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The following year, both Disneyland and the Santa Ana Freeway opened to the public, and the endless citrus groves for which Orange County was named began being razed to make room for the nice white folks who were migrating from the heartland in such profusion. In time, Time observed, the county became the "solid fortress of white conservative Republicans" we all know and try to stay out of. It made Reagan feel so welcome that he both began and concluded his presidential election campaigns here, and it elected the scariest Congressmen extant -- the rapaciously homophobic Christian fundamentalist William Dannemeyer, who believed environmentalism to be a pagan force designed to secularize American society, Dana Rohrabacher, a former Reagan speechwriter, known consort of Sammy Hager, and major thorn in the side of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the infamously hawkish Robert K. "B-1 Bob" Dornan, a known consort of Rush Limbaugh.

But the county that named its major airport for John Wayne is also home to two of the country's most prolific purveyors of kinky clothing, magazines, and bondage "toys," two F&F (for fetish and fantasy) boutiques that attract visitors from all over the world, a burgeoning population of dominatrices and transvestites, and the undisputed first lady of American kink, Ms. (formerly Mistress) Antoinette -- formerly little Jeanette Luther, corn-fed pompom shaker turned Rose Parade princess.

Before her marriage at 21, she tells you, she was no kinkier than any other assistant buyer at Bullock's, where she accepted employment after studying fashion merchandising at a small local college. But then her soon-to-be-second-husband Dick asked her to read a dilapidated English medical libarary book about sadomasochism. "At first I threw him away for about a month," she recalls, in that strange, skewed way of hers. "But then I discovered that it had to do with a lot of my needs in different areas. I took to the costuming just fantastic."

She took just as fantastic to the like-minded couples with whom she and Dick, a conspicuously overweight proprietor of a chain of weight-loss clinics, interacted, although "my first experience with a transvestite freaked me out. 'How dare he try to take my place!' I thought. But then I sat down and thought, 'Gee, his wife accepts it; if she can, why can't I? I made the decision not to be freaked out."

By the late '70s, she was a little famous, by virtue of the two magazines that bore her imprimatur, Kinky Contacts and Reflections. By the mid-'80s, she was more famous, by virtue of a Los Angeles Times profile that caused her then-preppy elder daughter to suffer very hard times at Foothill High. By last year her international renown was such that, for instance, she reigned as queen of the Safer Sex Maniacs' Ball in London, which attracted fetishists from as far away as Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and...Latvia.

Still endowed, at 57, with the best legs in American alternative sexuality, she claims never to have confronted angry vigilantes in her neighborhood in upscale Tustin. "Me going to work dressed as I do every day looks like I have tremendous amount of energy that is being put out there for a purpose," she theorizes. "And they admire that energy. They've had problems with their kids. They've had noisy motorcycles. They've had vandalism. We're the least of their worries."

She wants the world to know that she's no longer the dominatrix she used to be, but a couturier. A decade ago, she told you that she sometimes got so fed up with Dick's and the kids' leaving crumbs on the kitchen counter that she considered allowing one of the submissives who was forever calling her to come tidy up. Now, though, she says, "I don't waste time with newcomers; they're hard to train in the beginning. My great challenge now is how the movie industry and MTV and Madonna's book are going with all my costuming. I'm really enjoying being wanted like that." Even though the dominatrix with the high ponytail has been an S? icon for decades, she believes that Madonna, who wears Ms. Antoinette corsets in Sex, got the idea for her Blonde Ambition tour coiffure from her. She further believes herself a modern-day Bette Page. As far away as Boston, she proudly claims, "a club has Antoinette all over the place ? on the posters, tickets, dollar bills."

Her company, Versatile Fashions, has 33 full time employees and grosses $1 million annually. Versatile Productions has released some 85 videos. Ten thousand readers enjoy Kinky Contacts and Reflections every other month, substantially, she thinks, because they depict real people, rather than models. Her TV clothing line is sold in 650 boutiques around the world. "We have that down to a T," she says, apparently not trying to be cute.

"Whatever you see, you want the reverse of," she says, by way of explaining her three grown children's lack of kinkiness. One daughter is an MRI technician in Minnesota . Her son tows and repairs bulldozers. Thus far, only elder daughter Mitzi has "decided the white picket fence wasn't right for her. She became my Catwoman, my international spokesmodel." Between them, they've thus far bestowed a like number of grandchildren, "one of whom is the spitting image of me. She loves the excitement of all the frills and ruffles and charisma. She orchestrates all the little ones around her. She's slick as a whistle getting everybody to do her thing. It skips a generation! And my daughter is moving up to Washington and marrying into what we call the Walton family because [her soon-to-be son-in-law] has four children that we now call our grandchildren because they idolize us." Her outlandishly long fingernails, huge false eyelashes, bejeweled cigarette holder, and PVC miniskirts apparently notwithstanding.

Her Republicanism notwithstanding, Antoinette likes to think of herself as having made Orange County a slightly more tolerant place. "I gave Bill LaPointe of the Blade [the voice of the county's gays and lesbians] the courage to do what he's doing, which is changing Orange County all around. He thinks I'm just incredible." "She's one of the most fabulous, most courageous people I know," LaPointe affirms. "She's helped a lot of people in terms of accepting aspects of their personalities that would otherwise be looked down upon. And as hard as it may be to believe with her Mistress Antoinette look, she has a heart of gold. She assists a lot of alcoholics; at times I've seen her drop everything to be there for somebody who is going through recovery. She bends over backwards. She's always there for you."

"He's not available and I am," the great lady sniffs of her arch-rival, Jerry Lee of Spartacus. "I'm open. I'm here. I run a very honest, very ethical, full-of-integrity operation. He rips people off and does all kinds of crazy things. People have to wait a year for their merchandise. I want you to be my friend all your life. I'm involved. He's not."

"She and her husband came to me about 13 years ago wanting to buy my business," Jerry Lee fires back, "but I wouldn't sell it to them. Within six months they'd opened up their own shop. But they have no imagination. Every time I come out with something, they copy me.

"As for ripping people off, they've done that for years. They tried to go wholesale, but most of their accounts came to us because they couldn't stand dealing with them. Sometimes she tries to undercut us, but she can't deliver. They're flakey ? I mean really flakey; she's a diet pill freak. They're really into the scene; they're here, there, and everywhere, not really paying attention to business. I, by comparison, work 15 hours a day seven days a week.

"Order some of her stuff. Then order mine. You'll see the difference."

Another native midwesterner -- a Chicago native who relocated to Anaheim with his family the year after Disneyland opened -- Jerry owned convenience stores, fast food joints, and apartment-cleaning and -painting businesses before he began offering the famous Centurian F&F catalogs through such underground publications as Screw and The Berkeley Barb at the end of the '60s. He's prospered virtually from Day One, and now publishes helmet, trainer, bondage, transvestite, and shoe catalogs and Bizarre "O" and Transformation magazines, and maintains a million-dollar inventory of latex and leather clothing, shoes and boots, TV supplies, vibrators, dildos, bondage stuff, wigs, and costumes of all kinds at Fantasy Fashions, his plush 4000-square-foot store nine miles from Fantasyland in Fountain Valley.

"Orange County is conservative in terms of who it votes for and what it thinks it wants," the crossdressing grandfather, himself the employer of 35, observes. "But when it comes to sexual desire, people here are also very liberal. It's a new era, and people are letting themselves go. They're tired of the Falwell assholes trying to tell everybody what to do and how to lead their lives."

"I guarantee that you'll see a TV nearly every time you go to one of the malls around here," concurs Jennifer Antone, a dominant who's been based in Orange County since a year after she was busted in Long Beach in 1987 in honor of the Pope's visit, "I guarantee it. I have TVs telling me all the time, 'I never would have done this except I saw a TV at South Coast Plaza.

Maintaining a lavishly equipped dungeon within hollering distance of the Rev. Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, the devoted mother of three daughters observes that the number of dominants in Orange County has quadrupled over the past few years. "It's a different atmosphere here," she explains, "more of an upper middle class community. You see a wealthier clientele. Up in L.A., if someone comes in with $100, he doesn't just want a session, but one that runs all day long. The person who comes in and tries to keep you at a very low price and is really stressed out over money is much harder to satisfy because the money means more to him. Down here, they pay whatever I ask."

Her clients, who come from as far away as New York, are "predominantly Catholic and Jewish married men, doctors, attorneys, computer programmers. But the most striking thing is the number of women I see down here. A lot of female executives living in the area are coming out of their closets. Some come to be dominated. Others want to learn how to train their submissive husbands. It just thrills me that they're not seeing themselves as totally perverted just because they want to come over and experience a fantasy or enact a scenario.

"She's flamboyant," Antone says of Antoinette, of whose boutique -- and of Fantasy Fashions too -- she's a regular patron. "She's loud and flashy, but she's also very nurturing, and that's part of her appeal. She really does care about what her customers need. She listens to what people say, and a lot of them are very, very loyal to her."

None of them moreso than former marine biologist and karate instructor Reb Stout, Antoinette's right-hand man almost since he began doing secretarial work for her in 1978. With his L.A. Raiders cap, sweatpants, gut, and stubble, he's Joe Sixpack in the flesh, but as Rebecca H. Heels, he's starred in a couple of dozen of Versatile Productions' hilariously amateaurish videos, whose audience he perceives as "people from all over the world of higher than average intelligence -- airline pilots, Ph.D.'s, lawyers, doctors -- who've gotten bored with watching a nude woman fuck. They want something beside that, prolonged type stuff. They want to test their own imaginations, to enact fantasy scenarios."

The number of professional dominants might have quadrupled in Orange County in recent years, but it's about to be reduced by one, as Jennifer Antone's 22-year-old daughter Artemis ceases to entertain three clients a day at $200 a pop to pursue a credential in massage therapy. "We discussed it when I was about 14," she says of her following in Mom's footsteps, "but it was just too much for me to think about at the time. I was just discovering sex and trying to figure out, you know, how to give a blow job."

At first, all she liked about F&F was the clothing, which "matched my personality. It had a very tough, but sexy, look to it. I graduated from lingerie to black, shiny things, boots, and leather. "From there," she laughs, "I got a little bit of the twisted taste of perversion and kind of fell into it. But now I've kind of outgrown it."

If there's one thing about which Antoinette and Jerry Lee agree, it's that they had a tough time after the Meese Commission published its notorious study on pornography. While Jerry had to close an earlier version of his boutique, much nearer Disneyland, and temporarily lost the use of the name Centurians in a bankruptcy proceeding, Antoinette was made to understand that "we couldn't do certain things in our magazines and videos. We could show the clothes, but not the toys. We couldn't show anybody tied up or in chains. We couldn't show a whip in your hand because it would be cruelty. Then Catwoman comes out in Batman Returns! "Things have loosened up, but we've got another 50 years to go before everybody gets off the bus."




		The following year, both Disneyland and the Santa Ana Freeway opened to the public, and the endless citrus groves for which Orange County was named began being razed to make room for the nice white folks who were migrating from the heartland in such profusion. In time, Time observed, the county became the "solid fortress of white conservative Republicans" we all know and try to stay out of. It made Reagan feel so welcome that he both began and concluded his presidential election campaigns here, and it elected the scariest Congressmen extant -- the rapaciously homophobic Christian fundamentalist William Dannemeyer, who believed environmentalism to be a pagan force designed to secularize American society, Dana Rohrabacher, a former Reagan speechwriter, known consort of Sammy Hager, and major thorn in the side of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the infamously hawkish Robert K. "B-1 Bob" Dornan, a known consort of Rush Limbaugh. But the county that named its major airport for John Wayne is also home to two of the country's most prolific purveyors of kinky clothing, magazines, and bondage "toys," two F&F (for fetish and fantasy) boutiques that attract visitors from all over the world, a burgeoning population of dominatrices and transvestites, and the undisputed first lady of American kink, Ms. (formerly Mistress) Antoinette -- formerly little Jeanette Luther, corn-fed pompom shaker turned Rose Parade princess. Before her marriage at 21, she tells you, she was no kinkier than any other assistant buyer at Bullock's, where she accepted employment after studying fashion merchandising at a small local college. But then her soon-to-be-second-husband Dick asked her to read a dilapidated English medical libarary book about sadomasochism. "At first I threw him away for about a month," she recalls, in that strange, skewed way of hers. "But then I discovered that it had to do with a lot of my needs in different areas. I took to the costuming just fantastic." She took just as fantastic to the like-minded couples with whom she and Dick, a conspicuously overweight proprietor of a chain of weight-loss clinics, interacted, although "my first experience with a transvestite freaked me out. 'How dare he try to take my place!' I thought. But then I sat down and thought, 'Gee, his wife accepts it; if she can, why can't I? I made the decision not to be freaked out." By the late '70s, she was a little famous, by virtue of the two magazines that bore her imprimatur, Kinky Contacts and Reflections. By the mid-'80s, she was more famous, by virtue of a Los Angeles Times profile that caused her then-preppy elder daughter to suffer very hard times at Foothill High. By last year her international renown was such that, for instance, she reigned as queen of the Safer Sex Maniacs' Ball in London, which attracted fetishists from as far away as Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and...Latvia. Still endowed, at 57, with the best legs in American alternative sexuality, she claims never to have confronted angry vigilantes in her neighborhood in upscale Tustin. "Me going to work dressed as I do every day looks like I have tremendous amount of energy that is being put out there for a purpose," she theorizes. "And they admire that energy. They've had problems with their kids. They've had noisy motorcycles. They've had vandalism. We're the least of their worries." She wants the world to know that she's no longer the dominatrix she used to be, but a couturier. A decade ago, she told you that she sometimes got so fed up with Dick's and the kids' leaving crumbs on the kitchen counter that she considered allowing one of the submissives who was forever calling her to come tidy up. Now, though, she says, "I don't waste time with newcomers; they're hard to train in the beginning. My great challenge now is how the movie industry and MTV and Madonna's book are going with all my costuming. I'm really enjoying being wanted like that." Even though the dominatrix with the high ponytail has been an S? icon for decades, she believes that Madonna, who wears Ms. Antoinette corsets in Sex, got the idea for her Blonde Ambition tour coiffure from her. She further believes herself a modern-day Bette Page. As far away as Boston, she proudly claims, "a club has Antoinette all over the place ? on the posters, tickets, dollar bills." Her company, Versatile Fashions, has 33 full time employees and grosses $1 million annually. Versatile Productions has released some 85 videos. Ten thousand readers enjoy Kinky Contacts and Reflections every other month, substantially, she thinks, because they depict real people, rather than models. Her TV clothing line is sold in 650 boutiques around the world. "We have that down to a T," she says, apparently not trying to be cute. "Whatever you see, you want the reverse of," she says, by way of explaining her three grown children's lack of kinkiness. One daughter is an MRI technician in Minnesota . Her son tows and repairs bulldozers. Thus far, only elder daughter Mitzi has "decided the white picket fence wasn't right for her. She became my Catwoman, my international spokesmodel." Between them, they've thus far bestowed a like number of grandchildren, "one of whom is the spitting image of me. She loves the excitement of all the frills and ruffles and charisma. She orchestrates all the little ones around her. She's slick as a whistle getting everybody to do her thing. It skips a generation! And my daughter is moving up to Washington and marrying into what we call the Walton family because [her soon-to-be son-in-law] has four children that we now call our grandchildren because they idolize us." Her outlandishly long fingernails, huge false eyelashes, bejeweled cigarette holder, and PVC miniskirts apparently notwithstanding. Her Republicanism notwithstanding, Antoinette likes to think of herself as having made Orange County a slightly more tolerant place. "I gave Bill LaPointe of the Blade [the voice of the county's gays and lesbians] the courage to do what he's doing, which is changing Orange County all around. He thinks I'm just incredible." "She's one of the most fabulous, most courageous people I know," LaPointe affirms. "She's helped a lot of people in terms of accepting aspects of their personalities that would otherwise be looked down upon. And as hard as it may be to believe with her Mistress Antoinette look, she has a heart of gold. She assists a lot of alcoholics; at times I've seen her drop everything to be there for somebody who is going through recovery. She bends over backwards. She's always there for you." "He's not available and I am," the great lady sniffs of her arch-rival, Jerry Lee of Spartacus. "I'm open. I'm here. I run a very honest, very ethical, full-of-integrity operation. He rips people off and does all kinds of crazy things. People have to wait a year for their merchandise. I want you to be my friend all your life. I'm involved. He's not." "She and her husband came to me about 13 years ago wanting to buy my business," Jerry Lee fires back, "but I wouldn't sell it to them. Within six months they'd opened up their own shop. But they have no imagination. Every time I come out with something, they copy me. "As for ripping people off, they've done that for years. They tried to go wholesale, but most of their accounts came to us because they couldn't stand dealing with them. Sometimes she tries to undercut us, but she can't deliver. They're flakey ? I mean really flakey; she's a diet pill freak. They're really into the scene; they're here, there, and everywhere, not really paying attention to business. I, by comparison, work 15 hours a day seven days a week. "Order some of her stuff. Then order mine. You'll see the difference." Another native midwesterner -- a Chicago native who relocated to Anaheim with his family the year after Disneyland opened -- Jerry owned convenience stores, fast food joints, and apartment-cleaning and -painting businesses before he began offering the famous Centurian F&F catalogs through such underground publications as Screw and The Berkeley Barb at the end of the '60s. He's prospered virtually from Day One, and now publishes helmet, trainer, bondage, transvestite, and shoe catalogs and Bizarre "O" and Transformation magazines, and maintains a million-dollar inventory of latex and leather clothing, shoes and boots, TV supplies, vibrators, dildos, bondage stuff, wigs, and costumes of all kinds at Fantasy Fashions, his plush 4000-square-foot store nine miles from Fantasyland in Fountain Valley. "Orange County is conservative in terms of who it votes for and what it thinks it wants," the crossdressing grandfather, himself the employer of 35, observes. "But when it comes to sexual desire, people here are also very liberal. It's a new era, and people are letting themselves go. They're tired of the Falwell assholes trying to tell everybody what to do and how to lead their lives." "I guarantee that you'll see a TV nearly every time you go to one of the malls around here," concurs Jennifer Antone, a dominant who's been based in Orange County since a year after she was busted in Long Beach in 1987 in honor of the Pope's visit, "I guarantee it. I have TVs telling me all the time, 'I never would have done this except I saw a TV at South Coast Plaza. Maintaining a lavishly equipped dungeon within hollering distance of the Rev. Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, the devoted mother of three daughters observes that the number of dominants in Orange County has quadrupled over the past few years. "It's a different atmosphere here," she explains, "more of an upper middle class community. You see a wealthier clientele. Up in L.A., if someone comes in with $100, he doesn't just want a session, but one that runs all day long. The person who comes in and tries to keep you at a very low price and is really stressed out over money is much harder to satisfy because the money means more to him. Down here, they pay whatever I ask." Her clients, who come from as far away as New York, are "predominantly Catholic and Jewish married men, doctors, attorneys, computer programmers. But the most striking thing is the number of women I see down here. A lot of female executives living in the area are coming out of their closets. Some come to be dominated. Others want to learn how to train their submissive husbands. It just thrills me that they're not seeing themselves as totally perverted just because they want to come over and experience a fantasy or enact a scenario. "She's flamboyant," Antone says of Antoinette, of whose boutique -- and of Fantasy Fashions too -- she's a regular patron. "She's loud and flashy, but she's also very nurturing, and that's part of her appeal. She really does care about what her customers need. She listens to what people say, and a lot of them are very, very loyal to her." None of them moreso than former marine biologist and karate instructor Reb Stout, Antoinette's right-hand man almost since he began doing secretarial work for her in 1978. With his L.A. Raiders cap, sweatpants, gut, and stubble, he's Joe Sixpack in the flesh, but as Rebecca H. Heels, he's starred in a couple of dozen of Versatile Productions' hilariously amateaurish videos, whose audience he perceives as "people from all over the world of higher than average intelligence -- airline pilots, Ph.D.'s, lawyers, doctors -- who've gotten bored with watching a nude woman fuck. They want something beside that, prolonged type stuff. They want to test their own imaginations, to enact fantasy scenarios." The number of professional dominants might have quadrupled in Orange County in recent years, but it's about to be reduced by one, as Jennifer Antone's 22-year-old daughter Artemis ceases to entertain three clients a day at $200 a pop to pursue a credential in massage therapy. "We discussed it when I was about 14," she says of her following in Mom's footsteps, "but it was just too much for me to think about at the time. I was just discovering sex and trying to figure out, you know, how to give a blow job." At first, all she liked about F&F was the clothing, which "matched my personality. It had a very tough, but sexy, look to it. I graduated from lingerie to black, shiny things, boots, and leather. "From there," she laughs, "I got a little bit of the twisted taste of perversion and kind of fell into it. But now I've kind of outgrown it." If there's one thing about which Antoinette and Jerry Lee agree, it's that they had a tough time after the Meese Commission published its notorious study on pornography. While Jerry had to close an earlier version of his boutique, much nearer Disneyland, and temporarily lost the use of the name Centurians in a bankruptcy proceeding, Antoinette was made to understand that "we couldn't do certain things in our magazines and videos. We could show the clothes, but not the toys. We couldn't show anybody tied up or in chains. We couldn't show a whip in your hand because it would be cruelty. Then Catwoman comes out in Batman Returns! "Things have loosened up, but we've got another 50 years to go before everybody gets off the bus."