I was planting tomatoes on my allotment this morning. I’m also a vegetarian, play the piano I have a parrot. This is part of my identity, but it’s only part. “It’s so totally non-verbal,” he tells me. It’s a sad thing to say, but there’s not love from the heart in me for Colin – but what I have got is someone who is there for me and I’m happy with that.”įor David, a writer who works in academia, puppy play is an escape from the analytical world. I started chatting to Colin online and he offered to look after me. “Then I had this moment of panic because a puppy without a collar is a stray they don’t have anyone to look after them. “I wouldn’t say it was the catalyst, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Tom. He knew he liked sleeping in a collar, had a fetish for skin-tight clothing – Lycra, rubber, even off-the-peg cycling shorts – then came a dalmatian zentai suit he found on eBay, a £1 orange lead from Pets at Home until, eventually, a man in a club walked up to him and said: “Oh right, so you’re a pup.” The realisation was not without its repercussions: it led to a breakup with his former fiancee Rachel and a move into a gay relationship with his new handler. Tom’s discovery of puppy play came about gradually. “It’s just the chance to enjoy each other’s company on a very simple level.” “You’re not worrying about money, or food, or work,” says Tom, who works as an engineer in a theatre. When I speak to Tom, he is keen to point out that puppy play is about more than just outfits and surface-level power games: it’s about being given licence to behave in a way that feels natural, even primal. In the documentary, we see Tom, AKA Spot, take part in the Mr Puppy Europe competition in Antwerp, a mix of beauty pageant, talent show and Crufts David, AKA Bootbrush, talk to camera in a leather dog mask two pups walk through London pretending to wee on lampposts to raise awareness of their identity and lots of men jumping up for “treats”, barking and wagging their mechanical tails. While the pup community is a broad church, human pups tend to be male, gay, have an interest in dressing in leather, wear dog-like hoods, enjoy tactile interactions like stomach rubbing or ear tickling, play with toys, eat out of bowls and are often in a relationship with their human “handlers”. Secret Life of the Human Pups is a sympathetic look at the world of pup play, a movement that grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach out to likeminded people. Maybe too easy, in fact, because to laugh is to dismiss it, denigrate it – ignore the fact that many of us have found comfort and joy in pretending to be animals at some point in our lives. I t’s easy to laugh at a grown man in a rubber dog suit chewing on a squeaky toy.
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January 2023
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