That said, some good news: I just received the second part of Eric Tide's latest two-part chapter describing his Christmas Holidays as the slave of brothers Dylan and Logan, with the sometime participation of their cousin Graham. Since Part 2 itself is rather long, I’ll be dividing it into two parts. I’ll run the first part tomorrow or Sunday and the second a few days later.
More good news: To my astonishment, I've received another email from a reader describing his own early bondage adventures, which I think are sensational. I’ll be posting that email, and the several others I’ve recently received, in the course of the next few weeks.
We really do seem to be on a roll here with your stories coming in. Which is why I’m inclined to reprint a B&G editorial which appeared in Issue 70 (May, 1999), an editorial I came upon as I was digitizing Issue 70 last week.
Some background: In the “Loose Ends” section of Issue 70, I published a long letter from a reader who took me to task for many things, but especially for the stories I chose to print in the magazine. “You really need to hire professional writers to write most of B&G’s stories,” he wrote. “When you do print so-called ‘true adventures’ you still have to have a professional Story Editor edit them. The stories often are rambling and unfocused. An editor needs to cut and punch them-up...An Editor also makes sure the story is well written, makes sense. And has a beginning-a middle-and an END!”
While I left it to other B&G readers to reply to most of this particular reader’s critiques (which readers may or may not have done, I haven’t yet started working on Issues 71 and 72, so can’t say), I couldn’t let this reader’s remarks about the writing in B&G pass without comment. I devoted that issue’s entire editorial to my comment, which was basically my personal attitude to sexual writing. That attitude hasn’t changed much since that time. Here it is.
“In a dirty bookstore in the mid 1970’s I came across a thin, 
mimeographed booklet with a wonderful title, Straight to Hell, put out by a man named Boyd McDonald. Straight to Hell consisted of letters written by men to (I assume) the editor/publisher, detailing their homosexual experiences. The letters were written with no eye to literature, and McDonald never saw fit to correct misspellings or awkward or “incorrect” grammatical constructions, often in fact finding poetry in them.
“The letters ran the gamut from short and quick to long and 
complex, like sex itself. The description of a brief blowjob given behind the car in a supermarket parking lot while waiting for the wife to finish giving the kids a ride on the rocking horse in front of the store might be followed by a catalog of the different cocks sucked during an afternoon spent in a public toilet, which might be followed by a man’s memories of his earliest homosexual experiences, which might be followed by a man’s memories of every cock he had sucked or fucked or been fucked by in his life.
“The whole thing was seasoned by McDonald’s comments, which were funny, politically radical and very personal; he made no attempt to hide his fixation on eating ass and smelling underpants, ideally Ricky Nelson’s.
“I wouldn’t say Straight to Hell inspired a porn revolution across the board, but it certainly inspired one in my mind; it was the most exciting sexual writing I had ever read; even those letters that didn’t cause a stir in my cock were a joy to read; there was 
something refreshingly real about them, they were being written by real people, describing real experiences. Big cocks, little cocks, straight cocks, bent cocks, handsome guys, plain guys, married men, single men, few of them defining themselves as straight or gay, all of them talking about one thing only: sex, sex with men.
“I was so tired of reading the pornographic literature of that time, the cliché-ridden badly-written bulk of which described gorgeous guys 
with incredible cocks getting it on with gorgeous guys with incredible cocks. None of those pornographic heroes would have given the time of day to the likes of me, an average guy with an average cock, and even if my sexual energy was virtually unflagging, the things most pornographic heroes did when they got together would have 
been fatal for anyone human. I enjoy a good fantasy as much as the next guy, but my own private fantasies have never run do what I couldn’t do without dropping dead.
“Some of the men in Straight to Hell mentioned getting tied 
up, but not many, and never enough. That’s why I ultimately decided to do a magazine of my own using the letters I had been accumulating for years from guys telling me about their bondage experiences. As I said in my first editorial letter in Issue 1, if Boyd McDonald had been into bondage, I would probably never have had a reason to start a magazine called Bound & Gagged. But he wasn’t, so I did (with his blessing, I’m pleased to say. I put him on our mailing list, he liked Bound & Gagged, and we met several times in his smoke-filled little room before he died).
“I write all this now for the sake of new readers … who may not understand the “philosophy” underlying this publication. While much fictional sexual writing has improved tremendously since the 70s, the authentic personal history recounted by the real, unembellished human voice continues to get me where I live. It never fails to excite me on some level. And that’s why, whatever else may change with the magazine in a purely technical sense, and even if we do from time to time present fantasies and fiction, letters from guys like you and me talking about the bondage experiences of guys like you and me will always, always take precedence over all other types of writing.
“And now, as always, my pleas to you to write me about your bondage adventures. At least 75% of those of you reading this magazine have had them, even if for some of you they’ve only been solo activities. A minimum of 8,000 men read Bound & Gagged every issue, and that’s a conservative estimate. If every one of you who’ve had at least one bondage experience wrote me about that experience, not to mention about any other bondage experiences you may have had, well, that would net me some 6,000 letters and I’d probably never have to make this plaintive plea again.
“… Please sit down on your next free afternoon and write down your memories of your bondage experiences, your earliest, your most recent, your best, your worst. Change the names of the participants, change the names of the towns in which the experiences took place, if you feel you have to. Send the letters to me anonymously, if you’re nervous about letting me know who you are. Just write about what happened, what was done to you or what you did to someone else. Don’t worry about style, don’t try to be literary. Write me as you’d write a bondage buddy, simply, factually, without embellishments. I guarantee your’ll be in for a big surprise. Doing it will turn you on. Everybody who has ever done it says so.”
They said it in 1999, and they’re still saying it today, even if they’re writing about it in emails instead of letters. PLEASE, all of you out there, give it a try. Some 3,000 of you checked out this blog yesterday. If every one of you sent me (at [email protected], as always) a few paragraphs (or a volume, the choice is yours), I’d be one very happy man, who would never ask you for a submission (of the written variety) again.
I remember the "professional" porn I read back in the 60's and 70's, writing so bad it actually turned me off. And I remember encountering "Straight to Hell" and wondering if the guys (?) who wrote the crappy professional porn had ever read it, or had any experience at all with what they wrote about. (Being bound "helplessly" to a bathroom towel bar? C'mon!)
Posted by: Jeff Moses | July 15, 2011 at 11:21 PM