Tara Indiana Celebrates Her Dommiversary: 35 Years in BDSM

Mistress Tara Indiana is more than just a professional dominant: She's a near-legendary institution in the community.

She first got into the art of dominating and hurting men in 1989 and never looked back. In 1994, she founded The Den of Iniquity, the first and only dungeon to become a national chain. In an era when most BDSM venues were mob-run, she brought a more professional, businesslike ethos to kink. Her reputation grew to the point where the Daily News declared her "The Martha Stewart of Dungeons."

In 2016, Mistress Tara temporarily stepped aside from kink to something even more sordid and painful: Politics. Running as a member of the "Female Supremacy Party," she threw her hat into the ring as a candidate against President Donald Trump.

On April 25th she's celebrating her 35th "Dommiversary" with the grand opening of her new dungeon, Children of Lilith Temple in downtown Los Angeles.

Of course, we could hardly sit out such an event, and we hope you won't either; the Stockroom will be at Mistress Tara's Dommiversary with VIP bags that will make you sweat, ache, and tingle.

And to follow up that, Mistress Tara will be teaching her class, How to Dominate with Caning at Stockroom University on May 10.

In preparation for all this, we sat down with Mistress Tara to give us the whole story in her own words.

Stockroom: First of all, happy Dommiversary, how many has it been now?

Tara Indiana: Thank you. It's 35 years. It was actually 35 years last September, so we're celebrating a little late. But 1989 was when I got into the S&M industry.

Stockroom: So I have to ask: in all that time, what's changed — for you personally, and the culture.

Tara Indiana: So much. Well, okay. Let me start by saying what hasn't changed: What motivates people to get into kink and the reasons people are drawn to this, and human nature hasn't changed. But as they say, “The medium is the message,” So I think what's changed BDSM the most is the technology shift and the ways that we meet each other.

When I was working with print advertising, what I had to do to build my business to reach my base. You know, create a fantastic slick image of myself, or whatever Domme I was marketing at the Den of Iniquity. Write some great ad copy that reflected her persona. Place my ad, and then just wait for the phone to ring. right?

That's not how we do it anymore. It's all social media. What's changed is the access that submissives have. Before the Internet, the only access they had was the session. In the professional context, it was the session or the phone. That was the access they had to us, and they didn't get to respond back and comment on our ads right?

The modern clients of the dominatrix usually want to see a little peek behind the curtain. They want to see a little bit more of your “authentic self.” They they don't want that slick ad and I think that actually hurts what the dominatrix is — or is supposed to be — because the dominatrix is supposed to be the unavailable fantasy. Right? She's just out of your grasp. She's the one you fantasize about, but she's just out of your league, and that ruins all that.

And then you have the intersection of the algorithms and what the algorithms are demanding so that your content is even seen right? The algorithms on Instagram, for example, are actually biased against femdom. It actually changes the kind of content the modern dominatrix provides. You can see it down to the details of the way that they pose, the way they hold their body in the pictures.

What I see on my [Instagram] reel looks mostly like a strip club, but they're portraying themselves in a submissive way. And I think that is acceptable, while the other is not. For example, I finally figured out that if you have a picture of a woman standing with her legs apart, in a dominant pose, and a man kneeling next to her, both clothed, Instagram will take that down.

So that's going to change the way the dominatrixes market themselves, the way that they're perceived and the way that their clients interact with them.

Celebrating 35 Years of Domination

Stockroom: How are you going to celebrate making it through all those all those years for your Dommiversary?

Tara Indiana: I'm really looking forward to it. I have people coming in from New York as well as local people, people that I haven't seen in a while. I think we're going to be like doing a projection of some of my films. We'll be running my films in the background all night. We're going to have a red carpet with VIP bags, thanks to Stockroom.

I celebrate by passing the torch. I love teaching, you know. That's mostly what I do now. I love teaching women to dominate men, and I just focus on that, and how I can contribute in that way. And then, of course, in 2021 I started the Dominatrix Hall of Fame, as an effort to preserve that history and so we're going to enter our fifth year at Domcon this year. So that's also how I celebrate doing 35 years of this.

It'll also be the grand opening of my dungeon, Children of Lilith Temple. So if you haven't been in here to preview it for classes, this would be your opportunity to see the space, and we're opening up the space to rentals.

We've also added a couple of more large dungeon pieces, some new furniture pieces, so those will be revealed at the party, and I hope there'll be lots of play.

The Den of Iniquity

Stockroom: In your history, your big accomplishment was creating the Den of Iniquity right? Or maybe Dens?

Tara Indiana: Yeah. The first Den of Iniquity was opened in New York in 1994, and it was on, West 19th Street, in a small little townhouse which was right next door to oh, gosh! I'm going to forget the name of the store. There used to be an S&M store right next door to us, called The Noose.

So we were right next door to them and down the block from a bar named McManus’s, where we got into lots of shenanigans. So that was our first location in New York. Our second location in New York was at West 18th Street, same building as Pandora's Box. Then our second dungeon was Phoenix, with Porsche Lynn, and I believe that was in 2000.

Tara Indiana: Our first L.A. dungeon was with Aiden Starr. At that time her name was Mistress Lolita, and she was the headmistress at the Hollywood dungeon. We started on Fairfax, then the dungeon on Hollywood Boulevard was probably the one that everybody knows, and then we were also lucky enough to take over the space at Factory Place from Ilsa Strix when she left the industry. So we were over there for a while.

Stockroom: You said that you revolutionized the dungeon business by bringing a legitimate corporate culture to it. How did you do that? And what effect did it have?

Tara Indiana: When I opened up my dungeon in New York, I went through it with a real entrepreneurial professional attitude which didn't exist then.

Most of the dungeons were owned by the mob, and there would be a woman that was the front of the place. That was the “headmistress” — usually his girlfriend. Sometimes she was into S&M, sometimes she wasn't. And look to be fair. I'm not really knocking that entirely. I worked in those places before I opened one, and honestly, they weren't bad people to work for.

But they didn't facilitate an authentic lifestyle kind of experience, which was what I was trying to create when I opened the dungeon. The big complaint that I got from my slaves before I opened Den of Iniquity was that the girls they were seeing weren't really into it. They were just kind of going through the motions.

In terms of sex work, S&M in those days was kind of considered the bottom of the barrel. Usually they bottomed out of some other part of sex work.

And there was just a lot of…. chaos. It wasn't professionally run. It was a fun place to work, but it wasn't professional.

Tara Indiana: So when I opened my place before I opened, I decided to go stealth undercover. In those days, in a major city like New York there would be thirty dungeons.

I went to work in all of them, just to see what the competition was. I'd work here one week, a couple of days there, and I did some kind of shady stuff —like if I saw a girl that I thought was really great, I would try to poach her, which wasn't really the nicest thing to do, and I wouldn't do that now. But I was young, and I was entrepreneurial.

Then I did a business plan and figured out what I wanted to be different, and how, because the other thing I wanted to do is I wanted to facilitate a place where women would feel safe working, because if you're in a mobbed-up place where there's drugs and lateness and unprofessionalism, that's going to drive out the kind of women that I wanted to attract. I really wanted mine to be a safe space where those women would feel comfortable working.

And it was structured. There were rules, and you had to be there on time. There was a dress code because I was going for something really upscale. I was charging a lot more than the other houses were.

I expected people to really put together their look a certain way. When they went into session there was extensive training. There was a reading list. There were required movies that they had to watch. There were required classes that they had to do — which are the classes that I teach now.

That's how I got into teaching; I basically took the classes that I was teaching in-house at the Den of Iniquity, and I just opened them up to the public.

I hadn't set out to become an educator; I started teaching because I thought it would be a good way to promote the dungeon. Maybe get some dungeon rentals. Meet women who could be somewhere on time and who were really serious and interested in kink for the right reasons.

The other thing that I did was I really worked individually with the mistresses, creating their persona. Helping them pick out their outfits, art directing their shoots, teaching them how to pose. Because it isn't just the technical skills of learning how to whip and learning how to tie and all that stuff that's important. You have to know how to take a good picture.

In terms of corporate structure, we created a situation where there was room for advancement. The big problem with dungeons always was losing people to going independent, going off on their own. Which, of course, is the natural evolution of things. But as a business owner, you want to try to retain your best people.

So we created a structure where they would come in at one tribute, but the longer they worked the more they could make per hour. And because we franchised — we had dungeons in New York, L.A. and Phoenix — there was always the potential that you could be a franchisee and open a dungeon in whatever city.

I think that really inspired a lot of loyalty. And the girls that worked at the Den of Iniquity had a really unique experience. Because we used to tour them; we would fly them from one dungeon to the next, and they would get to travel, and meet slaves in different states. That facilitated them being top-level Dommes. The more people you play with, the better you get.

You get better at reading body language; it seems like you’ve become more intuitive, but you’re not. You’re just more experienced, and you’re better at reading body language.

Stockroom: What do you enjoy teaching best? What subjects and areas?

Tara Indiana: I love all of it. In my series, The Art of Female Domination, we do, I think, 38 different classes in total.

I consider there to be three hard skill categories. You have impact play. You have restraint, and then you have sensation play. Those are the hard skill categories. Then there are various classes that come under that. And then you have the soft skills. That could be the psychology of a particular fetish, or how to do the marketing, or whatever.

So I teach everything, from financial domination to fisting. I don't know if it's so much that I have a favorite topic to teach as I love seeing a woman's eyes lights light up the first time she hurts a man and gets pleasure from it.

Teaching Caning at Stockroom

Tara Indiana: I do love teaching caning because caning is the ultimate lazy top skill I teach intensives about flogging, because flogging is one of the hardest things to learn and master. There’s all different kinds of ways to do it. I teach single tails, and all of those are backbreaking. You're going to get a real workout. But the thing that's nice about the cane is it's just a flick of the wrist, and you can be of any age. As you get older, or if you have a disability, sometimes flogging or single tails can be kind of hard to do.

But caning you can do at any age, and you can also receive it at any age, as long as you're playing safely. And so that's one of the fun things about caning.

And just that it's so wicked. With the slightest flick of your wrist, you can deliver this excruciating pain. But caning can be sensual, too, and that's the other thing that's fun about caning: All different styles of caning, and that's what I'm hoping to show when I come in and teach.

It isn't just about like heavy corporal and just beating bejesus out of someone. You can also do something really erotic.

Stockroom: I think of caning as a very English kink.

Tara Indiana: English Caning is a very, very, very specific thing. The easiest way to tell the difference is with English caning is that it’s with the hooked handle, so it'll look more like the canes that you walk with, it's done with the thumb instead of with the finger.

I think the way that we see caning practice now is much more in the Western style. Which, being Western, is always a fusion. So you're mixing, tapping and cold caning, and a number of different things to create a variety of sensations.

Mistress Tara for President?

Stockroom: So one last question: are you thinking of running for president again?

Tara Indiana: Oh, it is tempting!

Tara Indiana: But I do have so much on my plate with the Dominatrix Hall of Fame. I think that my time is better spent there, and with my family. But who knows? We do have time, so things could change. I never say never.