For weeks Lee and I have been packing up the Bound & Gagged archives for their journey to the Chicago Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M), which will be their permanent home from now on. This morning Jeff Storer, the LA&M Director of Operations came by with a U-Haul, collecting for posterity approximately 70 boxes containing correspondence, photos, video masters and office records—including those which document in detail the Great Bound & Gagged Embezzlement of 1996 by a trusted, even beloved employee who, I'm told, continues badmouthing me after all these years and claiming he himself was badly treated by me (he knows who he is, and should he read this I'll remind him that he never began to make good on the legal contract our lawyer and his lawyer brother had him sign to repay even bottom dollar on the amount he stole). The B&G archive also no doubt contains, for posterity, a few personal laundry lists, dirty thoughts scrawled-on post-its, embarrassing pictures of yours truly, and overlooked bills.
I am going to continue this blog, though our source material will be elsewhere. I've seldom had to resort to it, anyhow. Everything important for my own purposes, and the blog, e.g. stories, pictures, documents, etc. are on easily accessible hard drives in my possession. So if you're a loyal follower of the blog, please stay with me.
Besides, I've held back on at least three sizable boxes of personal-experience submissions, some of which did appear in Bound & Gagged, but a lot of which—even excellent stories—I haven't been able to locate anywhere in our print or online editions. Over recent weeks, in the course of packing the archive up, I've been scanning and sometimes keying in these stories, turning them digital. So far I've already entered about 60 submissions which as far as I can tell have never been read by anyone but the people who wrote them, and there are, possibly, a lot more to come. I'll be posting them here, or, possibly, turning a lot of things into e-books, since I feel myself heading in that direction.
I've also held back on a fair amount of original artwork, for reasons I'll mention below.
That said, what is at this moment hurtling (safely, we hope) toward Chicago amounts to probably nine tenths of our collection. We waved it and Jeff a fond farewell as he drove out of the storage facility and turned onto the road.
Thoroughly exhausted from the packing effort, I am going to take a little vacation, including a vacation from this blog. I'll return to it after September 15th. At that time, I'm also going to put up a page offering a lot of Bound & Gagged artwork for sale (see above), artwork I'm hoping you will buy. Sadly, doing bondage porn for all those years didn't make me rich, and old as I may be I've still got to eat. I'll make the prices as reasonable as I can; I'll also be open in some cases to negotiation.
While I'm taking it easy, I'll still answer mail, if maybe not in immediate turnaround fashion; and if you send me something worthy of posting, and I'm in the mood to post it even while I'm lying around drinking mojitos on the patio, up it will go.
Happy Labor Day to one and all. See you on the 15th!
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