Alpha Pup Bruzr (GrandAlpha)
AwrrrrrrRUFFFFF!!!! I’m Alpha Pup Bruzr – some call me “GrandAlpha”. I’m 64 years
old, a full-time service dog to my Master, and a co-founder of modern Pup Play.
In 1986, my dear friend, mentor, and Alpha, Pup Ranger, started Pup Play as an act
of cultural and political protest at the International Mr. Leather convention in
Chicago in 1986. A year later, I came out gay, and when I came out, I came out
barking, so that makes me the second-earliest documented Pup. For years, Ranger
and I were the pack. No pup clubs, no moshes, no pre-made gear, just two stubborn
mutts in a world that often considered us disgusting. We were ridiculed and rejected.
We got called vile names. We were no better than bestialists, depraved, taboo, sick,
couldn’t speak of it, kept in the shadows – and we kept on barking, years on end,
until the world came around.
In August of 1997, I presented the first Pup Play workshop on record for my leather
club in San Francisco. That’s where I introduced the first Handler/Trainer curriculum
that I had developed for the leather community to use and adapt. From 1997 to
2004, I took my Pup Play workshops on tour to leather clubs, conventions, and S/M
runs across America, teaching hundreds of people how to unleash their inner dog
and make it real.
Those years were shadowed by AIDS. I survived it, though countless friends and
loved ones did not. As an activist from my first bark, I helped fight off three AIDS
quarantine ballot initiatives in California, marched with ACT UP and Queer Nation,
and fought like hell for us and for you, for our civil rights, for the day when we
stopped dying. Pup Play was an act of radical defiance, fierce life in the face of daily
death. That damn mutt got me through it.
For more than seventeen years, I’ve lived full-time in role and gear as the service dog
of my Master and husband, Lincoln, and my Handler, Spike. Four paws on the floor,
barking is default, dumb happy mutt, for my family that I cherish. This is for real, this
is my life, my truest identity, my calling.
My two-legged alter ego, Animal J. Smith, is a composer, flutist, singer, performance
artist, and LGBTQ+ activist. I’m also a 9/11 survivor, currently creating a performance
about returning to life and art after losing my Lower Manhattan home and
performance archive in the terror attacks, as an artist-in-residence with Oakland’s
Paul Dresher Ensemble, where I swept floors as an apprentice 39 years ago.
Today, I’m proud to assist historian G. S. Yang (aka G. Ponyhound!) to research,
document, and teach the origins of modern Pup Play so Ranger and me and the
Pioneer Pups, numbering about 20 of us in the world from 1986 to 1997, aren’t erased
from the history we lived and made.
All the Pups in all the world, spread across the continents, breaking the bonds of the
bipedal life, getting down there where we belong best – all of you are our
descendants, Ranger and me, there’s a tiny bit of our doggy DNA in every Pup, and
we love the hell out of you, we are so proud of you, and we’re working hard to
make sure you have a strong community and a solid foundation with new ways to
play, long after we’re chasing squirrels under the Rainbow Bridge, for many years
and generations to come.
Forty years ago, when I hit the carpet as Daddy Ron (my first and only) guided me
down, I never dreamed that the Pup would become my life’s work, but this old dog is
sure glad it did, and barking around down here with you, I’m the luckiest mutt in all
the world. awoo. wags!
In Service,
Animal J. Smith/Alpha Pup Bruzr
San Francisco, California, USA