Powers to the People
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He is a Republican, a mayoral candidate, historian, body builder, bi-sexual, occasional cross-dresser and owns a sex club.
In support of a new book project, I conducted an interesting interview with the founder and owner of San Francisco’s Power Exchange sex club. Mike Powers, founder, proprietor and kink master is a walking symbol of what is obnoxiously fun about The City. Few towns could whelp a man like Powers much less let him to live.
Not knowing me from Adam or Eve’s next of kin, Mike gave me an hour and a half of his time for the interview during which he multi-tasked like any good businessman, paying bills, reading snail mail and monitoring his staff’s chatter on walkie talkies. His purple office is decorated with posters of Abraham Lincoln and bookshelves filled with weighty tomes covering political philosophy and history punctuated with an occasional porn DVDs.
I didn’t tour the sex club for long. Despite being a slow Friday night some of the activities therein were still slightly out of my comfort zone. But that is part of Power’s marketing angle. He has created a sex club with a simple set of rules, one being that if any particular sexual activity disturbs you then you had better go elsewhere. His operation may be the ultimate personification of one San Francisco ethos – tolerating nearly every adult activity that does not violate another person’s desires.
Libertine lust if you must.
But Mike is painfully aware of San Francisco’s alter ego ethos, that of a growingly fascist town. With agitation as naked as his patrons, we discussed why an otherwise rough hewn city has a government hell bent on regulating every aspect of civilian life. It rubbed his Republican nature the wrong way (and given his profession, he is more accustomed to being rubbed the right way).
“Conservative in the volume of government, not values” was Mike’s take on how the GOP wandered away from its origins. Indeed this situation has troubled the traditional libertarian wing of Mike’s party for some time. I doubt the GOP is ready to embrace Mike — clothed or not — but they may be ready to embrace his more traditional politics.
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