Bob Wingate's Blog

B&G Relaunch Update

I promised an update for every Friday. Unfortunately this week there is nothing positive to report. Our developer has tried to put together a budget that would arrive at an amount we could reasonably ask for, but even doing that, considering our needs, the development budget comes to a minimum of $100,000. Oh, we could do the development in phases, but the first few phases would give contributors nothing they could actually see, and then we'd find ourselves asking for more, and possibly more after that, so no one would be happy.

 

A number of people have suggested we start out "lean," but for us lean would be just making our full archives available. Those archives consist primarily of well over 1,000 great stories and tens of thousands of photos. But how many of you would pay for those things alone? None of you? That's what I thought.

 

Nobody will pay for stories and pictures anymore. In order to make money—and sorry, everybody, but people need to make money even on labors of love—there are only three ways internet porn can be profitable nowadays: 1) through videos, 2) through live action shows in which paying members participate by suggesting or even directing the action, and 3) by providing social networking. Unfortunately, way number 1 is not as profitable anymore as it used to be: according to recent statistics, adult video profits were down 50 percent last year over the years before, thanks primarily to the number of hackers who grab new videos as soon as they come out and make them available for free. Furthermore, video distribution is expensive. It requires a site to use a lot of costly bandwidth. That's why smaller video makers have to go with large streaming companies, as we have done forever with AEBN, for which we've never earned more than a 30 percent return

 

Our website wants—needs—to do the three thing I mention above, but to do them it cannot start out lean. It has to work right from the start at full capacity; anything less would only net us a lot of grumbling from a lot of irritated customers. What to do? I await suggestions. (I had no response at all to last week's update).

 

Oh, one last thing. A reader did suggest that perhaps we merge with some other small bondage website. That's not a bad idea—assuming the particular website is legitimate, has no debts, and shares our "philosophy" of what male bondage is all about. I welcome suggestions. What are your favorite paying bondage sites. And do you know the people who run them, and whom you might ask to contact me? I'd be happy to work something out with one or even several bondage websites, to create a conglomerate of the best out there. Something like that might work for all of us. 

 

What do you think?

 

Every Way but Loose

Danny was a real cute kid who looked great tied up and could never get tied up enough. I never actually met him in person, but we both got tied up by a lot of the same people, and over the course of several years we corresponded back and forth quite a bit. The first pictures here were taken by Mr. Lee. Most of the others were taken in one or more hotel rooms by an older gentleman who traveled up and down the East Coast with a whole wardrobe of T-shirts, tanktops, shorts and sneakers he liked to tie "boys" up in, not to mention endless amounts of rope and bandannas. 

 

There was no way to put these in consecutive order. I tried, but then gave up.

B&G Relaunch Update

Not much to report this week. We've had long conversations with our designer and our developer, who's putting together a total budget for the project. That's not yet been completed, but has to be done, even if we balk at the price. I know too well from past experience that if things aren't done correctly from the start, there will be endless unpleasant surprises later. Which means we would then have to come to you for more money, and then even more money. Once the budget does come in, it's my intention to lay it all out for you.

 

Apologies to those of you whose emails I haven't yet answered. But I'll be getting back to you, I promise.

Boyhood Bondage Memories

This exceptional story was sent me several years ago by someone I never met in person, but became passionately attached to in the course of a long correspondence. In 2011 I started posting several pieces Aaron wrote me about his experiences in the British Territorial Army, and later about his treatment at the hands of his best friend, a psychopath named Matt, whom he had loved since boyhood. 

 

Aaron died last week, on February 13th. Rereading his  emails I found this story about his earliest experiences with Matt. When he sent it to me it was for my eyes only, he wasn't sure he wanted me to post it. Later he gave me permission to do so, if I wanted to. But he wasn't well, and I thought I'd wait till he could have the pleasure of reading it himself on this blog. Unfortunately, that never happened, so I post it now, in loving memory of him.

 

Note. Aaron's spelling was pretty bad, and all his emails came to me as long paragraphs, endless run-on sentences with occasional dashes. When he first started writing me I was stymied by his "style," but then I discovered that all I had to do was correct enough spelling and punctuation to make things coherent, form new paragraphs and put periods in the right places. Then everything fell into place; he was a born storyteller.

 

SCHOOL DAYS WITH MATT

 

So I was 13 & Matt was just nearly 14 years old. We both were just coming into our teens & both very randy, as I suspect you were also. I don’t know why, but from then I would get very sexually excited about any films with guys getting tied up in them. I remember a few such TV programs. One was The Streets of San Francisco. Don’t remember the actors’ names but I had wet dreams about the younger actor, since in a few scenes he got tied up. Another was Ironside. Again, a very good looking younger actor sometimes was tied up. They were both about police in cities in the US. Of course I expect you know of them.

Businessman in Bondage - 2

Here's the second part. Apologies if they're not in exactly the correct order—I hadn't reviewed the set in many years:

Businessman in Bondage

A writer who said he'd contribute to our relaunch asked for photos of businessmen in bondage, and I do anything to please. Here's a great set, a whole bondage photostory, that a reader sent in many years ago (the sepia photos should tell you that). We published some of these photos, though not all, if I remember correctly, in one of our early digest issues.

Relaunch Update

The terrible weather aside, this has been a much better week. Which is to say many more people contacted me to say they’d be happy to contribute to a crowd-funding campaign, some for small amounts which are all they can afford, others for several hundred dollars or even a thousand. Contributions of all sizes will be welcomed.

 

Our thinking right now is to try and raise money in phases, so that we don’t ask for one large, impossible sum from the start. The first phase would be for design and development, or rather for development, as the design is pretty much already done; The development, which must restart from scratch, will be the most expensive amount we’ll be asking for. We’ve had long talks with our developer, who is putting together a full budget and timeline as I write.

 

Having raised enough money for development, we’ll set to work trying to raise enough to make a few videos. In the old days, we used to budget $12,000 for a 2-3 person video; and while video quality has improved, I can’t imagine that the process itself is any less expensive these days. Bound & Gagged has to offer more than simple home movies—not that it won’t offer those, too: equipment still has be be bought or rented, locations have to be found and rented (we used to have our own studio and hopefully will again, but that’s in the future); actors, videographers, editors, directors, lighting and sound people, not to mention gofers/assistants, still have to be paid.

 

Ideally, we could make two or three videos for the price of one, using the same actors for a feature-length movie and then for one or more shorter scenes repurposed from stories in our archives, but until we’ve done that at least once, I’ll stick to $12,000 per. On the other hand, I can say that if any of you out there would be willing to volunteer your equipment and/or skills at such things as videotaping, editing, tying up, and anything else you can think of, not to mention sexiness for performing often helplessly in front of the camera, please contact me. The less we have to pay, the more we can do.

 

Once we raise enough money, get the development going, and the site in a viewable condition—I’ll let you know how long that will take next week—we’ll invite all those of you who have contributed to come to the site, play with it and inundate us with your comments, reactions, thoughts, advice, etc., so that on completion Bound & Gagged really will be able to call itself the site of the male bondage community, a production of the male bondage community.

 

A third phase, once the site was nearing completion and we began making videos, would be to raise enough money to keep it going and constantly providing new material (in other words for a full-time employee or two) until it can run on its own. I think it would be able to run on its own pretty quickly, but I'd feel more comfortable with a cushion, which I think could be filled by another $25K.

 

I’ll update again next Friday—or sooner, if something important happens. In the meantime, please write me your thoughts on what I’ve said. Put them in the comments section, or email me at [email protected]. 

Fun Bondage Tale

Hope the weather's not as lousy where you are as it is in NYC, with snow piling up outside and sleet hurling at the windows. Good day to stay home from work and lie around tied up and gagged, or, if no one's there you to put you in your place and keep you quiet, wrap some rope around your ankles, tie or tape a sock in your mouth, and look at dirty pictures and jerk off to bondage fantasies and remembered adventures (or write and send me yours). The fun story below appeared in Issue 56 (Jan/Feb 1997). By my calculations, from the information the writer gives, he and his friend Brian must have been about 13 or 14 at the time they did these happy role-play scenes.

 

FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE I LIKED BEING CALLED A “FUCKING QUEER”

 

LARGO, FL. I’m 30 yrs old, have red hair, a good body and have been tieing up my friends since the first time I knew I could. This is going to be a story about one of my earliest and most memorable bondage scenes I had with one of my best friends named Brian.

Two Hot Guys Bound

Matt Sizemore, who had just starred as a nasty top in our video Boynapped!, came for a photo shoot a few days later, this time to get tied up himself. We were having so much fun with him that the shoot was still going on when Logan Reed turned up for his bondage appointment. The year before we'd abused Reed, a guy whose dick boinged to attention as soon as ropes came out, using him in a vignette we did in Tit for Tat 2, and I regret to this day that we never took better advantage of him in a video. Anyhow, Reed was real happy to find Sizemore tied helpless to a post, and after we let Logan play with Matt for a while, we tied Logan in a chair, then released Matt to play with him, with results that you might imagine but can also see.

Bound & Gagged Relaunch Update

After suggesting we might go the crowd-funding route, I’d hoped a minimum of 25 of you would write me saying you’d be willing to contribute anywhere from $25 to $100 to the relaunch project. After all, we almost never get fewer than 1,200 readers a day, and often up to 2,000 and more. So I can’t help feeling disappointed that only 15 guys came through, even if one of you said he’d be willing to put in from $300-$500—for a lifetime membership, which of course we’d eagerly give him.

 

For that matter, everyone who puts in even as much as $25 would get something for his generosity. We haven’t worked out the quid pro quos yet, but have been thinking mainly in terms of memberships running anywhere from one month to forever.

 

A few of you wrote asking about the form the new “magazine” would take, if it would be similar to the old print publication, or even to the former online site.

 

The answer to that is no. To try to go the print route would be suicide, and nobody will pay anything anymore for a traditional-style magazine with columns, departments, articles, stories and pictures. We hope to include all those things in the new Bound & Gagged, but the magazine part itself will mostly be in video format, since that’s what people will pay for on adult sites nowadays—that and memberships in social networking arenas that enable them to make contacts and find like-minded friends they can talk to and, ideally, meet. Which is why we will also be a social-networking site. In olden days, that part would have been called the “classified” section, but our intention is to modify the "classified" concept and transform it into something truly exceptional.

 

Videos and social networking are the two things we primarily intend to offer new, paying B&G members, who will also have full access to our enormous archive of well over a thousand stories and many thousands of photos.

 

The videos will come in the form of short scenes, some based on simply putting doms and subs together, others in story-form, often taken from old Bound & Gagged stories, and some new full-length features.

 

The social networking component will be amazingly interactive, though I don’t want to go into more detail about that here, except to say that through that component we’ll also develop the material for a “magazine” that will grow steadily into a full-sized edition throughout the course of every month.

 

Lee and I have been looking into adult crowd-funding sources, and what we’ve mainly discovered is that they seem to take a very high percentage—from 20% to 35%—of individual contributions, and also, as far as we can tell, they limit goal amounts to sums considerably lower than we need. I still think that us creating an escrow account would be the preferred route to go, if we can make contributors feel secure using it, and make it easy for them to put their contributions in.

 

More about that later.

 

Right now, I’m going to let this go on another week, and make another call for those of you who haven’t written me yet to do so: tell me if you would be willing to contribute to a Bound & Gagged crowd-funding campaign. And urge your friends, who may not read my blog but who may have good memories of Bound & Gagged, to contact me, too. Twitter them, Facebook them, and ask them to write me, telling me they’d be willing to help. My email: [email protected]. 

 

I’ll update again next Friday.

Bondage in Context?

I've had some nice responses but not nearly enough from my relaunch post of two days ago. I'm going to have to hear from a lot more readers if we're even going to consider trying to relaunch.

 

Here's one email I got, which I blush to post. I post it nevertheless because it touches on something that seems to me very important: the importance of videos with whole stories where the bondage with or without sm has a context, as opposed to videos which just show bondage/sm scenes.

 

In response to your recent blog entry with the question of whether or not to go through relaunching your website.

 

When I became of age, the first website I subscribed to was Bound & Gagged. Unfortunately, the website was shut down shortly after and I never really got to enjoy the site. Of all the porn sites there are out there today, Bound & Gagged would be the one website I would always keep a subscription.

 

What made your site so special was that you played with the fantasy. I don't mean to trash talk other directors' work, but there is so much of today's work that's just superficial and focuses more on hot models than an actual story. For me, the story has always been the most important part because it's what makes it real, it's what connects me to the characters and takes me in.

 

One of my favorite movies was your Bondage Under Construction video, where you had two cute guys messing around in a cabin. What you did was a work of art. You directed an actual movie, you had scenes that set up the story and my favorite part was actually where Jim emptied his backpack and the way Brent reacted when he saw it and when he was getting gagged.

 

Ever since Bound & Gagged, I have never seen one single male bondage film with that kind of depth and story. For me, the relaunch of Bound & Gagged isn't about getting more porn, it's about your work. And to be honest, I wouldn't care if it wasn't called Bound & Gagged anymore, I would just like to see you direct again. So even if your project doesn't succeed, I sincerely hope that you won't give up because you are, in my opinion, a legend.

 

I'll be writing this reader personally, but let me just say thank you here. And asking others reading this to send me their thoughts on this subject as well.

 

 

Sam Dixon Hogtied

Several of you wrote me asking for this. Here you are!

These photos, by the way, were taken by the great Greg Lenzman, with Sam being bound and abused by the incredible Jamie Lawless.