MY HISTORY
One of my earliest memories is of being in the bedroom of our house on Neosho St in LA when I was supposed to be taking a nap. Since we lived in that house only from when I was 3 1/2 until I was 5, you can estimate how old I was. I was "napping" in my little briefs. I took my soft blanket (it had a cowboy pattern, by the way!) and stuffed it into the front of my briefs all around my little cock and balls, making a big mound around my groin. Then I rolled over on my tummy and rubbed and rubbed, until I reached a point of really intense pleasure followed by pain if I continued--sort of a 4-year-old's equivalent of climax, I guess. And what was going on in my mind? I was thinking about some cowboy being captured, tied up with rope and gagged with a bandanna handkerchief. And I repeated that scene, with variations, all through my boyhood and on into adolescence. The stories in my head, as I got older and more able to elaborate them and as I gleaned more material from TV and movies and, later, books, got much more sophisticated. Instead of just that image of a cowboy being tied up and gagged, I would tell a long story to myself, spinning out the story and controlling my masturbation to lengthen it as long as I could. I lengthened the stories by making the set-up for the important scene, the scene in which the cowboy got captured and bound and gagged, by making the set-up longer and longer. Every time I saw some men in bondage on TV, I would replay the episode as is for a few nights and then I would start to revise it, make it different, change the story, elaborate it. As I got older, the characters changed. When I was very little, they were always cowboys and I had (still have!) a strong fetish for bandannas worn as neckerchiefs and used as gags. Sometime later but before puberty, I began to notice that detective types got bound and gagged, too, and I started varying my nocturnal mindfilms with stories involving detectives being captured by the bad guys and getting tied up and gagged, but, as in the TV shows, detectives most often got gagged with men's white pocket handkerchiefs, and those too got added to my fetish. In very early adolescence, the colored and patterned silk handkerchief men started to wear in the chest pocket of their suit (this was the early sixties) began to catch my attention, and, first as part of a gag, later, simply as a a thing in itself, was added as a fetish to bandannas and white pocket handkerchiefs. As I once pointed out to a friend/fuck buddy (the first man I ever actually bound and gagged), if you think about it, a guy in a suit with a silk handkerchief in his chest pocket is a walking invitation to a kidnapping. You can tie his feet with his belt, tie his wrists with his shoelaces, use his necktie to bind his arms to his sides or, as a variation, hog-tie his wrists to his ankles, stuff his white pocket handkerchief into his mouth as a gag and tie his silk show handkerchief over his mouth to keep his gag where it belongs--stuffing his mouth! He opined that he'd never thought of it that way before, but he guessed I was right. And I am!
Sometime just around puberty, I began to make "dirty" pictures. I don't think most people would have realized that they were erotic, just unusual, since to most people there is nothing erotic in the image of a fully clothed man who is bound and gagged. I started out tracing pictures from magazines and books and then changing them a bit. I remember one of my first came from the illustration to a story in "Boy's Life". It showed a cowboy, who had fallen down while being chased by a belligerent cow, flat on his ass, his legs out in front of him, his back to a fence post, his arms braced behind him. I traced it and found it fairly easy to change my version, adding ropes to bind his legs, redrawing his arms with his hands bound behind the post, and, of course, drawing a big bandanna tied over his mouth as a gag. Another drawing came from a comic strip in the paper. Some guy got tied up, but not gagged. Again it was easy to trace the picture and draw a handkerchief gag over his mouth. Sometimes I didn't bother tracing the image, but just drew a gag: there was a group of pages in a discarded Sears catalog showing lots of good-looking fellows dressed in suits with silk handkerchiefs puffed in their chest pockets; I used a pen to draw gags on them all!
As my drawing skills increased (practice may not make perfect, but lust-impelled repetition can make things better), I stopped depending on tracings and just did my own drawings. By my mid-teens, I had gotten tolerably good, but by no means of Michelangelo quality! I based my technique on the comics, and would first draw the picture in pencil, then ink in the outline with pen, and then, as these things got more elaborate, color them with colored pencils. I basically drew two types: what you might call bondage pin-ups; and action scenes. The bondage pin-ups were simply drawings of men bound and gagged. Sometimes they were cowboys with bandanna neckerchiefs (or cavalry officers--I love those big yellow silk neckerchiefs!); sometimes they were detectives dressed in suits with a silk pocket handkerchief puffed in their chest pocket. They would be shown bound: just with their hands tied behind them; bound into a chair; hog-tied. And they would be gagged: a handkerchief or a bandanna would be stuffed in their mouth and another tied around their head to keep it in. I used those squiggle lines they use in the comics to indicate that the man was struggling, and sometimes I would draw a balloon above the guy's head with "Mmmmph! Mugummph!" written in it to indicate he was trying to yell through the gag. The action scenes came later, since they were much harder to draw, involving as they did more than one figure. In these, the man would be shown being bound and gagged: he would be bound and be being gagged, or he would have just been grabbed and would be shown as a handkerchief/bandanna gag was being shoved into his mouth, or he would be shown bound, the gag in his mouth and a bandanna or handkerchief being tied over his mouth to keep it in place, or he would be shown bound and gagged and thrown over his captor's shoulder to be carried off, etc. Sometimes there was just one captor, sometimes two; they might be dressed as burglars, or dressed in suits, or as bad guy cowboys, etc. Balloons like in the comics might be used for dialog, the victim going "Mulgumph!", the bad guys taunting their captive, or one giving instructions to the other ("Tie that gag good and tight, Jack!") or whatever. Sometimes there were "thought" balloons in which the gagged man expressed his surprise, fear, wonder at what was going to happen to him, etc. In all these pictures, the victim looked scared, surprised, fearful, worried, anxious. On a few occasions, I drew more than one guy tied and gagged in the same picture: a kidnaping of an all male singing group, for example, a trio maybe, all three guys in suits with silk handkerchiefs, all three tied up and gagged. If I could hold out from cumming that long. I used the pictures for masturbation. They would be very exciting for a few days and then I would want to draw another one.
I also began to write stories. I started sometime around 11 or 12, when I was also writing stories for school (not about bondage, of course! ) and getting feedback that I was good (for an 11 or 12 year old, I guess I was). Anyway, I found I could turn this skill to my advantage for my secret sex life, writing stories based on the mystery novels I had read, or simply describing in as great as detail as I could manage the mindfilms of my nocturnal masturbation. Again, the early ones were very simple, merely descriptive of bondage. Soon, however, they became much more elaborate, and I tried to make them have real plots and some character development--although I don't think I thought in those terms at that age. I just wanted them to be as much like the books I was reading as possible, only about my obsessions: cowboys tied and gagged, bankers robbed and tied and gagged, detectives captured by the bad guys and tied up and gagged and kept prisoner. I have sometimes wondered if my love of and (forgive me) skill with descriptive language did not at least in part come from the hours I spent writing carefully detailed descriptions of how my heroes were dressed, their jeans and boots and vests and bandannas, or their suits and ties and silk handkerchiefs. Certainly it has contributed in a mutually re-enforcing feedback to my physical sensuality, and how I really and truly enjoy and get off on men's clothes, my own and my partner's; I really like clothes, men's clothes, the feel and look of them, jeans and flannel shirts and denim shirts and leather boots and vests and soft, worn (and large!) bandannas, and also the soft wool of trousers and sportcoats and suits and the crisp cotton of starched dress shirts and the smooth silk of ties and chest pocket handkerchiefs--I really enjoy the sensuality of them all--and leather isn't bad, either. I have never really understood transvestism (although I don't condemn it) simply because, although I think women's clothes are great on women, I really and truly like men's clothes--on men! All my stories have always included detailed descriptions of how the men are dressed, because it is so important to me. Anyway, I went on writing these stories, and endlessly varying them, but they all of course had one thing in common--at least one bound and gagged man. But, there was never any sex. Sex in the conventional sense hardly entered my fantasies, either masturbatory or drawn or written, except very briefly right after puberty and even then only sketchily. It soon dropped out, not to return except again briefly after I came out at 25, when it appeared and then disappeared once more until my thirties--and still is only ocassionaly included, mostly in the kind of finished stories I put on the net, rather than in the fragments I often write, which concentrate more on the roping and gagging per se.. In my private stories, ones I would not bother to share with others, sex never appeared at all, and that was precisely why they were not stories I would expect others to share.
I will try to conclude. Both stories and pictures had their "golden ages" and their fallow years. I was very productive and got quite good in my teens. I cut back in college--no privacy and guilt over my being not only "queer" but *weird* queer held me back. I even burned many of my old stories and pictures. The year I lived at home between college and graduate school, I started up again with a vengeance, and I wrote quite a bit and drew a great many pictures of men tied up and gagged. When I went to graduate school, not the nocturnal fantasies, but the drawings and the stories went dormant during the few years before when I finally came out. Then, having mentioned my "vices" to a friend (the same fuck buddy I first bound and gagged) he asked to see some. I had none to show (they were all in a box in the attic at my folks' house), so I promised to make him some, and then I began once more. I drew him a picture of a suited and necktied fellow with a big silk puff in his chest pocket being grabbed from behind by a burglarish looking fellow who was stuffing a big bandanna wad into his mouth as a gag--the victim was struggling and mmmphing in surprise, and the burglarish looking fellow was smiling and clearly enjoying what he was doing. My friend liked the picture, although he said he didn't understand the significance of all the clothes (although he did know about my handkerchief fetishism). And I wrote him a story about a motorcyclist in the Berkeley Hills being attacked by a group of three other cyclists who tied him up, gagged him, dragged him off into the trees, and raped him. This was probably the first time there was any explicit sex in a story I wrote. The leader of the group was a handsome fellow and became infatuated with their victim, so he sent his companions off afterward to give himself time and opportunity to seduce the captive (he succumbed!) into being his lover. He liked that, too. And I was off again, and have continued to write and draw fairly extensively ever since.