that the name had been chosen to include the word “kink,” I was dubious, because to me “kink” was synonymous with “BDSM,” and I had to wonder how this conference model was going to include and address other sexuality communities, and how it would be different from your average BDSM workshop. (I also had to wonder where I, whose realm is primarily queer identity and politics, would fit in.) Well. Folks who have been to a KinkForAll (and hopefully that number will start to grow pretty rapidly!) will know that it is quite different indeed.

Maymay says all this better than I do, so I recommend you read his blog; I won’t even try. I’ll just point you to something he said in a recent podcast where he spoke about KFA (which is what prompted me to write this post): “The BDSM community is so focused on these, like, extreme sports-style skill sets that we forget, often, that’s not necessarily the most important thing… especially for people who need to know more about the world in which we live in [in order] to come out to our world.”

That’s exactly right. Much as there was a time when the gay community was criticized for being overly focused simply on sexual practice, and not on larger, more abstract or theoretical questions about identity and community, so too (from what I’ve heard; I can’t speak as an insider) does the BDSM community seem to struggle with this problem. KinkForAll is addressing that, and here I think the word “kink” is actually key: I’ve come to see this word as encompassing any non-mainstream sexuality, maybe a further broadening or development or evolution of “queer.” I think we can use it that way; it’s not as if it’s a word that actually connotes a specific sexual desire or practice in the way that the B, D, S, and M of that acronym do. From a sociological perspective, I have to say that KFA is a perfect opportunity to watch this community evolve and shape itself, and the questions that KFA has posed to me make me constantly reconsider how minority sexuality communities continue to place themselves in relation to the majority. As the LGBT community becomes increasingly mainstream and increasingly integrated into a “straight” (for lack of a better word) paradigm, what takes its place as the radical outlier? Maybe “kink” is the new “queer”; one of the concepts I saw threading through KFANYC was that what almost seemed more important than any specific sexual preferences was a radical ethos, a prevailing notion of being outside the mainstream, of DIY, of grassroots. I don’t think it’s erroneous to draw parallels to gay liberation, when a minority sexuality community decided it was going to establish its own boundaries (or lack thereof), and not allow the law or the medical profession or anyone else to do that for them.

I think I may have lost the point of this rant, except to say that, well, all this is critically important. In my classes and my own reading, everything is about progress, and acceptance, and mainstreaming; today in my lectures in the last week of class, sociological data on the younger generation’s increasing acceptance of homosexuality went along with my history professor’s discussion of progress on the same-sex marriage front. And that’s all well and good, but I think it’s still wise to address the sexuality counterculture, whatever that may be at time of writing. They lend an uncertainty to the whole model, the possibility that maybe relationship paradigms and societal standards will continue to shift and change and blow our minds. That’s why I’ve signed up to attend my second KinkForAll, anyway.