In my hands.

I hold a slim paperback novel titled The Tarnsman of Gore, published in nineteen sixty six by author John Norman.

It's the first in a sprawling series of fantasy novels set on a counter Earth.

Here's the blurb from the back cover.

Earth could never.

Know of Gore, the world always on the opposite side of the sun.

But Gore somehow knew about Earth.

As Tarro Cabot soon discovered.

Taken my force to that savage world, Cabot was compelled to become a Tarnsman, a warrior trained to master the great warbirds of Coroba.

This book, it's not the type of fiction I typically gravitate towards.

It's giving pulpy romance.

Novel meets planetary sci fi vibes.

On the cover is a suggestive illustration.

A shirtless, muscular man brandishes a sharp weapon, his stance exaus dominance.

Below him, a topless woman kneels, her head bowed in submission, her hands bound behind her back.

Looming in the distance, A warrior rides a massive, savage looking bird.

I read the first book for research purposes, but honestly, it was a struggle listening as an audiobook on double speed helped.

Among the trees on the clover, I threw her to my feet.

She tried frantically to readjust the folds of her veil, but with both hands I tore it fully away, and she lay at my feet.

As it is said on Gore face stripped.

The Gore series spelled Gor starts off pretty tame, following a British professor abducted from Earth and forced into the life of a warrior on Gore.

Gores differ from Earth in a lot of ways.

Fantastical creatures, homestones that hold mythical powers for different clans, that sort of thing.

Plus there's your typical array of human activities plundering, nomadic wandering, kidnapping, wars.

But the most notable thing is that men on Gore can own female slaves.

They're called kajira.

They wear collars and have no rights.

These women are considered akin to pets, and this arrangement is mutually beneficial according to the philosophy described at length by author John Norman, as men are naturally dominant and women are inherently submissive.

Here's a typical passage, the likes of which is repeated ad nauseum throughout the series.

Most Gorrian slave girls, once they make the adjustment to the caller, are radiantly happy.

Society, particularly it's males, rejoices in their existence.

The male fulfills himself and the mastery, and the girl, sheltered and cared for and nurtured and commonly loved, even madly, receives the strict, uncompromising domination without which she could not attain her full woman in society approves of their status, and they themselves desire it.

No wonder they walk with grace and beauty, No wonder they walk proudly.

They have been found women enough and feminine enough, and exciting enough, and desirable enough and beautiful enough to be put in the collar.

So yeah.

Unsurprisingly, the books were divisive.

Released during the nineteen sixties and seventies, as women fought for equality and pushed back against patriarchy, there was public backlash.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, a sci fi author of the popular Miss of Avalon, shared a publisher with Norman and wrote a book in protest called Warrior Women, in which a female slave fights back against her enslavement.

Yet the Gore books resonated with enough readers to sustain Norman's prolific output, roughly one book a year for over two decades.

In nineteen eighty seven, the series inspired a Hollywood movie, Just Remembered a Woefully and was treating like.

A sage to Morels.

It looks campy and was widely panned by critics at the time, but despite dismal box office numbers and reviews, a second Gore movie was released a year later.

I can't even find box office numbers for that one, so it doesn't seem like it had much of an audience.

And it was around this time in the late nineteen eighties that Norman was dropped by his publisher, a decision he has said was due to pressure from feminist editors.

But he didn't stop writing.

In the early two thousands, Norman took his work online, publishing more than a dozen ebooks since The advent of the internet also fostered a devoted subculture of fans.

Gore obsessives gathered in chat rooms to debate everything from traditional sword sizes to slave garments to how best to integrate the social structure of the books into one's life.

In other words, how to be a Gorrian not pretend, not role playing on second life, but how to be a master or a slave in the home, in the bedroom in life period.

Today, a niche community of self identified Gorrians still exists.

They practice master slave relationships modeled on the books keeping Norman's controversial vision alive.

And that world, well, that was Tellina's.

Gore was a world of slaves and beautiful women, of human domination by the alien secret priest kings.

And it was also the world of Telena, the tempestuous daughter of Gore's great warlord.

She waited for the man who could subdue her, the man who would be her master.

From iHeart Podcasts, I'm Melissa Nelson, and this is what happened to Teleina.

Zar when Tom passed.

I mean, she was obviously devastated.

Her world had kind of revolved around him.

They had one of those bombs that you know, everybody could aspire to.

Little town have their skeleton.

I mean, they're not with that.

I had done some internet digging and then that popped up with the John Norman Gorrian novels, and I was like, what the hell are you people into?

What is going on here?

Episode three Belonging.

I had hoped to speak to John Norman, author of the Gore series, to learn more about his work and the subculture inspired by the books, but his current publisher told me that Norman quote does not want to be interviewed if the slant is going to be another judgmental feminist attack.

He added that Norman is also over ninety years old, and like many that age can be a little cranky.

So instead I talked to an expert, who, despite being a feminist, was surprisingly non judgmental.

I don't think that when John Norman published this he ever imagined that people would try to live like that.

Nobody writes a novel thinking now, I'm hopeful that everybody will read my novel and live exactly like that.

Would anybody like to live through?

Anna Karinina, I mean, you know, fiction is an escape.

This is doctor Gloria Breem, a sex therapist and self described kinster.

It could have been the pure product of his imagination and his sexual fantasies, and not a world d would even choose to live in himself, but a fantasy world.

And we're all permitted to fantasy world.

I mean, I actually read a Gore book when I was probably twenty.

I was bored one night and I picked it up and I thought, oh, this is really interesting.

The vibe of the cover was kind of sexy.

It was a guy standing looking all masterly and you know, maybe a woman at his feet.

It kind of got across its message to readers.

I wasn't even aware I was kinky.

It was just kind of interesting.

It was a wonderful fantasy.

And he wrote a ton in the series because the book sold a lot, probably to a lot of kinky people.

Gloria has spent her career as a sex educator trying to reduce the stigma around BDSI, an acronym you've probably heard thrown around that stands for bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism.

Certainly since the beginning of recorded history, you can find Roman wool paintings of people being whipped and having ecstasies, and lots of art from the Roman era on that tell us that people have always been interested in extreme or non conventional, non reproductive sex.

Looking at it from the outside, it's definitely weird and bizarre, but looking at it from the inside, we all feel like this is where the love is, you know, the real, raw, primal love.

We're not doing it to be emotionally hurt.

We're doing it really in outs of finding joy and ecstasy.

Though the Gore books were titillating, Gloria never really connected with them.

The strict gender roles depicted in the series felt anachronistic.

On Gore, men were in charge, women followed, listened, and served, often while scantily clad, which is.

Why I didn't like the book and I didn't care for the series, because I'm feminist to the core, and I was from the age of fourteen, and I actually was raised that way by my parents.

Gloria's introduction to Gore was brief didn't leave that much of an impact, But later in life, when she immersed herself in the BDSM community, she learned that some people felt very connected to the books.

A few years later, when I finally did hook up with the BDSM world, there were Golorians among us who took various handles straight out of the novel.

It was more about obedience and women serving the will of their master.

There's no way to know how many people in the US or in the world call themselves Gorrian or try to live according to the principles in the books.

But if you move in BDSM spaces, you may come across them once in a while.

I once met a Gourian couple where the guys started to tell me, well, you know, all women were born to be submissive, And that was like the end of the conversation right there, you know, because really, you know, there's no universal anything about male or female this world.

It's been hard to pierce as an outsider reporter and a woman.

Gorrians are extremely protective of their lifestyle, knowing that their choices are probably not accepted in the mainstream.

Those who did talk to me shared fears of being outed and losing their jobs or jeopardizing their families.

In order to better understand what it even is to be a Gorrian, I spent six months lurking in the online spaces where they hang out these days, Reddit and discord, and listening in on these conversations.

I was able to glean some information.

For example, there's a spectrum of Goreyan participation.

On one end are those who keep it virtual where they role play the master slave dynamic online.

And on the other end are people who live every day like this, couples who enter into a contract.

Sometimes we're in sometimes not, where the woman submits to the man, relinquishing her rights to choice, freedom agency.

It sounds shocking, but for some people it is very sexy and very satisfying.

I do believe that Gorrian's, just like other bdsmmers, are very choosy and carefortable about who they give power to, and they reserve power for their masters.

If you have two really good people who really are compatible, that's going to be fun.

But if you are with somebody who is flawed, or has mental health issues, or is actually really a troubled person, it could be quite dangerous.

I've been a twenty four to seven slave owned by Master Zarius since two thousand and four.

One of my friends that calls me a pragmatic hedonist.

I'm totally down with that.

I'm looking at a social media account that Teleina created.

In her bio, she describes herself and her husband Tom aka Master Zarius.

We're a Gorrian family and belong to the Gray Eagle family.

Previous to being owned by Master Czarius, I was a BDSM submissive to a variety of masters and mistresses.

I've been in the lifestyle since.

I was eighteen.

This is a dramatization of some of Telena's writing on fet life, a dating and social media site for people interested in fetish and BDSM picture Facebook, but with dick pics and leather.

If you're curious.

It's not safe for work unless your work is making a podcast about all of this.

I was able to see Telena's profile simply by signing up for an account.

As far as I can tell, there was a time when Telena was a prolific fet life user.

She connected with new friends, found events to attend, and shared a lot of personal writing.

Although fetlife is primarily a sexual form, there's not much on her page about sex at all.

Most of what she shared was overwhelmingly wholesome.

Little essays focused on the banality of everyday life, and people would respond with kind comments.

This was clearly her chosen community, where she felt safe to be herself.

I've spent too much of my life being so harsh on myself.

My house isn't as clean as my mother's.

My waistline isn't as small as someone else's, my hair is too stringy, my taste buds aren't developed enough.

Whatever, Telena revealed a lot about her life, her insecurities, her ongoing weight less journey.

I tried on the cute pants first, and they fit like they were made on me.

And it happened.

A small smile curled the left side of my mouth, and for the first time in many weeks, I was able to see my entire body in the mirror, and I liked what I saw.

Her adventures in baking a short.

Time later, voila an excellent dessert, which the guys at my office are enjoying right now as I type this.

I cut the result into squares and stack them to make a cute little strata.

Everyone here thinks I'm an excellent baker.

Reading through these essays, I got a real feel for Tellina's personality.

She's spunky and adventurous.

In one post, she talks about skydiving with her niece, but she's also not afraid to be vulnerable.

I started thinking about how so much of my life has been work to find the balance between being tough and being soft.

I went a little overboard in the toughness department, to the point where I had no soft edges at all.

On more than one occasion, I was thrown out of bars for fighting.

A little before I turned thirty, I started getting tired of always having to be so tough, so my pendulum swung.

The other way.

I became all soft all the time.

When I took off the exterior shell of toughness, my soft underbelly was all that was left.

I cried at the slightest provocation.

My feelings were frequently injured, and I showed her poppy dog eyes to my owner when he raised his voice just a few decibels.

Okay, So being tough all the time was exhausting, and being weak all the time was even worse.

Si Teleina wrote a lot about her relationship with her husband Tom, who she refers to as Master Csaius or just Master.

How well did I adapt to being property?

Well, that depends on whether you ask me or Master lol.

I'm not sure exactly how or when Teleina and Tom met, except that they both served in the military, and by two thousand and four they were living together in Indiana.

Teleina was thirty eight, Tom forty six, and it's possible that it was Tom who introduced her to Gore.

According to his own posts on fet life, he discovered of books in his youth and they made a big impact on him.

Here's a dramatization of Tom's writing.

I began reading the Gore books in nineteen seventy nine.

Within them, the philosophical tenets of a man being a man and a woman being a woman rang true for me.

There was a twenty five year gap between starting my journey as a Gorrian mastering my first slave.

I admit that mastering my Teleina these past ten plus years has been a very rewarding and insightful experience.

According to her profile, Telena had been in BDSM type relationships since she was eighteen years old, but with Tom, she moved into something different, a master slave relationship that required her submission to him twenty four seven.

I was not used to not being in charge of my time tasks, Destiny.

It was an ugly adjustment that ended up bringing depth and greater understanding in my relationship with Master.

Because we both wanted to be together in our roles so badly, neither of us expected it to be so hard.

They lived strictly according to Gorerian principles, which meant that Tom was in charge of all decisions until Lena yielded control absolutely to her husband.

I learned how to shut up.

I know it sounds simple and truly it is.

However, the amount of will power necessary to put this into practice is enormous.

The self control practiced by all the slaves who I esteem is beyond imagining to most of those who don't serve.

For most people, me included, the word slavery does not have any positive connotations.

Wars have been waged to abolish it.

Generations of people have worked to ensure no one endures such a fate, and here is someone voluntarily living this way.

Honestly, I find it hard to wrap my head around.

And yet the way Telena described it, their relationship sounded more nuanced than I had expected.

I see so many posts asking what is quote normal for a master, mistress owner to do.

This is my response.

Our real master gets up at six am on the weekend to take the dogs out because his slave has a migraine.

Our real master waters the basil plants when his slave is away, even if he doesn't like to eat this stuff himself.

Our real master goes for a walk rather than taking his anger out on his slave.

Our real master understands that his slave won't always perform perfectly.

While setting the atmosphere for perfection to happen.

Our real master punishes his slave when she does something wrong because he loves her.

A real master uses his hands to hold and comfort a slave when she's overwhelmed with fear.

These are all things that I believe a real master should do, and the these are all things my master does regularly.

I'm a blessed girl.

Teleina freely shared the inner workings of her relationship with the Gore community, and over time became an expert, someone who guided others new to the lifestyle.

I discovered from digging through her old posts that at some point she actually began formally teaching classes with Tom on how to be in a dominant submissive relationship.

Here's a description of a class they taught in twenty thirteen called Formal Dinner Service, where slaves were taught how to serve food while naked.

Learn the science behind serving table covers, how to serve formal table settings, napkin folding.

Then go deeper into the mindset behind formal service.

Take some time to experience the thrill of coordinated movements, feel the rush of performing a job well.

Acknowledge the place deep inside yourself where a desire to serve naked lives.

While you'll walk away with handouts, the most valuable gift you'll receive is the knowledge that setting and serving at a formal table is within your immediate grasp.

After the class, join us for a luscious dinner where you can practice your skills, either as a diner or a server.

Deep diving into the Gore series, the subculture that is cropped up around it, and Telena's embrace of its principles, I had so many questions, the most pressing being why would someone so smart, self aware, and opinionated like Telena want to engage in a dynamic like this.

Don't get me wrong, there's a part of me that understands the allure of seeding control.

There are plenty of days where I feel so burned out that I don't want to decide anything what to eat, or what to wear, or even what show to put on to decompress.

But as a woman, wife, and mom, equity in my head household is really important to me.

My partner and I deliberately strive to share the mental and physical loads of life, play acting these roles for kink and pleasure in the bedroom.

I get that, But to live within this dynamic where the male partner always has the final say.

It goes against every fiber of my being.

Why would someone desire this?

For many people, it feels comforting to not have to be in control all the time.

There's this feeling of glorious freedom actually in not having to make decisions anymore.

You've just become an instrument of somebody else's will, and this is actually liberating because now, instead of being constantly faced with all of these choices that maybe overwhelm you, somebody else is going to make them for you, and that feels good.

This is Julie Fennel, a sociologist and longtime member of the BDSM community who studies gender and sexuality.

She's the author of Please Scream Quietly, a story of kink.

I guess the last thing is just providing pleasure and happiness to another person, which is a very human thing to enjoy doing that.

You really get a lot out of seeing your dominant feel pleasure and be happy and knowing that that came from you.

Julie told me that people who choose to live as submissives are oftentimes a healthy, well adjusted, and self confident, making the choice out of free will.

But she acknowledges that's not the case for everyone.

I have data that suggests to me that a lot of people are motivated by unhealthy things, which, unfortunately the BDSM community is terrible actually having frank conversations about I put the data in my book from twenty seventeen is quite clear that submissives have lower self esteemed than dominance do.

I think a lot of times people are motivated to be submissive because they think they aren't good enough at being a person, and so they want somebody else who they think is better at being a person to help them be a person.

There's a stereotype the people who are into BDSM must have had bad experiences in their childhood that led them down this path, and that BDSM is a way to grapple with or relive those traumas.

And maybe in some cases that's true, but as Julie explained it, many others just like the sensation of a whip on their skin or being tied up with ropes.

I can take them for a walk.

I like putting people on leashes.

It's fine, as she said, not everything has to be pathologized.

Julie pointed out that a big draw of BDSM is the community aspect, finding others who don't judge you for who you are.

Beyond online spaces like fat life, it's not uncommon for BDSM ors to congregate in person, whether that's at nightclubs, backyard barbecues, or dungeons.

Any good socia just can tell you that just being part of the community is usually very good for people's mental health.

I think finding community is often the biggest reason why people end up being heavily involved in the buds and subculture.

Like sure, they might like doing kinky things, but ultimately the thing that really gets some joy and why they keep coming back to this what is functionally a social club, is because they like the people there, and they feel emotional support and validation from them.

On the whole, it's pretty beautiful to be around.

It can be pretty beautiful to be around other people who share your outlook and values.

I get that, but is the gore community beautiful?

I have limited insight, but the conversations I observed in gore spaces were pretty misogynistic.

In one discord form I joined, the women slaves were constantly talked down to and seemed unable to share their opinions freely.

Their names had to be in lowercase letters, and they couldn't even talk about themselves in the first person, she instead of I.

It didn't take long for me to get kicked out of the forum for simply asking one of the women what it was like to identify as a slave.

This Goreyan culture.

I observed it seemed to me to be a cover for old fashioned beliefs about the superiority of men.

Oh will hasten to add that that is like way outside of mainstream BDSM right now.

Goreyan philosophy is an outlier in the BDSM world.

Julie says that's because gore really goes against the current understanding of gender, which is far more fluid and dynamic.

She mentioned a survey she conducted among bdsmers asking them if they agreed with the statement I believe that men are naturally dominant and women are naturally submissive.

Only ten percent did Yes.

Subculture as a whole is extremely liberal for a variety of reasons.

There's this thread in pan sexual media, so I'm community that, like, we're all, regardless of our gender, have all the ds and roles equally available to us.

The idea of a system that would restrict that is very antagonistic to that norm.

And so it's one of many reasons why I would say mainstream medias some subculture tends to like giggle a lot nowadays about Gore.

Gore gets a laugh, the sci fi elements, the arcane beliefs, we're so far past women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

But that doesn't mean it's harmless.

It is not unheard of for people who are in master slave relationships to say that they have given up their safeword, which means that like whatever the top chooses to do to them, the bottom has said that they will take it.

Giving up your bodily autonomy, it can make you vulnerable to abuse, to being in dangerous situations, which made me wonder was Teleina ever in harm's way.

There was one essay she wrote that gave me the shivers.

Not long ago, Master, and we'll call it a difference in viewpoints.

That sounds pretty benign, right, he he he.

That difference in viewpoint culminated in me making a conscious choice to not follow Master's protocols for greeting him when he came in one evening.

Frankly, I had come to the conclusion inside my head that Master didn't care about the greeting ritual and wouldn't mind me skipping it.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I was close to Master, he reached out his arms as his lips came close to mine.

I thought we were going to have a hug and kiss.

Imagine surprise when Master's hand went around my throat and he forced me to my knees while calmly and quietly asking did you forget something?

I believe he even had a smile on his face.

As a reporter who has spent a decade writing about domestic violence, this story raises all the alarm bells.

But I asked Julie what she made of it.

She tells it as this story of like that she was grateful to be reminded of She was happy that he cared enough about it that he would punish her and put it back on her place.

But I've spent my career writing about domestic violence, and so for me, it's hard to read that essay and not see it as abuse.

And like, I've seen a lot of victims of domestic violence really come up with really creative ways to justify the behavior and make sense of it in their own relationship.

You tell me this story and you say this is disturbing, and I understand why.

But I hear that the story and I think.

Oh, that's hot.

I'm not going to say say I think there's something seriously wrong with John Norman and his followers.

This is Jess the Internet sleuth in Minnesota.

I'm not like out there, I'm woman.

Hear me, roar right, I'm not doing that.

But it would be a cold day in how before my husband whipped me or told me I could or couldn't do anything because he would find himself outside the house.

After finding out about Telena's disappearance from a Facebook post, it doesn't take just long to connect to Lena to the Gorrian subculture.

I did like digging, like her name to Lena Tzar.

I was like, that's that's weird.

So I kind of just googled and this Goryan stuff popped up.

And then as you go through with some of her friends, it'll say Gorrian or master or sister wife or just little odd tidbits and I'm like, what is that?

What is that?

Scrolling through Telena's Facebook just comes across a post from January twenty twenty, just a few months before Telena goes missing.

It's a photo of Telena's new Oklahoma driver's license, along with her story of dealing with the bureaucracy of legally changing her name.

Here's the conversation I had at the Social Security office today, me I've had a name change and need to get my card changed.

Social Security worker, Why did you change your name because I wanted to?

Did you get married or divorced?

Know?

Then?

Why did you change your name because I wanted to?

So you don't have a reason.

Yes, I have a reason.

The reason is because I wanted to.

I don't feel like we're getting anywhere me same.

So right before Telena disappeared, she legally changed her name, and not just her last name, both of her given names.

She went from Jana Lovic to Teleina Galloway.

Galloway was Tom's last name, even though they never formally married and Tom had been dead for over two years, carrying on his memory in this way seemed important to her, and the name Teleina.

She'd been using that first name for years amongst friends and family.

According to the petition she filed with the State Online, she used the handle Telena tzar for her social media accounts.

Jess isn't sure where tzar comes from, but Telena it appears she had taken it directly from the Gore books.

The Gore world is one just knows nothing about, but she's willing to learn.

So I started reading the novels and then listening to him on audiobook, and it's different.

It's not something I would read, I don't think.

And how many did you read?

I think probably ten.

While the rest of the country is exploring new hobbies during quarantine, Jess is getting a mini education in BDSM and Gore culture, and from what she learns, it seems like a subculture where women could easily be taken advantage of, hurt, or even killed.

Jess knows that Talina's late husband Tom couldn't have been involved in her disappearance, but what about the other men in the Gore community, Men who saw women as property, men who were not used to hearing the word no.

They have very black and white views on I'm the man, It's my job to protect.

It's your job to submit to me and never ask questions.

Ever, you do exactly as I say when I say it.

I'm going to put a collar on you.

You don't need dinner until I say so.

You have sex with who I say so.

You wait on me, hand and foot as I say so.

Very very just dominant, submissive, not like fifty Shades of Gray, but like some of the stuff I saw on fet life because I created a fake profile to creep on these people.

I mean, there's women in cages, there's women that they bleed, that like cut them so they bleed.

They do something called kid play where they wear diapers and for turn their kids.

It's very not my cup of tea.

Jess and the internet sleuths start wondering is their main source Toelena's friend Marty also a Gorian.

For one, there's that photo where he referred to Toelena as another of his wives.

And then there's his unusual nickname Wolf or Wolfy.

I remember a conversation where we all refused directly to call Wolf wolf because we were like, we're not calling you by some pseudo friggin' you know, master name.

All of us we're like, this is disgusting, we're not into it.

And then I came to understand that that was not his Gorrian name, so we decided to call him Wolf and Wolf tried very hard for the first I want to say, two three weeks to cover up the goryan aspect of it, even though we were very convinced that had something to do with it.

You did think I had something to do with it initially.

I did, absolutely Still Jess is not afraid to ask Marty Wolf pointed questions about Gore.

He gave me a very PG version of things.

He had told me that it was like live action role play of dungeons and dragons, but they have sex with each other.

That's how he explained it to me, and I said, oh, okay.

I didn't want to think that I was super judging him, because I don't want to make anybody feel bad about their sexual preference or what they want to do as long as everybody's gong holl for it.

Cool sounds good.

But the more I talked about it.

More it sounded like these women weren't They were consenting, but they were all abused or had had really bad lives, and I didn't think that they were mentally capable really of making the choice to consent to something like that.

And when I questioned him on it, he just rubbed it off like that I didn't know what I was talking about, and maybe I don't.

I'm not sure.

As the COVID shutdown stretches from days to weeks, Marty lets down his guard opens up about gore life.

He eventually explains to Jess that Teleina and Tom and Marty and his wife were all in a Gorerian family together called the Great Eagle Family.

To take their family group seriously, the mento had rings of an eagle, and they all had the same ring because they were in the Great Eagle Family.

He was very proud of it.

He thought it was great.

Teleina seemed to be proud of it too.

Here's how she identifies at the top of her fet life profile.

We are a Gorrian family and belong to the Great Eagle Family who hosts an event in Oklahoma called Gorefest.

We always have a fantastic time.

Gorefest was a festival created by Marty.

Every so often, he and his wife invited Gorrians from across the country to their sprawling property in Oklahoma for a weekend of revelry.

Talina and Tom loved going to Gorefest so much so that they ultimately moved to Oklahoma to be closer to Marty and their Goryan friends.

It was also at Gorefest where Teleina met Corey, who went on to become her roommate after Tom died.

I found an old website that Marty ran dedicated to Gorefest that includes this little history.

In nineteen ninety nine, a few Gorrians from online html chat decided to get together for a small gathering to share in real time what they felt in virtual time.

To honor the spirit that John Norman wrote about in his books.

It would be a time for all to come together and share thoughts and ideas while enjoying for a short time what each role plays online, whether free or slave, to enjoy the freedom of being themselves.

From the original thirteen that were here in the fall of nineteen ninety nine for the first gathering to the record seventy five attending in two thousand and four, there exudes an astounding feeling a family.

Clicking around on this old website, I found the list of events.

Sparring acts, throwing tug awar and serving slaves could take part in a position competition testing their knowledge of the ten submissive positions they should be able to assume upon command.

According to Gorean philosophy.

Don't look these up at work either, and there was also cy a slave auction.

On another page was a list of gore Fest attendees, divided into two categories.

In one list, I found mass Csarius, Tom, Master Shekhar Marty.

In another, the slave list, Telena tzar czar as In, belonging to Master Czarius.

By the time Telena went missing, Master Czarius was dead, so did Telena belong to someone else.

Marty explained to Jess that Telena was now an unknowned slave.

Marty had Telena's quote protection caller, which meant that he was looking after her.

He wasn't her master, but he was a protector of sorts, though what she needed to be protected from was unclear.

I asked about the protection caller he said he had for Telena, and then he explained to me when Tom died, he moved in there to help Teleina because she hadn't dealt with her own money or anything.

When Tom was alive, Tulina had no control over her own life.

Everything was decided by him.

When she went to work, what she wore, what she ate when they ate, Any money she made went straight to him and he covered you know, he paid the bills.

So when Tom died, wolflipped there and did all that for her.

So he said that it was his Telena wife, so it was a second wife, and said the caller was just to protect her from other Gorrians trying to take her caller, and at that time I didn't know what that.

Meant, other Gorrians trying to take her coller.

Jess is suspicious of the list of men who attended Gorefest over the years, masters whose real identities are unknown to her, but Marty is adamant that all this Gore stuff has nothing to do with Telena's disappearance.

She's looking in the wrong place.

Jess thinks there's more he's not telling her, but as time goes on, she starts to believe he's being earnest.

We built kind of a trust, you know.

I feel like he would tell me a little bits and pieces of things about his relationship, and he'd become really vulnerable with me.

He'd cry.

He started telling me personal stories about his life, his family, his mom, and we just built a relationship.

He'd like to FaceTime with me and he'd see the kids in the background and he'd say nice things.

You know, he never said anything creepy to me or the kids.

To me, he'd sometimes say creepy things, but never to my children.

He'd always, Oh, look at Mattie.

It looks like she's grown since the last time I saw her.

She looks beautiful.

Like things that you would say to me, you know, you'd be like, oh, your daughter is still pretty or something.

You know.

We back and forth, like he'd say nice things about people's kids to them, and we just got close.

The two are an unlikely pair, a nosy bartender in Minnesota, a geeky goryan master in Oklahoma, having intimate conversations deep into the night, trauma bonded in the depths of COVID isolation, when all of a sudden, a new clue takes the investigation in an entirely different direction.

And I'm telling my buddy this as we're sitting in the garage.

And he said, do.

You not think that you just got created an entity, an a possible friend.

That's next week on What Happened to Telena'sar?

What Happened to Telenazar is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

It's written, reported, and hosted by me Melissa Jelson, with writing and story editing by Lauren Hansen.

Our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch.

For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Jason English and Karl Catle Well fact checking by Savannah Hugley.

Zoe Denkla is our associate producer.

Jeremy Thal is our editor.

Original music by Aaron Kaufman, with additional music by Jeremy Thal and Gideon Crevische.

Episodes are mixed and mastered by Carl Katle Voice acting by Lizzie Gore, Chris Ferry, Stephanie Frame, Pete Monica, and Molly Maslin.

Our logo is designed by Edo Moore.

Thanks so much for listening.