Thanks to the way my life worked out, I had no alternative but to live out and proud as a kink since my early 30s. My ‘deviant’ photography got some mainstream traction, and people—the people I would have assumed are vanilla and would have hidden my kink from—started asking questions. And so it was that I did not quite come leaping out of the kinky-as-a-brillo-pad closet, but the door opened a crack, and then some more, and then some more, and the light wasn’t nearly as scary as I would have thought it to be.
Mostly, people have been very accepting of my kink. Even my very conservative family members were not just accepting, but almost largely dismissive. It did not matter to them. My ‘nilla pals were still my pals, and life went on just the way it went on before. Which, in hindsight, could have been expected, and is exactly the way it should have been. I have a few gay pals, and they are still my pals after they came out of the closet. Oh, you’re gay, cool, now do you still want to go to the cricket match on Saturday? They treated me with my kinks the same way.
But I’ve been surprised by many people, people whom I believe still stuck in their own society-imposed closets. But now that I’m out in the open, I’ve received questions. Lots of questions. And the most commonly asked question is: “When did you know?”
I mean, fair enough, right? Humanity has a morbid curiosity about everything. We stare at car wrecks and we want to know how people we’ve never met died, and for some reason, when people find out Gerry is kinky, they want to know the gory details. Really? Tell me! When did you know?
I’m here to answer that question: since I was old enough to think.
And I mean that literally. The ideas of bondage and restraint are as inherent and fundamental to my thinking as the idea of eating too many chocolate bars—I have a sweet tooth. I did not develop one, I was born with one.
I remember the first girl I tied up: I was in nursery school—what some of my international friends would call kindergarten. I tied her to the ladder of the jungle gym with a skipping rope. It came as naturally to me as breathing. I saw nothing wrong with it. But the disapproving looks (and probably a warm ass, this was the 70s) made me wonder if maybe I am strange.
As a kid, my favourite toys would be police sets. Gramma thought I wanted to be an officer of the law. An anarchist like me? C’mon! Those police sets had guns and batons and sometimes a little PVC hexagonal cap and, of course, plastic sets of handcuffs. Somewhere during my childhood, what passed for health and safety in the 80s, those plastic handcuffs all got quick release buttons in case you lose the key. That’s I lost interest. What’s the fun in that, right?
Oh, and I can tell you about my love for Richie Rich comics, and his girlfriend Gloria always getting ‘kidnapped’ and ending u getting tied up. Man, I wanted to do that! (without going to jail like the kidnappers did, of course. And as I grew into double-digit years, the concept of ‘consent’ was introduced.) Soap operas were my favourite TV shows to watch, daytime soaps at least once a week had an offering of some hapless damsel in distress across the bouquet of Days of Other People’s Santa Barbara that made up afternoon TV when I should have been doing homework.
This is primarily the reason I believe that being kinky—bondage, dominance, submission, S&M games, whatever—is not inherently sexual. It is not about getting my jollies during the morning shower. Well, not usually. Kinky sex exists, and it’s great fun, but that is not end all and be all of it. In fact, getting my rocks off on kinky fun is very unusual for me. What does a four-year-old tying a girl to the jungle gym know about sex, right? (Oh dear, as I write this, I can hear the howls of the SJWs who will of course take this out of context…)
But I have corroborating evidence, your honour. In my mid 20s I had a girlfriend (now sadly deceased) who had a four-year-old girl (Damn, she’s like in her 20s now!). One day, the kid somehow found mom’s handcuffs. (We of course tried to hide our toys away, but you know how resourceful kids can be.) Kid did not want to know ‘why’, she just wanted to play with them, and was very upset—as in throwing tantrum upset—when she discovered the handcuffs designed to take burly 200 kg six-foot-four prisoners named ‘Tiny’ to jail, would not fit on her four-year -old-girl wrists. But as said, kids were resourceful—and again, do not ask me how—she discovered she could get one cuff across both wrists and this will hold her securely. And then she walked around and locked the other cuff around the wooden slats on the back of the couch. And there she happily spent the entire evening, screaming if we came close to her with a key. She just wanted to be happily tied up. Just like I wanted to be at her age—and every age since.
