Keep Your Mouth Shut: March 2015

Bob Wingate, the founder of Bound and Gagged magazine was kind enough to do an interview with me recently. It's fascinating to hear the thoughts of someone who has been doing bondage for over 30 years and see how they compare to my (relatively) short time in the scene.

Bob now runs his own blog BobWingate.com that I wrote a piece for recently which you can find here. In addition he keeps the old editions of Bound and Gagged magazine archived online. For anyone who was too young to have experienced Bound and Gagged magazine back in its hey day, I suggest you check him out. You won't be disappointed :).

Bound and Gagged magazine

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Could you tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up? What was it like?

I was born in New York City, in Manhattan, and lived for the first 12 or 13 years of my life near the northern tip of the city, in an area called Washington Heights. Our apartment (flat, to you) overlooked the Hudson River, with the George Washington Bridge a brief and beautiful half mile to the north. The George Washington Bridge was at that time a single span bridge (it’s a double span now) and the area between my building and the Hudson, called Riverside Drive, had not yet been turned into the spaghetti junction/super highway it is today, but was the next thing to being in the country, with grassy meadows, tennis courts, playing fields, and a big lighthouse on the rocks below, almost beneath the bridge. Across the river were the palisades of New Jersey, pristine, undeveloped—an unbreaking line of structures stands on them today. All in all it was a nice place to grow up, far enough above the uproar of the city to have a small city feel to it, yet close enough to midtown to be just 15 minutes away by subway (tube, to you). My parents, like many in Washington Heights at that time, were European immigants; the community was home to a sizable number of Jews, communists, intellectuals most of whom had fled Hitler, all of whom contributed to making me the person I am.

My childhood was, as I remember it now, undramatic and basically pleasant. I did well in school, got along with my parents who weren’t strict, and, like my friends, was granted a lot more freedom to go about on my own than young people are nowadays, at least in the US, with parents terrified that their children will be molested by every stranger in the street, so program every minute of their after school hours, and stay in constant touch with them almost every minute of the day via mobile phones. My parents got angry if I wasn’t home in time for dinner, but I almost always was, since my friends also had to be home in time for dinner, and I think my family ate later than many of theirs did.

How did you first discover you were interested in bondage? How did you first discover that you liked men in bondage in particular? What was your first bondage experience like?

When it comes to bondage, I was always, only, interested in men, well, in boys, during my childhood. I liked girls well enough as friends, and liked boys as a lot more than friends although it took me many years to acknowledge that even to myself, but from childhood, bondage games were something from which girls and women were rigorously excluded. Even though a heterosexual novel brought me back to bondage in adulthood, and I’ll get to that in a minute, bondage was for me exclusively a boys’ thing. And remains for me exclusively a man’s thing today, though I reluctantly admit that women may do it.

Back to my childhood, for my interest and first experience, and at this time I must have been around 10 or 11 years old. My best friend and his older brother lived on a lower floor in our building. One Easter vacation, friends of his family came to visit from Colorado, bringing their two sons, who were the same age as my friend and his brother. I was sick (you Brits would say ill) for the first few days of the vacation, but when I recovered, I went down to see my friend and be introduced to the two young visitors. It turned out that the boys had been spending the few days that I’d been sick tying each other up, which is to say the two older boys had been tying up the younger ones. Since I was the same age as the younger boys, they immediately pounced on me and before I knew it I was tightly and inescapably hogtied.

I have no idea if my penis got hard, since till then I’d only really paid attention to my penis when I used it for peeing, but my whole body certainly went boing. I was helpless, and scared, and humiliated, with all of them staring down at me and laughing and making fun of me. I was also in heaven. Though I shouted for them to let me free, that was the last thing I wanted, and fortunately they weren’t in a hurry to do it, either. They told me I could get free as soon as I untied myself, which I could not do on my own: the older visitor had been tying up his younger brother for a long time and was very good at it. I tried hard, because they ordered me to, but I couldn’t find a knot that loosened anything. So I lay there twisting and writhing and grumbling, the latter mostly because I felt I should more than because I really wanted to. They ought to have gagged me, but didn’t. What they did do is set a card table over me, pull up chairs to it and play a board game, using me as a footrest and sticking their sneakers in my face.

Eventually they untied me, but not before the older visitor made me kiss the tips of his hightop Converse sneakers, and lick them a few times, which may account for my lifelong fetish for sneakers, for hightop Converse All Stars in particular, and my insatiable desire for hot guys wearing them.

The bondage games continued for the duration of the vacation, whenever the five of us were together (and continued often when I wasn’t around, as I would learn later, which made me insanely jealous). It was always the older boys tying the three of us younger ones up, I don’t think we ever paid them back in kind. Then the visiting boys and their parents went back to Colorado and my best friend’s older brother, who had never had much to do with us before that vacation, lost interest in us again. I don’t remember my friend and me ever tying each other up after that. But I introduced rope games to a cousin my age who lived just across the street and for a year or so, when his parents went out on a weekend evening leaving the live-in housekeeper to babysit, I would stay overnight and he and I would tie each other up every which way, and experiment with cloth and adhesive tape gags. The housekeeper paid no attention; as far as she was concerned it was just boys being boys. That summer, with other boys in the neighborhood, we also transformed a lot of games of tag of one kind or another into games where kids who got caught got tied up.

The particular games my cousin and I played together came to an end one weekend when he and I decided to “kidnap” a boy who lived in his building, whom neither of us cared for but who was always tagging along behind us. Our object was to invite him to stay at my cousin’s overnight, jump him, tie him up and give him an enema (my cousin’s suggestion, and he, whom I just had lunch with yesterday, turned out straight as an arrow). It was all in good fun—sex had never entered into any of this, and when my cousin suggested giving the kid an enema it kind of shocked me, though I went along with it—but it turned out the kid didn’t want to be tied up or given an enema. He slipped out from under us when we jumped him, ran out of my cousin’s place, then went home and told his mother. Within a day or so she went to our respective mothers, who then came to us, individually, for an explanation.

Several times already my mother had questioned me when I came home in the morning from my cousin’s with the residue of advesive tape around my lips and on my chin, her questions occasioning much embarrassed mumbling from me. Fortunately, she’d never pushed the questions too far, or been too insistent. This time, too, there was at least as much embarrassment and mumbling from me to my mother who, fortunately, again, did not insist. I have no idea what my cousin told my aunt, who tended to be insistent, and who had always considered me a bad influence on him anyway. In any case, the long and the short of it is my cousin and I stopped playing our bondage games, entered different high schools, found new friends, and for many years didn’t see much of each other. As for tying guys up or getting tied up myself, I didn’t have anything more to do with that until I was in my thirties, except when I was alone in bed with my cock in my hand.

I’ve written about all this (and probably some of what follows) in issue 25 of Bound & Gagged, though I printed it as from an anonymous reader. That issue is long out of print but I have a few archive editions which I’ll sell for $150, if anyone’s interested.

I spent my late teens and twenties in France, and was living in Paris, unhappily married to a beautiful Frenchwoman and lusting after the beautiful French firemen in the stationhouse around the corner in front of which I walked my dog every morning, when The Story of O was published. My wife and I lived in a circle of intellectual professorial types (she herself taught at the University), and the question of the day, being asked all over Paris, was who was the real author of The Story of O, since it was obviously written by somebody famous hiding behind a pseudonym. I personally couldn’t have cared less who had written it. It was the book itself that hit me where I lived, and I couldn’t believe the way everyone seemed to be talking about it in a dry, unsexy, academic way, I couldn’t believe that anyone could actually be talking about it at all, it spoke to such deep, personal, painfully embarrassing desires inside me.

Since in my heart I’d always known I was homosexual (I could never have called myself gay back then) I had to change the pronouns in my mind when I read The Story of O and turn O into a guy, skimming and trying to skip the specifically vaginal passages. But that never provided a fully satisfactory read, since every time I picked up the book I had to make that mental jump in genders. And then it came to me that I might write my own book, which I’d call “The Story of Y,” since if O represented the vagina, it made sense that Y would represent the cock and balls. And of course I’d change everything to accommodate my personal fantasies. I set to writing at once.

I didn’t get far. My raging cock got in the way. I couldn’t write a paragraph or even a few lines of dialogue without racing to the toilet to wank away at my cock (I love the English word wank and since your blog is aimed at an English audience…) till I rubbed it raw.

I didn’t get far with the book but I did a pretty good job of neglecting my poor clueless wife and making her sick of me; within six months our marriage was over. I moved out—got kicked out would be closer to the truth—and a few years later went back to the States, to California, as a guest of that selfsame cousin of mine and his wife, who had recently been my guests in Paris. They were at Stanford in Palo Alto, just thirty miles or so south of San Francisco, that gay mecca. We drove to California from New York, my cousins, my dog and me, since they’d been visiting their families on the east coast, and I told them on the way that I intended to “go up to San Francisco and become a faggot,” as I believe I put it. “Excellent,” said my cousin, “you can put an ad in the Berkeley Barb,” a popular paper in that era of sexual liberation full of gay classifieds. And that’s exactly what I did, within a week of arriving in Palo Alto. I went up to San Francisco and put an ad in the Barb, saying I was new to the area and to gay life and seeking to learn more about both. I made no mention of bondage.

Was it easy to find other bondage lovers before you started Bound & Gagged or the bondage fan club? How did you find other people?

I wasn’t intent on looking for bondage sex or other bondage lovers when I first came out. In San Francisco I was just ravenously hungry for any male-male sex. And I found it, in spades. I happily debauched myself for the better part of a year. Bondage was still very important in my fantasies, but the very few times it came up with the people I met out there, I got nervous and didn’t pursue it. Piggishly sucking and fucking from dawn to well after dusk was enough for me. Sex was everywhere, it was the seventies, all you had to do to get it was smile in someone’s direction as you walked down the street, and everyone was smiling in lots of directions. But while I was nervous when it came to doing anything in the bondage line, I did discover the novels of Larry Townsend in a stereotypical dirty bookstore probably frequented by the kind of men who wear raincoats on sunny days, though I didn’t notice that. I loved Larry’s books. They were well written, intelligent, about guys dominating and binding guys, and often very hot, but ultimately there was too much leather and too many dungeons in them for my taste (I know, I know, The Story of O was full of dungeons and leather, too), together with a lot of what we’d now call “Old Guard” assumptions that made me uneasy. I wasn’t particularly into leather or dungeons or rules on the “right” way to do bondage sex. It seemed to me that any way was right, as long as it was fun and nobody got killed, or hurt more than they wanted to be. For me it was all about guys just doing it together because they wanted to, doing it with clothesline in the bedroom or the living room or the kitchen, the hall or the back yard, doing it as friends, as equals; playing games—wrestling, flipping a coin, shooting baskets—to determine who would dominate the other for a session. Though my ideas and turn-ons would later evolve, at the time I wasn’t into such things as Master/slave situations and other kinds of roleplay. For me, it was all about boys being boys together.

Thoroughly disgusted with that whole stewpot of sex I’d wallowed in in San Francisco for the better part of a year, I returned to New York where for the first six months I was as celibate as a priest, well, as celibate as a celibate priest. Then, slowly, I began to go out to bars and have regular gay sex (which I always enjoyed a lot, with or without bondage, I have to say; still do) and which was as abundant in New York, I quickly discovered, as it was in San Francisco. But before long I did start looking for bondage. And I began to find more than a few glimmers of it. There was a fair amount of cheap literature on the subject. And there was the magazine Drummer, which appeared some time in the mid seventies. Drummer concentrated on all aspects of rough sex but bondage took up a considerable amount of space in its pages, and there were lots of ads for it in its classified section. There were also bondage ads in vanilla gay newspapers, The Advocate out of California, notably, which had a wonderful national sex classified ad section back then. Similar ads, often less “old guard” than in Drummer, regularly figured in all the gay newspapers, if not abundantly. And ultimately, for me, there was a small mimeographed publication of classifieds called The Rigid Bondage Roster that I found in a New York gay bookstore. It was through this Rigid Bondage Roster that I had my first bondage experience as an adult, at the hands of the editor/publisher whose ad I unwittingly answered.

Sadly, it was one of the more boring bondage experiences of my life, anything but a rigid bondage one; it almost made me wonder if bondage was truly something I wanted to pursue, in fact. The guy who “topped” me, himself quite sweet, put leather cuffs on my wrists, clipped them together, raised my arms above my head and attached the clip to a hook above my head. Then he sat behind me doing God knows what, watching TV I imagined since the TV was on, while I stood there, bored to death and wondering if I shouldn’t just raise myself up on my toes and release the clip from the hook, which I might easily have done. But I was a good boy, who had been brought up to be polite, and he was my host and had put me there, and I supposed it would do no harm to stay put for at least another 15 minutes. If something didn’t happen by the time his program ended, I decided, I would review my options.

But something did happen. He came over to me, unhooked my wrists from the ceiling hook, laid me down on the floor and jerked me off to an okay orgasm, then released me, telling me it was one of the best experiences he’d ever had and he hoped we’d get together again soon. We never did, but we did chat from time to time, and become phone friendly, and I asked him if he couldn’t introduce me to others. He kind of knew what I was looking for, and told me there was one guy I might like, very goodlooking, but into a Master/slave scene. Most of what I knew about Master/slave scenes I had learned from The Story of O and Larry Townsend’s novels. It wasn’t my scene, but what the hell. I called the guy, who told me in advance that what really turned him on was to be begged to suck his cock and lick his feet. Well, I love sucking cock and I have a huge foot fetish, so I was more than game, but when I went to his place a few nights later—and this guy was beautiful—I kind of fucked up when it came to doing the begging right. Being submissive was obviously something I would have to work on (I like to think I improved over the years), as he, if truth be told, would have to work on his bondage skills, for like the Roster editor, he restrained me using store-bought strap-on, buckling leather cuffs (which I hated as I hated all purchased equipment for a long time, thinking that rope was the only authentic material for rendering a guy truly helpless) which I could have unbuckled in seconds.

We both realized very quickly that the scene wasn’t working for either of us, which I’ve regretted over the years, because I really would have been happy to suck his cock and lick his feet for days if I’d known how to beg for them convincingly, and if real inescapable bondage hadn’t been as necessary to me as it was then. So in the end we removed my cuffs and sat together on his couch and he asked me what I was looking for. I told him what I’ve already said here: guys being guys together; and he asked me why I didn’t run an ad saying just that in a gay newspaper. The next day I did, and reran the ad a number of times, and as a result made some good bondage buddies who felt as I did, with some of whom I remain friendly to this day. I’d no doubt have remained friendly with more, if so many from those years hadn’t been lost to AIDS.

In 1979 I met the first of my two lovers (I’m currently married to the second one) through one of my bondage buddy acquaintances. Bob—his name was also Bob—had been in the Marines, and was more into SM than bondage—for him a pair of handcuffs was enough, they’d get a guy’s hands out of the way, which was where he wanted them. But we fell so heavily in love that he was happy to accommodate my desires as I was more than happy to accommodate his, and I happily let him abuse me, sometimes rigorously, and he was happy to put me into some pretty heavy bondage situations. We were together until he died 12 years later, but had an amazingly intense bondage/sm relationship for the first three or four of those years, which I’d willingly have had go on forever. As it was, our friends in couples were amazed; the sexual intensity of their relationships had petered out after a year or so, how did we keep ours going? Well, ultimately, we didn’t, not least because Bob really didn’t want to hurt me, or do the things to me that he’d have liked to do to someone he cared about less, and in any case all things inevitably lose their intensity as novelty and discovery turn to habit. But those years were wonderful while they lasted.

Bob and I had never intended to be monogramous; we just had been, because we were so profoundly into each other. But after three or four years we did open the relationship. He went looking for people he didn’t care about to abuse, and I went looking for people whose desire to get tied up or, better, tie me up, was predominant.

For those of us who were too young to experience the magazine in its full glory, how would you describe it and what made you want to start it?

It must have been some time in 1983, I believe, that one of my oldest and best bondage buddies told me he’d heard about a bondage club forming in Boston (about 200 miles north of New York). We both thought it was a great idea, then sat around bemoaning the fact that there was no bondage club in our city, and wishing that someone would start one. We knew we ourselves never would, neither of us was the kind of person to form a club. But then, a few months later, on a rainy afternoon when I was feeling particularly bondage-horny, I did just that. At this time New York, which had never before (and has never since) been able to sustain a good gay newspaper, had had one for a few years, called “The New York Native,” and on the spur of the moment I put an ad in it that read something to this effect: Bondage Club Forming in New York. If interested, send SASE to PO Box…

An SASE was the acronym for “Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope,” so that I wouldn’t have to pay postage to reply to people, if anyone wrote. The post office box was the same one I’d rented to respond to that first ad in The Rigid Bondage Roster in the mid-seventies. Since meeting Bob, I’d never used it but had held onto it. After all, you never know.

My ad was scheduled to run for two weeks. The first week it appeared my little box was so crammed full of letters I could hardly get them out and I had to go to the window for a tub full of others, there were hundreds of them. The second week the number was slightly smaller, but still jammed the box and filled half a tub. I couldn’t believe it. Could there be that many guys in New York City wanting to get tied up and tie up others? Apparently so.

That stopped me short. I didn’t know what to do next. I had no idea how to run a club. I remembered, though, that in what must have been his most famous book, The Leatherman’s Handbook, Larry Townsend had included a few questionnaires for people wanting to get into the BDSM “lifestyle”—I put it in quotes because I really hate that word. I took a lot from those questionnaires, modified them to be primarily bondage-oriented, xeroxed them up and sent them out to all who’d sent me an SASE.

The club went on to become the New York Bondage Club, the NYBC, now in its thirty-first year and thriving, though I’ve had no involvement with it since 1988, the year Bob was diagnosed with AIDS and I was already busy with Bound & Gagged, which I’d started the year before. The questionnaire responses supplied the material for the first two issues. After that, I had no more need to resort to them until the internet came along some ten years later and people stopped writing me as often, since from issue 2 on I was inundated with letters from all over the country, all over the world, about readers’ bondage adventures.

The magazine was made up almost entirely of those letters, often sent to me anonymously. I openly modeled it on another digest-sized publication from the 70s, called Straight to Hell, published by a man named Boyd McDonald who, as far as I was concerned, revitalized gay sexual writing. Straight to Hell simply consisted of anonymous letters from men all over about their homosexual experiences. A story might be nothing more than a sentence or two, e.g. “While the wife was shopping in the supermarket I went into the restroom and sucked off 3 guys, and a skinny guy ate my ass. I shot twice,” to several pages of descriptive text. It was an eye opening little magazine to read, not because every story was a turn-on so much as because McDonald had discovered that the sexiest and best porn writing was the human voice talking, in its natural tone, telling about what its speaker had done or had had done to him. Sometimes the speaker even wrote about being tied up, but bondage was only incidental in Straight to Hell. If it had been the main subject of the little digest, I’d never have started Bound & Gagged.

Here’s a curious thing. Before I did start B&G, I considered putting everything I’d amassed from NYBC applicants—since every time someone applied to become a member of the club, I sent out a questionnaire—into a book. I remember saying to Bob one evening that I probably had more information about men’s bondage fantasies and experiences than anyone ever had in the history of the world and we might make a book of it. Not long afterwards it occurred to me that a magazine might last longer and even make us some pocket money for a few years (I thought I had about two years’ worth of experiences to publish). I went the magazine route, and until a few months ago, had completely forgotten, not that I’d given thought to putting out a book, but that I’d actually begun to put such a book together. Then, just last August, I opened an old strongbox in the attic and found in it a manuscript from 1985, about 180 pages long, filled with stories I’d taken from guys’ essay-question responses to the NYBC questionnaire, most of which I’d never published in the magazine! I started posting them on my blog (bobwingate.com) around that time, and am still doing it.

Oh, by the way, no Boston Bondage Club never did get formed, at least not in those years.

Obviously your magazine had a huge impact on the BDSM community. I might argue that without it there might not be such a BDSM community as it would all still be very taboo. How do you feel Bound and Gagged shaped the BDSM community today?

I have no idea. Did it actually shape the present community? Perhaps. But I’m not sure how, or to what extent. If Bound & Gagged had never existed, I suspect there’d still be a huge amount of BDSM to be found on the internet today. Even when I started the magazine, it was in the air. And that air was the air of the sexual revolution of the early 70s. It’s not as though bondage didn’t exist until Bound & Gagged came along. (I once saw a photo of a woman in a leather hood by Man Ray, taken in the 1920s or 30s). While B&G was the first to focus on bondage exclusively, I’d have to give Drummer the credit for being the first gay publication to do regular articles and stories on the subject. What I can flatter myself that Bound & Gagged did do was simply give permission, show that you could want to get tied up and tie guys up and not necessarily be a mad man or a monster. I sounded sane, and relatively sensible, and even had something of a sense of humor. That’s all it takes: a father figure (which was the last thing I particularly wanted to be) with an accepting attitude and a little humor, saying it’s all all right; that can take the sting off even the scariest, most shameful fantasies. I can’t tell you how many men have written to tell me that Bound & Gagged saved their lives, bondage had been such a taboo subject, and their secret desires and fantasies had more than once brought them to the verge of suicide. Thanks to the extraordinary amount of bondage to be found all over the internet today, I doubt that many young people would feel suicidal about desiring it.

You tell me what you think the present state of the BDSM community is. I’m not sure I know, since I’m more than a little bit out of the loop, having reached that undesirable age (known as “old”), especially for the young men who’d rather I do to them what I’d have them do to me, when I’m no longer very interested in doing things to them.

Do you think many people found the love of their life thanks to your magazine? Do you know of any instances?

I can’t speak for many, but I know some have, even without statistics to back that up. I myself found the second love of my life, my present husband, thanks to it. He answered the anonymous classified ad I ran for myself in the magazine (I didn’t want every personal hookup I made to look at me as the “great Bob Wingate,” if you can bear it, but as just another guy). It was three years after Bob died, and I wasn’t looking for love but for a houseboy/slave who could cook, since I spent most of my waking moments at work and thought it would be nice to come home to a well-prepared dinner, and if the houseboy wanted to be recompensed for his slavery with bondage, well, I could do that. Of course Lee lied through his teeth, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to cook and for the last twenty years I’ve done all the cooking, but he washes up well. Not as a houseboy/slave, however.

I’m old and jaded now, so while I may believe love lasts, speaking from my own experience I don’t think good sex does within couples, whether the sex be bondage sex or any other kind. Lasting love inevitably becomes comfortable love, easy love, caring love, and sexual intensity depends on newness, unfamiliarity, unimaginable expectations, exploration of the unknown. Comfortable love is when you can allow yourself to be yourself in the other person’s presence, and he can allow himself to be himself in yours, with all eccentricities and peculiarities out on the table, the two of you no longer presenting to each other the persona you show the world or even showed each other when you met early on for sex and wanted to learn everything about each other. Love inevitably falls into daily habitual things you do together, cooking, cleaning, washing up, being silly. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, quite the contrary, but it doesn’t contribute to exciting sex, which is what you hope true love will be forever when you’re young. You yourself may be too young to want to hear this.

If that’s the case, what do you do when you and your partner no longer want to do bondage together?

Find it elsewhere, and allow your partner to find it elsewhere, too. I think it’s more important to find love with a partner, right at the beginning, who is tolerant of your bondage needs, as you are of his, than it is to find a partner who will tie you up or let you tie him up, if one or both of you insist on monogamy. Let the good bondage relationship stay as monogamous as it likes for as long as that works, but when it stops working, and I’m pretty sure it inevitably will, and the thrill of doing bondage together gets dulled, let each of you find others to do it with, then come home and tell about it, or don’t, whichever way the two of you prefer. That’s my suggestion. Always up for discussion.

Do you have a particular story one of your readers sent you that really sticks in your memory and why?

I’ve told you I wasn’t very good at the Master/slave thing when I was starting out, but one of my all time favorite stories is a Master/slave story that appeared in Issue 54 (1996) entitled “Natural Slave Meets Natural Master.” It proves if nothing else how tastes in everything, including bondage, can evolve with time. At least mine did.

My interest in the Master/slave relationship became very strong when my lover Bob was dying, around 1990. I remember one very bad night, when after sitting up with him for most of it, I stretched out on the couch in the living room and started jerking off. I think that may have been the first time I fantasized becoming a slave, finding a master who would remove all my burdens, take away all my responsibilties (I was also caring for my elderly parents at the time) and himself assume responsibility for every detail in my life, down to the clothes I’d wear and the food I’d eat. It was a fantasy which became all consuming for a time, and remains very powerful.

Apart from that, check out all the stories in Bound & Gagged that specifically mention guys playing around in white socks and hightop sneakers and you’ll find the stories I always liked best. One was in Issue 24, entitled “Smelly Minded Iowa Sockhead Tickletortures Buddy,” even though it wasn’t the tickling part that turned me on, since I personally don’t care for tickling.

How easy or difficult was it to run the magazine? Did you ever worry about running out of stories? What about financially? How many staff members did you employ?

It was as difficult to run the magazine as it is to run any business. I always worried about running out of stories (I still do) but never did. Financially we did quite well for most of our 18-year-run. We had our ups and downs, including two embezzlements, one by someone who’d been a slave of mine, and whom I’d trusted highly. That was very disappointing, and almost put us out of business. At our height, we employed 6 people.

What was a typical photo shoot for Bound & Gagged like? Where did you find the models?

Models came to us off the street. But periodically I went out to California and did a bunch of videos and photo shoots with porn stars, because you find more guys out there willing to show their faces than you do in New York. In a typical photo shoot I or an assistant tied guys up and took pics, too boring to go into the details of that.

The legacy of your magazine still lives on, even in the digital age. We now have fetish dating sites and a lot of bondage porn sites. Do you see a little 'Bound and Gagged' in all these sites? Are you a fan of any particular sites?

I see a little Bound & Gagged everywhere, but that may just be wishful thinking. I check out bondage sites still, and there’s a lot of great bondage going on everywhere, possibly not thanks to my magazine at all; in any case, I’d be the last to know. No favorites.

Finally do you have a message for the younger generation regarding bondage and the community?

Things happen very quickly nowadays, and people have no sooner said “Hi” to one another on line than they’re looking to meet up right away for a bondage session. My advice to the younger generation is the same as it’s always been to everyone: Don’t let anyone you don’t know well tie you up in your own home. Don’t go for a bondage session with someone you don’t know very well without alerting a good friend to where you’re going, the name, phone number and address of the person who’ll be topping or domming you, and when you expect to be home. Let your dom know that you’ve done that. Call the friend as soon as the session is over and let him know you’re well. All the rest, e.g. discussing limits with your partner, turn-ons, turn-offs, health issues, possible breathing problems, etc., should obviously be discussed and acknowledged beforehand, but you should do those things anyway if you have the sense God gave a goat.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I want you to know that you are a hero of mine for all you did for the BDSM community!