Title: A Guide to New York's Fetish Underground Author: Claudia Varrin Publisher: Citadel Press Publish Date: 2002 Pages: 230 Genres:: Fetishes,Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Much sexier than Shecky’s Erotic New York, which promises to serve up “the best sex in the city,” A Guide to New York’s Fetish Underground pulsates with libidinous intrepidity, fueled by the enthusiasms of author Claudia Varrin. A sexpert on all things covertly perverse, Varrin is a professional dominatrix, active in the fetish underground both nationally and internationally. In this slim reference volume, she focuses on our gritty East Coast city of sin, creating a travel guide that looks beyond and beneath the slicked-up streets of Soho and the Upper East Side and the Disneyfied Times Square tourist traps.

The book begins by helping you suit up for your next special evening, with chapters specializing in fetishwear and leatherwear, goth attire, military chic, and other types of uniforms. Shops with names like The Baroness Latex, Demask, Religious Sex, and Trash and Vaudeville hint at rich fabrics, decadence, flirtatious fun and a healthy helping of the taboo. Varrin runs through each site’s inventory with all the ebullience of a teenybopper searching for the next best micromini.

Next, you’re aided in accessorizing your new outfits, and then getting yourself in the mood, with chapters on shoes, lingerie, toys, video rental, and more. Mainstays like Eve’s Garden and Babeland (though listed with the outdated Toys in Babeland name) are in attendance, along with some more obscure (and inscrutable) stops, such as Goodland Trading (martial arts supplies) and Canal Rubber.

Finally, you’re ready to step out on the town and get freaky with other like-minded fetishists. If you’re a novice to the scene, Varrin telles you how to hook up with your kindred spirits, listing BDSM societies, houses of domination, clubs, regular parties, and more.

Put together in the format of guides done by Shecky’s and Zagat’s, yet not utilizing their practice of multiple reviewers, you have to wonder if you’re getting the full picture here. After all, Varrin likes what she likes and, while you can’t fault her for not being comprehensive, this is only one person’s opinion (albeit a very experienced person). Still, if you keep an open mind and carefully consider every listing in this book, badly reviewed or not, you too will be an expert on how to find whatever it is one needs for a night underground.

Perhaps the biggest fault of this book is that it hasn’t been updated since 2002. Some of the listings are outdated, with websites refusing to pop up and shops shifting location. The environment of the fetishist is by nature a constantly changing one. Blue shops shut down. Parties move. Hosts and hostesses decide to get out of the game.

But perhaps that’s why this remains the only edition out there. The underground would no longer be the underground if it was laid bare for everyone to see.