Sean

6. Discuss the wacked out body modification crap you're into. pics
11. Discuss what you did when you manfactured piercing jewelry.

I don't know how much I will really write on this,
but I will at least give the history on it. you can still google
my name ?sean christian? with body piercing and get some
stuff that i have written over the years.

back in the middle to late eighties, northern California was a
really weird place. most of us thought that punk rock was dead,
and the gothic movement was really about over at the time. it
was really cool to be as sexually freaky as you could, and Jane's
Addiction ruled supreme. hip to be junkie sheik. so San Francisco
was a really weird place to hang out. it was common for the
twenty something crowd to be polygamous and to know as much
as you could about the church of the subgenius, so you could put
it down and say that it was ridiculous.

so I would drive up to San Francisco from my home town of
Sacramento and spend time with the freaks. at this time there
was no professional piercing shop there, and a few people were
just piercing out of their homes. the biggest house of this was
Esther and Vaughn, who a few years later opened Body
Manipulations. one of their friends was a good friend of mine,
teun ebbers. I also new this guy named Jay that used to live in
Sacto and moved to SF. he came back for a big party one night
and was talking about how cool he was or whatever, and started
talking about a cockring that he got put in. that was something
that I had to see. so off we went to the bathroom and he pulled
out a frenum piercing with a 12ga fixed bead ring in it. holyshit
I thought that was the fucking coolest thing that I had ever seen
and had to get one. so off to the city I went with him, and pierced
in someone's house It was so the first piercing that I ever got, other
than one earlobe with a safepin, was a 10ga frenum.

shortly after that I wanted to find out if there was anyone in
Sacramento doing the same thing, so I didn't have to go to SF.
but the only thing in Sacto was a huge underground gay men's
leather crowd. but there was one man that had been having
piercing parties for years, and low and behold if I didn't find a
way to get invited. he asked me to show up in boots, levis, and
a wife beater. I swear to god it took me years to realize that I was
the 'eye candy' at the party, young punk rocker with a shaved
head in tight jeans at a leather party. but I guess that everyone
knew that I was naïve to it, and nobody tried to play bad touch
with the straight boy. but at those parties I started realizing some
of the basics of piercing, really dirty bad piercing, but piercing
never the less. now I know that it was more of a S&M cutter's
scene, and just some cock torcher. but there were more than
enough guys around that would let you practice genital piercings.

so after a few years of dirty freaky deaky, both Body M and
Gauntlet were open in SF, and I started hearing about a woman
branding and piercing in the area also. I would go up to Body
M a few times a month and see what they were doing and try
to learn more about it all. at that point the jewelry was just
too expensive to get pierced much. a retail captive bead ring
was close to fifty dollars. so to get a hole in you, there was
big money to be dropped for a young guy. but one of my
SF friends moved to sacramento and started piercing out of
a tattoo shop that was opening there. his name was mike hare
and the shop was called the exotic body. he made some jewelry
there, and there was another guy in sacramento that started making
jewelry named scott rogers. scott was going up to Body M and
trying to get them to buy his rings, but they were very picky
about jewelry. I think that they had to see five of six sample
runs before they would buy a ring from him, but it pushed a few
him into making really nice rings. around the same time, I decided
that I want to move to the desert and find myself. so off to texas
I went.

I was living in El Paso and hacking people out of my house,
and every once in a blue moon driving to Dallas to get pierced.
there was one piercing shop there, and it was in a book store.
it was called skin and bones, and I got my nipples pierced there
in tandem. allen falkner (masumi max?s exhusband) hooked me up,
and I took what ever I learned there and went back to el paso and
worked in a small shop. texas was short lived, and I wanted to go
back to California. so I moved home and started working with
scott rogers making jewelry and have huge piercing parties out
of my house. we would have one a month, and invite everyone
over. scott and I would pierce as many people that would come
over, and we really didn't do that good of a job.

we started really getting scotts company rolling, and started a piercing
shop called Sub Q. at the time it was the second shop in Sacto, behind
mike hare's shop. both scot and I knew that we couldn't handle the
piercing shop on our own, so we got my old friend from SF, teun ebbers
to move to Sacto. he had moved to his old home town, Kansas city and
was piercing at a tattoo shop there call Grim's. there was quite a few
shops in SF by then, and there was one in santa cruz with this guy
named Eric Dakota. we would trade him captive bead rings for needles
that he had made for him. teun was a surgery field technician in the
air force, so he knew quite a bit about making a place as clean as you
could with what you had, and taught me how to stop cross contaminating
things. for quite some time we just rocked that piercing shop and had
a great time with it. we were friends with this cat in Arizona at the
time named steve 'the devil' hayworth. we used to ask him to make
us weird shit when we were doing projects. at the same time, a new
shop opened in SF called nomad. both teun and I knew blake and
christian, so we would bounce ideas off each of them and they would
do some of the same.

we kind of worked out a few idea's that using heavy cleaning agents
might not be the best idea, so both shops started telling clients to
use dr. bronner's castile soap. teun and blake both thought that salt
water soaks would help with the drying of the skin. so that went into
the aftercare. if it was a friend of ours, we just told them to leave it

alone and it would heal fine, if it got infected, soak it then. around
this
same time, California started talking about getting some legislation
about body piercing. that freaked everyone out. Sub Q was only a
few blocks from the capitol building, so I would go over there and talk
to the staff in the senator's office that was putting the bill through.
(side note, most of the above shops were using ET jewelry including
me) Body M, Gauntlet, Nomad, and Fakir could not come to one mind
about aftercare and skin prep. everyone was nervous about the state just
outlawing piercing, so they decided to start an organization call the
APP to help out with lobbying and solve some of these disputes.
Mike hare was going to a few of the meetings and was going to
get a board position, as almost everyone that was going to be in
the APP was going to have a position since there were very few
of them that were even willing to do it.

I was offered something then, blake asked me to be involved. I told
him that it was a San Francisco scrap that I didn't have the time to
get into. "decide what you want, and I will go to the senator's office
for you" it was a fun time trying to learn the right way to do things,
and we really didn't do it right. what did I learn out of all that?
Drama is dumb. don't use that big ass needle, and for god's sake, don't
put a taper behind it. its really easy to get burned out quick. Teun quit
the shop and decided to move home to become a nurse. I hung in as long
as I could, but scott and I were of two different minds when it came
to technique. I had to do something else. I didn't want to work for him
anymore, and I didn't like rockstar piercers anymore. so I decided
to start a small company with a few friends. Revolution Body Jewelry.
make the best of the best, comprise nothing.

that was a really fun ride for a few years, but i really thought that it
would be a small company so I just became partners with everyone
that I thought was going to be employed. me and two friends. you
know the old saying, don't go into business with friends, well its
true. we just had different visions of what we wanted. so it was easier
for me to leave than to fight. at that time I had been going to
different piercing shops all over the country to learn more about what
people were doing.

i sold that business to my two partners and left for santa cruz, ca
to work at the largest manufacturing plant in the world at the
time. it was called anatometal.

__________________
-sean
skype: sean.a.christian
sean @ revolutionforce.com