Drone Sex: Remote-Controlled Intimacy
Richard Lemieux and Clara Straham have a very healthy relationship. They claim, independently, to be able to anticipate one another’s every move as if they’ve been together all their lives. Clara’s certain that they’re soul mates, Richard has told his family that he’s found “the one” and as a testament to their connection, they have sex together two to three times a week, every week. In the spring, they’ll be married while standing no closer than 2,600 feet to one another, which perfectly suits their relationship: Richard and Clara have never met and never will. They are pioneers of a new technology-enabled romance; one in which their physical affections are executed by electronic proxies–drones that can fly far beyond their own personal comfort zones.
Richard Lemieux is a retired entrepreneur. He made a modest fortune, he tells me, when he sold a software company that he founded in 2003 in Montreal. Netprotectica was a security solution provider for low-level data networks in hospitals, and Lemieux’s exit has afforded him the quiet life in the outdoors that he’s always desired. “It was hard at first moving into the country after having spent most of my life in such a progressive city,” Lemieux tells me. He relocated to rural Campton, Kentucky just outside of the Red River Gorge state park. “Montreal is diverse and cosmopolitan, and Campton…well, isn’t,” he laughs. “And that’s exactly what I wanted.”
“The act of piloting this machine to do something as intimate as delivering a handwritten love letter felt secretive and sexy.”
Lemieux has never been married. His preoccupation with his company over the past decade was only the second half of an exhausting IT career that provided him very little time to invest in a relationship. “I put my head down in 1992 and never looked back up,” he says. Now at 51 and single, Lemieux is faced with an entirely new challenge. “Where do I start? How do I meet people? Who do I want to meet?” His initial attempts to connect with local singles in the Wolf County area were fruitless, and a few online dating incidents ended in disaster. Lemieux decided he was done trying to find a mate and instead focused his efforts on something altogether different. A self-proclaimed “maker,” Lemieux was surprised to discover a number of other electronic hobbyists in the region, and so, in June of 2013, he founded the Red River Gorge Electronics Enthusiasts (RRGEE). In its inaugural form, the club shared tips and tricks and collaborated on projects building everything from HAM radios to robots.
But it was the introduction of the first remote-controlled UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or drone that became an obsession for many members of the group including Lemieux. At one monthly gathering he overheard another member (who has asked to remain anonymous) describing the use of her drone to deliver letters to her boyfriend. “She said it was exhilarating,” Lemieux explains. “The act of piloting this machine to do something as intimate as delivering a handwritten love letter felt secretive and sexy. She wasn’t afraid to say how much it turned her on.” It inspired Lemieux. He decided he would experiment with technology to address his own struggles with intimacy, and he invited her to meet for drinks one night a month later.
“I didn’t know how to broach the subject,” Lemieux recalls. “I knew she would be open to exploring, but it seemed too ridiculous to say out loud,” he laughs. “‘I want our drones to have sex with each other.’” Lemieux was relieved to find that his friend was completely open to his concept. “I knew she was in a serious relationship, and honestly, I wasn’t interested in being with her that way personally. She got it and decided it would be fun to give it a try.”
That night after two bottles of wine, Lemieux and his friend took their drones out into the open field behind the Campton restaurant where they’d met and began the test. According to Lemieux, the drones were only in the air for about ten minutes and the whole affair was little more than jumbled foreplay: two devices that were not made to come into contact with one another trying to connect. “It was dark, and we were a little drunk,” he says. “The charge in my drone didn’t last long, but we knew we were on to something. It was titillating.”
“The charge in my drone didn’t last long, but we knew we were on to something. It was titillating.”
Lemieux returned home and spent the next few days in his electronics shop investigating “anatomy” candidates for his drone. He wanted to create a mechanism that would allow for that magical connection that was missing from their initial engagement. “I experimented with several interfaces, anything with a plug and a port,” he explains. “I wanted there to be some sort of physical connection which had to be successfully executed for the experience to pay off.” After landing on a USB solution–a male cable and a female port–he decided to call his friend to continue their test. But something unexpected had occurred.
“She was upset,” Lemieux says. “She was angry that I hadn’t called sooner after our night at the restaurant. She was confused about our relationship.” He explained the technical advances to the drone that he’d been working on, trying to convince her that this was just for fun, an experiment. “She said it would be better if we took a break for a while. I couldn’t understand what was going on.”
Lemieux found himself in a frustrating position. “I was devastated,” he recalls. “I felt as if I had just invented the virtual sex equivalent of the internal combustion engine but had no one else I could turn to to bring it to life. I gave up on the idea entirely.”
A few days later, while reading through the RRGEE forum online Lemieux discovered a thread posted by a new user, ClaSAct. “Afraid of people, but love technology,” the post read. “Want to be a part of the group, but too scared to meet in person.” Lemieux was intrigued. He responded and began a conversation that would change his life forever.
The forum user ClaSAct was Clara Straham, a widow who had spent her entire life in the small community of Hazel Green only 15 minutes up the road from Campton. Two years earlier, her husband of thirty-six years died unexpectedly in a hiking accident in the nearby Natural Bridge State Park, leaving Straham alone and, as she discovered the hard way, very unprepared for single life. “I was miserable. I felt so alone all the time,” Straham, an attractive woman in her early sixties, says, “but I was afraid of meeting people, getting involved.”
Lemieux and Straham’s conversation moved off of the public forum, into emails and, after many months, video calls through Skype. But despite their close proximity, Straham refused to meet Lemieux in person. “I’d never really been in a relationship, so I didn’t know what to expect,” Lemieux says. “But I was falling in love with Clara, and I needed to do something about it.” Straham’s comfort level with technology is atypical for someone at her age, and her active participation within the RRGEE community, though remote, indicated to Lemieux that she could potentially be the partner he’d been looking for: someone who could help him realize his vision of drone-enabled romance. “I was terrified to ruin what we had been building together, but I had to try,” he says. Knowing the risk he was taking with the fragile Straham, Lemieux made the suggestion one night on Skype.
“I was terrified I would ruin what we had been building together, but I had to try.”
“I told him I thought it was crazy,” Straham laughs. “But really, I thought it was beautiful. Exactly what I’d been hoping for; what I needed in my life.” Straham had already been building a drone from a kit she’d bought online. Lemieux sent her his specifications for the USB port and they went to work. After five days and a dozen consultation calls over Skype and several hours of flight practice, Straham was ready for their maiden flight together. They agreed to have their drones rendezvous over the gorge.
“The first flight was nerve-wracking,” Lemieux says. “We selected a location that was approximately half a mile from each of our respective launch points, somewhere over the gorge.” Straham had insisted on the total mile separation, still unwilling to make physical contact with Lemieux.
“I was nervous; I didn’t know what to expect from the encounter,” Straham recalls. When their drones first met it was truly thrilling. “Seeing his drone through my drone’s camera made it so real. It made him so real to me.” Their first few attempts at insertion of Lemieux’s USB cable into Straham’s port failed. “It was clumsy,” Straham chuckles. “It required a great deal of skill and agility to maintain position, calculate the shifts in wind and properly present the port to his drone.” Lemieux began to worry that they would not be able to consummate the moment, that this would be an enormous failure and an end to their burgeoning relationship when, with only a few minutes of free flight charge remaining, the drones finally made the USB connection.
“It required a great deal of skill and agility to maintain position, calculate the shifts in wind and properly present my port to his drone.”
“It was amazing,” Lemieux says. “Everything I had dreamed it could be.”
“So romantic,” Strahan agrees. “He had told me data transfer may occur, and it did. He sent me a .gif of a rose blooming.”
Over the next few months Lemieux and Straham continued their romantic trysts, perfecting their maneuvers, and experimenting with new positions, and the rest of the RRGEE community began to take notice. Soon, others were modifying their drones and having similar engagements over the scenic river in the state park. Some members began capturing video of their encounters and sharing them on the club’s forum. “It sounds crazy saying it, but even just watching other drones execute a successful coupling is stimulating,” one member commented. A thread on the forum called “Drornography” was created to point to hundreds of these provocative videos some of which have begun to appear on commercial “drorn” sites. The proliferation of the videos and the modification schematics shared liberally across the internet have carried the practice far beyond the sleepy hills of Kentucky. Now known in the mainstream as Dromance, it’s taken on a life of its own.
“I certainly didn’t mean for this to become so big,” says Lemieux. “What was intended to be a way for two people to connect with one another has exploded into a cultural phenomenon.” I ask Lemieux if he’s concerned about the permutations that may have perverted his original intention. Cybonkers/Cybonking, for instance, is a spinoff that celebrates humans actually performing sexual acts on drones and other machines. “It’s a free society,” Lemieux laughs.
In ethnographer Stefana Broadbent’s landmark 2009 Ted Talk, How the Internet Enables Intimacy, she spoke of a similar disruption to the isolation imposed on us by the institutions of society which she calls “The Democratization of Intimacy.” Five years later, people are still leveraging every possible tool and technique, undeterred in their drive to eliminate barriers, whether physical, emotional or mental, that are imposed on us by our environment. Drones are the first of many of these arbiters of intimacy.
In April of 2015, Lemieux and Straham will be married in a drone ceremony 300 ft. about the riverbed where they had their first encounter. No humans within a half a mile, says Lemieux, the maximum range of their radio transmitters and a kind of measure of their new relationship: For now, he says, they will maintain separate residences and have no plans of ever seeing one another in person. “It works for her,” he says as he pilots his drone toward the treeline, around a limestone formation, in search of his love.
Want to learn more about Dromance, Drorn and Drone Sex? Click here.
Originally published at www.troyhitch.com on December 29, 2014.
