Meet Lord William, an S&M vet
A New York character with a storied past
Lord William, back in the day
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A lifelong New Yorker, Lord William has sharp brown eyes, arm-to-arm tattoos, and the finest mullet this side of Youngblood-era Patrick Swayze. He’s a talented bassist and an award-winning breeder of frilled lizards, bearded dragons, crested geckos, exotic roaches, and scorpions. He’s also seen, in the bowels of a defunct S&M dungeon, a man’s penis nailed to a board.
“When you think about it, it’s kind of like a trick,” Lord William says. “The guy wasn’t circumcised. The nails were sharp and thin, almost like a pin. So it’s just a little prick, really. The mistress took his foreskin, pulled it forward, then hit the nail with a hammer through the board. The guy screamed and walked around showing everyone.”
Lord William is a quasi-pseudonym dating back to his days in New York’s ’70s S&M scene. An ad in The Village Voice led him, like many, to “a live show and dungeon tour.”
“There was one mistress there who was brutal,” he remembers. “She was like, ‘I dare anyone to come up onstage with me.’ She beat the shit out of me, and I didn’t give up for nothing—until she gave up. Afterward, the person in charge came up and said, ‘Would you be interested in working?’ I said, ‘Why not?’”
Within months, he became the manager and a makeshift auteur at the theater-cum-sex-club called Belle du Jour. The Lord attributes his rise to versatility: “Some guys took dominant roles, some guys took submissive roles. I didn’t care either way—giving, getting, it was all the same to me.”
As manager, he pushed for more nudity and better-looking women. “I saw the S&M scene like this: You had ugly girls dressed up in leather. That was the bottom line. There wasn’t anyone that hot over there.”
In those days, when Times Square repelled families and subways reeked even worse of urine, both homo- and heterosexual dungeons enjoyed a golden age. The scene was close-knit, and Lord William cameoed in clubs across Manhattan. Among these were Plato’s Retreat—memorably recaptured in the recent documentary American Swing—and his personal favorite, the Hellfire Club. Tucked in the basement of the Liberty Inn, that long-standing love nest near 14th Street and the West Side Highway, the Hellfire was a place where “you could see the street and all the shit dripping down from the sewer,” Lord William says. “The bathroom was a bathtub against the wall. You peed in the tub—on the floor, too. It was anything-goes.”
S&M performers tended to be wayward youths, but the clientele were mostly seasoned fetishists. Some licked feet, while others preferred the business ends of cudgels, fish hooks, catheters, or pincers. At least one, Mike the Plumber, appeared nearly every night with a handcrafted toilet, which fitted his head so mistresses could pee on him.
When the AIDS scare shuttered gay clubs and bathhouses, however, their straight counterparts followed. By the early ’90s, most of Lord William’s hotspots were closed. His cohorts sought either softer careers or harder drugs. “I don’t keep in touch with any of them,” he says now, with a trace of wistfulness. Combing through a photo album in which his genitals feature prominently, he points at former costars. “She’s probably dead. Dead… dead. That guy might still be kicking. Oh, him? Yeah, dead, I’d bet.”
Lord William, however, is still very alive. He lives in Woodhaven, Queens, with a family, a yard, and some reptiles. And these days he works doing installations for a rarefied, specialty home-entertainment emporium—one you’ve most certainly walked by—where his expertise commands his colleagues’ respect.
This doesn’t mean he’s tamed. “My band’s playing the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island this year,” he says, “so I’ve been meeting the vendors and the sideshow crew. You ever been? It’s great. The cops don’t care what you do. Now there’s a scene I need to get into.”
