For me, personally, the best recent find from my unpublished book of male bondage accounts was this interview I conducted back in the 1980s with the late and much lamented Jim Stewart, founder of Fetters. If Jim alone was not the single person most responsible for inspiring the modern bondage movement, he is certainly one of its gods, justly deserving pride of place in its pantheon. I'd completely forgotten I'd ever done this interview, which at the time I'd simply titled
INTERVIEW WITH A BRITISH BONDAGE FANATIC
Q. How old were you when you first became aware of your interest in bondage?
A. Interest and awareness of interest are two different things. I think the more I became aware of bondage the more I realized that certain experiences in the past were connected with it.
Q. Can you identify some pre-awareness experiences?
A. Well, I know for example that I had a pair of rainboots, Wellingtons, which I hated to wear because they were dull and unshiny, and there was somebody in school who I now identify as having been a very attractive child who had this shiny pair of Wellingtons, and I was very fascinated by those. Also, I’m very turned on to motorcycle gear and stuff like that and I realize that I had an uncle who was very good looking and healthy — he was in the navy — and when he went away to the war he left his motorcycle coat, as they were called [in England] in those days, with us. It hung in our closet, and I do remember locking myself in the closet and wrapping myself in it. Then I remember the school bully in the playground who was playing with the chain and padlock that locked his bicycle, and threatening to lock peoples’ hands behind their backs.
Q. What is your earliest memory of a bondage experience?
A. Memory is so unpredictable. I can remember in detail a photo session with my two older brothers when I was a toddler, and I must have been three or four... I remember that my father had a pair of gardening Wellingtons and when I stood in them they were practically up to my crotch. And one day when the family was out I do remember standing in them and tying myself to the drainpipe with a piece of rope.
Q. Is that your first bondage memory?
A. I think it would be around the same time that I saw the guy in the school playground, this dangerous, truculent bully-type called Roy, actually lock somebody’s wrists behind them round a post in the bike shed. I was fascinated, and wished that it would happen to me and hoped that it would never happen to me. But what age was that? It was my first school, so it must have been five, six, seven.
Q. When did you reach a definite sexual awareness?
A. Not till quite late. I didn’t have my first orgasm until I was 13 or 14. I didn’t even know what it was then, and I thought I was just leaking. Although I’d got two older brothers, it was something that was never discussed.
Q. And they never tied you up?
A. No. But I was always fascinated by it. I did go to see a lot of movies at that time, because this was pre-television, and I did love the westerns and things like that. But I liked best if people wore leather chaps, especially the stovepipe ones and not the floppy ones. And if somebody got tied up or restrained in any way it was always memorable, and the movie stayed in my mind whereas others didn’t. I hated Gene Autry and Roy Rogers because they were far too tidy and neat and civilized.
Q. By this time you had reached your teens.
A. At about the age of eleven I became aware of Houdini and started combing the library for books on magic that had any rope tricks in them. And that became as it were the excuse and justification for experimenting with someone who was living in the same house. We did tie one another up a lot. It was during one of those sessions that I think I really came for the first time. A few times before that I got very excited and on the verge of it, without realizing what was happening, and I wanted to repeat the experience. I found it came with being tied up and stimulated to some extent.
Q. This was a friend of yours?
A. Yes.
Q. And you supposedly did this as magic tricks? As escape artists?
A. Originally the excuse for tying one another up was in terms of, Can you get out of this? or, Can you get out of that? Gradually we both got more competent so that when we were tied we stayed tied, which really seemed to be more rewarding than being able to get free.
Q. Was there any sexual attachment between you and this boy?
A. Not sexual attachment; tease. There was no interaction other than tease. Because when you’re tied up you can’t stop someone from doing something that is basically embarrassing, degrading or frustrating, irritating, annoying, that you would like to stop if you were free to stop. The fact that one came to enjoy it was a development, I suppose.
Q. What’s become of him?
A. I’ve met him since. He was always a cold fish and he is still unmarried and he’s still doing his weekend scuba diving and things like that, so he obviously climbs into rubber suits still. But he’s not attractive to me, I’m not attractive to him, and he isn’t ostensibly gay.
Q. Are you?
A. Let’s say I’m turned on by males and not by females, male-male bondage but in reasonably hard, reasonably robust, reasonably macho terms.
Q. How do you like your bondage?
A. Though I’m reasonably efficient at doing it, I would far rather have it happen to me, but I think that best of all I like to see it happen to other people.
Q. You make a strong connection between rubber and leather and bondage. Are those necessary accessories to you?
A. I think I'm more turned on by everyday usable equipment of the restrictive protective clothing variety — construction workers' clothing and equipment, army equipment and gear, motorcycle clothing — than I am by specially constructed “sex bondage” paraphernalia. It’s like sportswear. A pair of boxing gloves, a sparring helmet and a crotch protector from a sports store, which reduces your mobility to some extent, is more sexy to me than sex gear. I do like rope and things like that. But a motorcycle suit that you can’t get out of unaided is very attractive to me.
Q. All in all, you seem to like the voyeur role best.
A. I haven’t got particularly high-powered sexual urges. I still feel a certain amount of self-consciousness or embarrassment about sexual play. I’m more turned on by seeing people under restraint. Because of my own physical limitations — being that I like male-male action, which is quite robust — there are other people better equipped to both give and receive it than I am. But at those times I like to be in a position where I cannot interfere or influence what is going on, which is a perfect excuse for being incapacitated before the action really starts.
Q. Can you give an example of a time that just that happened?
A. Oh, yes. Having instigated a bit of competitive one-upmanship between two particularly complicated people, the man who was inclined to be physically aggressive with his friend could only be free to do so if I wasn’t in a position to interfere. He had to do it in my place because I had two straitjackets, one of which he intended to use on his friend. He made sure he put me into one of them in such a way that I couldn’t get out before he jumped his friend.
Q. Jumped him? And on his own was strong enough to subdue him?
A. Well, it was catch as catch can, but he knew the equipment, and so he was able to put the other guy in the strait jacket, and then do several of the things to him that the two of them had done, sometimes to prisoners, when they’d been in the army.
Q. Which army was this?
A. English. They were abroad, in Borneo, in Germany, in the Commando Corps. I’m attracted by people who are attracted to that sort of employment. A lot of people who do go into the police, the prison service, the military, have often got subconscious or conscious leanings toward being involved in this sort of situation, whether as the aggressor or as the victim. It may be totally subconscious.
Q. You told me once about some paratrooper who came to see you claiming he didn’t believe you could tie him up effectively.
A. He was an army drill sergeant. He said to me, “If I didn’t want to get tied up I wouldn’t get tied up, whatever happened.” And I said, “Once one gets any form of hold on somebody, if you know what you’re really doing you can go through a series of motions that will incapacitate them whether they like it or not, however hard they fight.” And I do think there are techniques to do this as long as the circumstances and the space are right. Because if there's table lamps to knock over and a photograph on the wall to get smashed, it’s not quite the same as if you can bounce people off walls. I told him that once I got a small loop of rope on one hand I could swing enough to incapacitate him. And I did it, purely by getting a loop on one thumb. With a couple of reasonably adept twists I got his hands incapacitated, stayed out of the way of his feet and was able to overbalance him and get him into a completely efficient hogtie. It was no great problem, and there weren’t many bruises involved, just a couple.
Q. Was he able to get out of it?
A. No.
Q. Who got the bruises?
A. I did.
Q. Once you had him there, hogtied on the floor, what was his attitude?
A. “Okay, you win. Now let me out.”
Q. Did you?
A. Not right away. But you’ve got to be careful in a situation like that, because you know you’re going to get killed when you let them out if you take it too far, or you’ll get your television smashed or something. You have to play it by ear. In this case it was a question of proving to the guy that I could make him do anything in the end to get free, lick my boots, suck my cock, anything. I didn’t make him do it, but he knew that I could. Then, when I let him go, he felt he’d been taught something, which I was pretty sure he’d use on others.
Q. But first you let him struggle?
A. Yes. Sometimes I get more of a lift out of seeing someone struggle out of a restraint successfully than I do putting them into something they know they can’t get out of so there’s no point of struggling. The biggest turn-on for me is to appear to be going to do something to them that they don’t want to happen, because that proves to them they’re in a situation they can’t get out of.
Q. You want to do something to them that they don’t want to happen?
A. I want them to think that I’m going to do something to them that they don’t want to happen. But I get no kick out of doing something to someone that he is in fact not going to get a kick out of, at least in retrospect.
Q. How do you judge, while it’s going on, what to do that a person really doesn’t want to do, but will get off on in retrospect?
A. That’s the gamble. And that occasionally makes me very nervous, because you’re treading a tightrope the whole time, aren’t you?
Q. Have you had any bad experiences as a result of that?
A. Nothing in any way painful, damaging or expensive. I’ve had people never come back. The successful ones are those who say, “You bastard, when are we going to get together again?” Since I find the reverse role situation much more interesting than a permanent top or a permanent bottom situation, I’d rather provoke a guy into wanting to do something to me than into wanting to get the hell out of there. But into doing something to me that is as responsible and responsive as what I’ve done to him.
Q. Can you give a few examples of the sort of thing you’ve done?
A. There are so many. It can be as simple as putting someone into something and saying, “I’m going out to see a movie. If you’re not out of that when I come back, you’re in it all night.” Or if someone has theatre tickets and has to meet a friend down the street in two hours’ time, it’s enough to say to him, “How are you going to explain tomorrow morning that you didn’t turn up with the tickets?” That’s going to give him a couple of good hours fury and struggling. And as long as you let him out ten minutes before curtain, he’ll be so grateful. He may come back with a marvelous reprisal a day later, or a week later, or a year later. You’ve given him a sequence of emotional developments which he’s not going to forget in a hurry.
Q. Has anyone ever given you that kind of sequence of developments, and can you tell us about it?
A. Let me see. Well, for example, I was having a country weekend in Holland once and it rained and rained. The guy I was visiting said, “Do you fancy some fresh air? Let's go for a walk.” To do that we put on a lot of rainproof gear, which for me included a full motorcycle suit and helmet, and so it was no problem to walk through the fields and remain dry. On the way back through the orchard, he said, “Do you fancy being tied to a tree for an hour?” I said great, and he proceeded to do this, and then, unexpectedly, he opened the top snaps of the suit so the rain started to run down and in. For the next two hours I knew where every little trickle of ice water was traveling inside that hot suit. It was a great turn-on, but I didn’t kill him when he got back. I wanted to have the opportunity to do something similar to him. To me a sort of return match, using one’s experience of the person to do to him what he’s done to you, and with interest, with a vengeance, is a very nice way of developing a relationship.
Q. What other sort of scenes do you enjoy?
A. The sort of scenes I think I do extremely well, when I take the risks, are, strangely enough, non-sexual. I like taking people out in public under some sort of restraint or handicap which doesn’t show -- manacles, or a rope body harness, and perhaps a butt plug. It isn’t apparent to the public, but the person knows he’s got it on him, and you know he’s got it on him, and he knows you know he’s got it on him. It’s a big turn-on taking someone shopping in Woolworths like that, or to a cafeteria, or even to the movies.
Q. Don’t manacles show?
A. At home I’ve got an army field jacket with holes cut in the pockets so you can lock someone's wrists to a handcuff waist chain and lock his hands into his pockets so he just looks as though he's walking along the street with his hands in his pockets. There are certain raincoats you can do that with, too. I’ve taken people out in England in full motorcycle gear, with gloves with mitts over them taped in position, so they can’t get the suit off. I’ve taken them round to the local pub with a gag under the motorcycle helmet, and left them standing outside the pub while I’ve gone in for a drink, in a reasonably rough area. It was quite a high for me. Once I took someone down to the post office wearing my field jacket, with his hands manacled inside the pockets, and said to him, “Hand me one of those forms over there.”
Q. What was his reaction? Did he tell you later?
A. A sort of breathless hype. They all need a little time to absorb it, but the next time they come over, if you ask them if they want to do it again, they may say, “I don’t mind.” This happened with a boy in New York, one winter. Both times we did this it was very cold outside. I tied his hands and elbows under a big down jacket, put a gag in his mouth, then pulled the hood up and laced it tightly so that only his nose and eyes showed, and walked him to the subway. The first time we did this, when the train came I had him sit at one end of the car, and I sat at the other. The second time, I said to him, “Go to the end of the line and wait,” and I shot out of the doors just before they closed.
Q. What did he do?
A. What could he do? He couldn’t go up to the nearest policeman and say something because he’d got a gag in his mouth. As long as he wasn’t mugged and no policeman asked him what he was doing, there wasn’t any problem. And none of those things happened.
Q. And you met him at the end of the line?
A. As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I’d contrived for other people to meet him and say, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” One of them, in fact, was a policeman friend of mine. They took the kid out to the police car outside. I was on the next train, and I went out and joined them.
Q. What was the best revenge anyone ever got on you?
A. It looked as though he was going to do to me what I’d done to him, so I cooperated. But after I was tied, when we got to the car we drove into an area that I didn’t know, and we got out and went into a store that I didn’t know, and the guy said, “Find your own way home,” and disappeared. But in fact he didn’t carry it all the way through. I think that was the best time.
Q. What was your reaction?
A. Panic. Total panic, and how did I get myself into this stupid situation? But in retrospect it was good.
Q. You say you’re attracted to real macho guys, cops, servicemen, prison guards. Do you ever have any moral problems when it comes to dealing with people like these? Do you make distinctions between the sort of things you like done as sexual turn-ons, and these things done as tortures to unwilling victims?
A. I think that when you're dealing with army personnel it is very easy to dissociate yourself from the serious side, but as for my reaction to people who have torture fantasies: most physical torture of another human being is obscene. It’s amazing how easy and how basic it is to make something like that excruciating. Anybody who really fantasizes about torture should be made aware of the realities of the sort of situations they’re fantasizing about. They don’t face the realities of being chained up or tied up for any length of time knowing they cannot say, “Hey, it’s time you let me out, my foot’s gone to sleep or I’m losing the sense in my fingers or my balls are dropping off.” When you are in a torture situation nobody takes any notice of that, and it soon stops being in any way erotic or pleasurable. And it doesn’t start to be pleasurable again once you’re out of it. It remains an obscene experience.
Q. So it's important to distinguish this as an erotic experience, or at least as one that’s gone into willingly?
A. There’s got to be a point of agreement, and a commitment of a certain type from both parties.
Q. What is your favorite jerk-off fantasy?
A. Specifically?
Q. Yes.
A. For that you have to gather together a group of elements in terms of situation, and paraphernalia, and dramatic situation... One of my favorites is based on a situation of two brothers, one a bit older and a bit beefier than the other, in a rural situation where the older one has developed his sexual prowess by using the younger brother “nominally” by force. Even if he’s now going out and tupping every girl in town, he’s still sharing a bed with his brother and occasionally forcing his brother to do things that he wouldn’t otherwise do. They work out in the fields together and the older brother dominates the other most of the time. Part of the attraction for me is that they wear clothes that enables them to racket around in the mud. To some extent the tougher brother’s always challenging the younger one, they race home, things like that. In the heavy gear. But there comes the day when the younger brother jumps the older brother in the barn. Here you go into the specific technical way that somebody physically less heavy can surprise and effectively immobilize somebody who is tougher. It may mean having a piece of chain ready to throw around his neck, and he throws it round a post and back round the neck and round the head and shoulders so by the time the older one’s still wondering what the fuck in fact has hit him and how to unwrap himself, the younger one has grabbed a piece of rope and pinned his elbows, which means that however much he stamps and shouts, you can do the wrists, which means that you can take a breather and lash the boots to the same post and if necessary pull the knees back. And then the younger brother’s really got time. The older brother usually wears army gear, fatigues or greens or whatever, and the younger one’s got his waterproof suit and waterproof boots on, and he just stands there and says, “Now I can either do to you what you did to me, or I can do to you what you’ve forced me to do, only I can do it without you forcing me.” So he can then either suck him off in spite of all the protestation, or... And if the brother is going to kill him, he says, “Well, Mum’s away for a couple of nights, it’s going to be three days before you get loose to kill me, by which time...” I may not get into the whole situation before I shoot my load, but that’s the sort of route I take.
Great stuff. The latter scene shows up in the stories on his site. Thank you for sharing this interview with us. I would like to have met him, but sadly, he's passed on.
Posted by: Mister-X / Spartan | March 24, 2015 at 11:35 PM
Fascinating stuff. I met Jim a number of times, and was proud of being able to suggest a new item of kit for him to make for me.
Posted by: control | April 08, 2015 at 12:28 PM
jim was one of the gentlemen in the bondage scene, taught me a lot
Posted by: chris ede | April 16, 2015 at 05:18 AM