An Oral History of Hitchin' Bitches PDX
Part 1: The First Decade, 2012-2022
Draft of our Oral History uploaded 2/5/2024. Minor adjustments and links in the future! We are very grateful to ZA for pursuing and drafting this oral history, and to all the past volunteers and facilitators that have contributed to it's contents.
The original version of this history is posted on our Fetlife group. This version has been lightly edited, primarily to shorten all HB PDX organizers’s names to initials to protect their privacy.
Interview with J, July 10, 2022, with updates by ZA, October 2, 2023, updates by HK Nov. 26, 2023, updates by NW Jan. 1, 2024.
J: SS1 and I started out the Hitchin' Bitches PDX group in Portland, Oregon, in October 2012. At the time I had only been doing rope for a year or so myself. In Portland all the teachers were cis men and it felt like there wasn't a spot for us, if you were not a cis man. There were monthly queer parties happening then, and I would impromptu teach stuff at those parties and people were enthusiastic about that. But there was a need for more. When I would go to queer parties, it was only a small handful of us that would give tastings. I identified as female back then, and I really went out of my way to be as femme as possible, with pink rope.
In 2012, Portland already had PRAG, Portland Rope Arts Group, predecessor of Rope Arts Group PDX; Noble was teaching; The BOTI House already had Sunday parties; the Valhalla Education Series was happening and one of the classes there was on rope. Tantrika wasn't doing On the Fringe rope group yet; though it welcomed and inspired many of us during its existence from 2016 to 2020.
I came across Hedwig online. In January 2012 they had started the international Hitchin' Bitches group in Sweden, and from there chapters quickly sprang up in dozens of cities. I emailed Hedwig and followed their rope for a while. Hedwig emailed back to give the okay and to remind us of the rule that Hedwig is listed on Fet as a leader of all HBs chapters worldwide.
From the beginning, we were very politely trying to say this group is not for cis male tops. It’s a home for folks that didn't have another home. And a safe space for cis male bottoms — they're underrepresented as well — without feeling their masculinity is questioned. It was never intended as a cruising space, so we put it out there that folks, including cis male rope bottoms, could post on the forums for looking for class partners. We set up the online threads as a space for people to make those connections before coming to the event.
The first meeting in Portland was at my place at the time, The BOTI House. (That house, like the Tardis, was much "bigger on the inside" than it appeared on the outside, and many local ropesters have happy memories of its basement. -ZA) For a long time we scheduled once a month for HBs and twice a month for BOTI House parties. Sundays at 4pm is a good time of day for a rope group.
The class format was that we would do kind of a 101 intro for new folks and then a themed tie. We each had our own way of teaching. Mine was that I'd tie the whole thing first, then take it apart, then we'd tie along afterward. There were two and sometimes three of us demonstrating at the same time, because the spaces we were in were awkward sometimes and you couldn't always see from the crowd. This split the effort of helping people, to have at least two people co-hosting, and that made things better. Sometimes we had workshops with a projecting camera to enlarge the image.
We had people come in to teach through Hitchin' Bitches, a couple of queer female tops who came in and taught. Freya taught us once; we had Mynx teach a beautiful class on tying with one rope. We would try to get people to come in and teach, so it wasn't me and SS every time. Out-of-towners traveled here to teach us; we collected donations to cover the cost of the space. Cost initially was $5, pass-the-hat, with no one turned away for lack of it. In 2014, as a fundraiser, SS1 started an online shop with t-shirts and tank tops and tote bags with the Hitchin' Bitches logo and slogans like "I tie like a girl."
In 2016-2017, COL took on teaching and leadership. SS2 was COL's demo bottom, and she helped organize. We decided to switch from the old Catalyst space to semi-public venues, to make it more accessible. We went away from dungeon spaces to make it more welcoming to people who are new to kink as well. Rope is one of those "gateways'' where new people enter the scene. We had to search for a physically safe space for everyone. On Alberta Street the studio had stairs, though, which wasn't ideal for accessibility. The educational side limited us, too, when we wanted to do anything like hardpoint suspension training; that was really hard to find for gender-variant people. We need an indoor playground with swing sets to convert into a playroom. [laughter]
[ZA takes up the story]
Next, in 2017-2018, NW volunteered to lead the group and teach or host monthly, still at the studio on Alberta Street. People found us online then via either FetLife or Facebook; many used one or the other but not both. NW shared with us:
“I had only been a top for under a year I think when I took over facilitating/hosting. I had never wanted to top until I went an HB class as a spare bottom. The teacher threw a hank at me and said "you might as well try self tying while you're here." I loved it. Immediately after that I bought my first hank and went fully switchy.”
NW and volunteers like RR worked to update our group description to be more specific and inclusive to all the tops that were welcome in our space. Around that time in 2018, HK joined as a co-facilitator, and we had a really nice consistent group of new and veteran peeps!
During this time past facilitators, including SS1, J, and COL, returned to teach classes here and there. Around this time there was growing interest in self-tying and self-suspension, and in ropework as movement or dance. We hosted YumYumPanda and SubtlyBound for a popular face tying class, a bottoming workshop by RR, and a TK class with ShesANatural, among other guest presenters. We also hosted a performance and class with international educators BurgundyRose and SpringTide.
From about 2018 to 2022, J took a break from community events and leadership because they had reached the end of their rope :-) and needed to focus on grad school, then returned to the scene.
In 2019, HK took on leadership for Hitchin' Bitches PDX as NW moved on to new ventures. Early in 2020 we moved to an aerial dance studio in the same building that had prospects for suspension. It was there we welcomed BurgundyRose and SpringTide back for a rope intensive on Movement, Flow and Improvisation. Then the Covid pandemic reached Portland, though, and for two years we stopped renting indoor space.
[HK takes up the story]
As with most things, the Covid-19 pandemic was (and still is, as of 2024), challenging for Hitchin’ Bitches PDX. In 2020, we met over Zoom to do rope "together apart", offering virtual classes and discussions. One opportunity these zoom events afforded was reducing our overhead, allowing HB PDX to collect donations to give to local organizations. We started by donating the proceeds of our April and May 2020 virtual classes to our new venue, hoping lockdown would quickly end and our new venue would survive. In June and July, both honoring Juneteenth and responding to the protests regarding the murder of George Floyd by police, we donated event proceeds to Don't Shoot PDX, a local group centered on direct engagement activism, education, and bringing an end to systemic discrimination. Our November class honored Native American Heritage Month by donating to Wisdom of the Elders, a Portland non-profit supporting Indigenous knowledge preservation and workforce development programs for Native peoples.
For most of 2021, Hitchin’ Bitches PDX was quiet for the first time in its history. HK was struggling with the ongoing pandemic and all the complications that entailed. Thankfully, with the encouragement from friends and volunteers like ZA and SS2, HB PDX was able to hold a few socially distanced outdoor events in summertime and zoom classes as the weather cooled. We used this time to survey our community on what Covid precautions would help folks return to in-person events in 2022.
With data in hand, we returned indoors in 2022, masked and with vaccination cards, to tie and be tied at the collaborative space of SubRosaPDX, Club Rosa. After our January class made a pivot to virtual due to a Covid spike, our other events ran in-person with guest presenters including MxBliss, WOKT, and HK. We also offered rope jams and skillshares. These classes, and the community created within them, spurred new energy in Hitchin’ Bitches PDX, with returning and new volunteers taking on capacity-building roles. L, S, and HG set up a Discord group for volunteer communications that would eventually go public. RF started our website and newsletter templates, and so many others contributed, and continue to contribute to, our dream board for the organization. 2022 was also the year KinkFest resumed, and HB PDX was there in force, hosting a community rope jam and social.
[ZA’s narrative resumes]
From 2019 to 2022, the group description on FetLife evolved to become more clearly inclusive, and more trans and nonbinary participants attended regularly, especially as people joined after finding us online not only on FetLife but also on Discord starting in early 2023.
In the course of its first decade the FetLife group for Hitchin' Bitches PDX has become more organized and grown to have more than a thousand members. In-person events have welcomed usually fifteen to forty attendees each, meeting more than 150 times from 2012 through 2022. Besides sometimes adding workshops and rope jams to the calendar, we have continued the tradition of getting together monthly except in the month of KinkFest, the large annual conference on Easter weekend. We have also carried on Jenn's tradition of offering loaner rope to anyone who needs it during classes and rope jams. Over the years the group's share-basket has also come to include a growing collection of good books to lend during classes which started with NW’s generously donated collection. Our titles include things like Evie Vane's Better Bondage for Every Body, Shay Tiziano's Tying and Flying, and Lee Harrington's Shibari You Can Use and More Shibari You Can Use.
The Portland, Oregon, chapter of HBs has developed thanks to ten years of all-volunteer work by a whole cast of dedicated ropesters. Kudos especially to the local group's founder, J, whose patient efforts created a solid beginning for this much-needed rope space following Hedwig's international model. Warm thanks also to all the other co-founders and leaders, including SS1, COL and SS2, NW, HK, and everyone who has taught, hosted, demo bottomed, organized, posted announcements, moderated online discussions, and participated in this decade of workshops, classes, and rope jams. Thank you all! Here's to the next ten years.
