I just sent out the letter that follows to thousands of people on our mailing list: those whose addresses are most certain to still exist. Thousands more letters will go out over the next few days to email addressees the mail service we are using considers "Maybes," basically because I've had no contact with them for several years. Please feel free to forward a copy of this letter to anyone you think may be interested, and of course to communicate with me, as always, at [email protected].
Subject: A Letter from Bob Wingate
Hello Everybody,
I am sending this email to all former subscribers, customers and friends of BOUND & GAGGED Magazine, KW Enterprises and The Outbound Press for whom I have email addresses. I’d like to let you know what has been happening with me since B&G suspended operations in 2005, nine years ago this coming June.
This is a one-time email, which will not be followed by others—except to those of you who may contact me.
Before I begin, and as we are still in the first month of the New Year, let me wish you a healthy and happy 2014.
Now to the purpose of this email; I’ll try to be brief.
About a year after the company closed its doors, while my partner (now husband) Lee and I busied ourselves trying to put together a more mainstream magazine—specifically a magazine for gay men over 50—I also started a blog (www.bobwingate.com) to keep the spirit of BOUND & GAGGED alive. There I posted and continue posting old stories and photo galleries while soliciting and posting new stories—many of them exceptional—and some new photos, and trying to encourage readers to use the site as a bondage forum (not altogether successfully). I’ve also used the blog to sell available back issues and DVDs, at exceptionally good prices if I say so myself.
In 2008, as Lee and I were on the verge of acquiring the necessary financing for our mainstream magazine idea, the economy collapsed, and the new magazine went down with it. We were not, sadly, too big to fail.
Almost right on the heels of that, it occurred to us to relaunch BOUND & GAGGED as an online magazine only, full of wonderful bells and whistles. This meant that we would not just offer new stories and photos, which nobody would pay for anymore, but would repurpose old stories from our huge archive, turn them into videos, and do the same for new stories that came along. We’d also make new feature-length bondage videos similar to the thirty odd videos we’d done in the past. And, finally, we’d construct a brilliant social networking/hookup section to knock people’s socks off.
Lee put a profile for me up on the fetish website Recon, and the response to my appearance there was personally very gratifying: hundreds of people messaged me, telling me how happy they were to see me and begging me to bring back B&G, since what we had offered, many insisted, was lacking these days despite the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of bondage sites proliferating on the net. I found that hard to believe, but was certainly flattered.
Wanting BOUND & GAGGED back was one thing; finding investors was something else, and despite our many talents, Lee and I discovered that asking for and getting large sums of money—getting any money at all—from people with money was not among them. And while some people were astounded at the amounts we said we needed, we felt and still feel they were reasonable.
A busy interactive site of the type we had in mind isn’t self-sustaining and self-perpetuating; apart from the considerable costs for design and development, once the actual relaunch occurs there has to be a staff to create, develop and provide new material constantly, a studio to do that in, and a sufficient amount of money to pay both the staff and the studio upkeep, not to mention freelancers of all types, for a minimum of six months, which was how long we knew it would take us to start becoming profitable. As everyone knows, the world has changed considerably since BOUND & GAGGED came on the scene, and to keep people happy nowadays you’ve got to offer something new at least once a week, preferably several times a week, ideally every day.
We nevertheless strove to make it happen, and even found a partner to develop the site.
We convinced ourselves we’d manage somehow to make things work, even going so far as to take a booth last Memorial Day weekend at IML, just to see if there was truly an interest out there. And from our reception at IML, there certainly was. Hundreds of people came to our booth, where we offered free back issues and did bondage demos and even had our dear friend, the revered and fabled top Jason Branch, make an appearance and lend a hand on the busiest day.
A large number of IML visitors even signed up to be on our mailing list, to be kept aware of what was happening as we neared the relaunch date. They are among the thousands of you who are receiving this email.
Despite problems with the ongoing design and development, we told people at IML—and made ourselves believe—we could relaunch in September, which would be four months after Memorial Day and is now three months ago. We returned to New York riding high.
Only to suffer a pretty stunning reality check soon after we got home. Our developer, who has a well-paying job, told us he had to pull out and devote himself to his job full-time.
We had recently found an incredible designer (in Australia!) who was offering his services for free, partly because he loved us, partly because he saw the potential profitability of our business plan. But we had to find ourselves an incredible developer, and while we did do that, it turned out the developing costs would be way out of our range, and, speaking honestly, there was so much work remaining to be done that the developer said it would take a lot longer to make the new site happen than we thought anyone would have the patience for.
I’ve been asked to do a number of interviews (I did one at IML) but I’ve shied away from doing them, as I haven’t known what to say. And people kept asking me, keep asking me, when if ever Bound & Gagged is going to relaunch.
Sadly, Lee and I have both come to the conclusion that the relaunch is not going to happen. We can’t go it alone, and we haven’t been able to find backers to make it feasible. So this is my formal announcement that we’ve abandoned our plans to bring BOUND & GAGGED back to life.
Someone recently suggested that we try something like Kickstarter, but I’m not convinced we could raise a sufficient amount of money from that. If a large number of you disagree with me, please do let me know and we’ll definitely look into it. (It occurs to me that if everyone on my mailing list sent between $25 and $100, we’d have more than enough to get things going with a bang).
So as you can see, we haven’t abandoned all hope. Suggestions are welcome.
In the meantime, I have lots of stuff left from the old company, back issues, DVDs, bondage equipment, some new, some used, all for sale. I’ve already offered some small items of equipment on my blog, and will continue to do so, as I’ll continue to maintain the blog, if there is interest. Despite the number of visitors who according to the metrics come to my blog every day, I sometimes think there’s no one out there and I’m writing in a void.
My blog tends to have as many as two thousand visitors a day. Some blog readers will be getting this email, as well as reading the bulk of this email on the blog, since I’ll post it after this email goes out.
Please visit me at www.bobwingate.com, stream our videos through our old BOUND & GAGGED website, www.boundandgagged.com, leave comments on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/bob.wingate and feel free to write me at [email protected], where I’ll always be happy to hear from you.
With affection,
Bob Wingate
