I’m home (finally), but a frustrating and funny thing happened at the airport. I’ll update this with pictures tomorrow, but they saw a big black spot on the xray and wanted to see inside my carry-on bag. It was chock full of sex toys and leather gear. The big black spot were big padlocks I took with me (pic below). But there were leather collars, restraints, floggers (wrapped in a towel that said BarebackRT CUM RAG), etc.

As soon as the guy pulled me over I said “I’m coming from and S/M conference. I apologize for what’s in the bag”. He was good about it though, he found the padlocks but then inspected the rest of the contents and came across a small billy club – maybe 8 or 9 inches in length (see pic below). He said he had to check to see if it would be considered a weapon. Turns out his boss had zero sense of humor and declared it a weapon. That meant the Chicago Police had to be called. When they got there the officer asking me questions didn’t know what S/M was – I had to explain it to him.

I’m sure they all thought I was a freak, but I just squared my shoulders, looked them in the face and answered their questions in a friendly manner. That got me some credit. Instead of escalating it, they realized I was pretty harmless. They still had to run a check on me and write up a report.

The funniest part was they were all handling the little billy club having no clue I stick it up guys butts. If they had known that, I think they would have dropped it like a hot potato. One of the officers asked another one, “what does he use that for?” and the other officer said “I don’t even want to know…” Indeed, he didn’t want to know. So there was a humorous aspect to it, though I couldn’t enjoy it too much given that they were watching my every move.

The guy who initially pulled me over was super nice about everything. I didn’t have a key to lock my carry on, so he went out of his way to find some tape to put around the bag. He even told me about a security check point that had no lines so I could get to my flight on-time. And United handled it perfectly as well. When I came back and said the TSA was making me check the bag they put me to the front of the line and didn’t charge me for the extra bag.

It was a huge hassle and rattled me a bit, but in hindsight it was pretty funny. It reminds me of when I went to Puerto Rico years ago with a sand-filled leather ball stretcher in my bag. The security guy pulled it out and studied it for several minutes and finally asked “what’s this for?” I said “you don’t want to know” and he just dropped it back into my bag and told me to have a nice day.