Coming upon this wonderful story a few days ago was a real find for me. The story was published in Issue 103 [November 2004] and I'm almost certain I never read it at the time, which is conceivable, since at its time of publication Bound & Gagged was in the good hands of editor Robert Davolt, while I had illness in my family so sometimes only leafed through an issue without actually reading it before sending it to the printer. If I'd read this particular story I know I would have remembered it; it immediately sparked memories for me of reading, in my own teenage years, a lot of which I wasted behind a locked bathroom door, a similar account of Victorian methods of restraining adolescent boys from "accidental" masturbation in their sleep. One of the things I jerked off to a lot in that bathroom was the idea of being strapped down in that very kind of accident-stopping device.
In Issue 103, the story was titled "Trouble in Catholic Boarding School." I prefer the new title below.
Glimpses of Heaven
PHILADELPHIA, PA. When I was sixteen, I spent the year at a Catholic boarding school in the middle of Pennsylvania. I had been hanging out with the wrong crowd back at home in Philadelphia, and my parents were sure that a year away, especially under the watchful eye of Christian Brothers, would do me well. Reluctantly, I agreed.
This is not a story about wayward priests. Our teachers, all of them Christian Brothers, acted properly and professionally. If, as we boarders always speculated, some of them were gay and were turned on by our budding adolescent bodies, they never showed it. We lived in our own residence halls, and they lived in their quarters. They did come by to inspect our rooms, but only after we were dressed. Otherwise they left us to ourselves. The cleaning ladies saw more of us in our dorms than any of the Brothers did.
One especially enthusiastic teacher was Brother Leo. He taught us Christian Morals. Not all of his teaching dealt with sex, but much of it did. We were convinced that he really believed in Hell, for he warned us that perdition was in store for us if we violated God’s teachings. The body, we were informed, was the creation of God and should therefore be directed to the service of God, not of man. Sex was permissible—unless we, too, one day became brothers or priests—but it was a sacred act and was intended by God to be confined to marriage. This was six years ago: I am now 22. That he did not quite have in mind gay marriage I do not doubt.
Brother Leo, who was in his late twenties, was very explicit about what we could and could not do. He told us, firmly and repeatedly, that no matter how tempted we were, we must not practice “self-abuse”—in other words, masturbation. Since all of us were virgins, and since in any case we were living in an all-boys’ school with no access to girls, his warnings against intercourse didn’t really faze us.
Father Leo preached our responsibility toward one another. It was our Christian duty not merely to treat one another with kindness but to help one another do the right thing. We were our dormmates’ keepers.
After class, and especially at night, before lights out, we talked and talked about Father Leo’s teachings. Because he talked so often about the evils of masturbation, we were less embarrassed about talking about it with dormmates than we’d otherwise have been. My dorm consisted of ten boarders. Two or three claimed that they never masturbated, though the bunkmate beneath one of them regularly felt the top bunk shake—and it wasn’t from an earthquake. The rest of us admitted, if only by our silence, that masturbate we did, though some said that, trying to follow Christian teachings, we did so only when we couldn’t contain ourselves any longer.
I myself had no inhibitions. I used to jack off as often as I could. The problem was finding a place. The bunk beds squeaked, and even if one had a bottom bunk, as I did, the bed still shook. The toilet stalls had only half-doors, and there always seemed to be someone waiting in line. The safest place was in the chapel, but God forbid if one got caught, as happened once to me.
What has any of this to do with bondage? Well, Father Leo was a collector of manuals on Christian and secular sexual behavior. With his permission a few of us were allowed to peruse his books. They couldn’t leave his study, but we could read them there for as long as we wished.
John, the most bookish member of the dorm, seemed to read everything in the study. One book he came upon was a dusty, worn book on Victorian moral practices by some Dr. Thackery. It was addressed to parents of adolescent boys—not girls. The book surveyed the range of teachings and practices throughout Europe.
It turned out that there had been invented by a German a device to ensure that growing boys not play with themselves during sleep, when they obviously had less control over their behavior. This device—really an endless series of straps all tied together—amounted to a bed frame to which sleepers could be tied down spread-eagled, so that they could never touch themselves and thereby jack off. The straps were not intended to stretch the boy’s body, only to keep the boy’s hands away from his private parts. Why the legs as well as the arms had to be strapped, it was not made clear, but so they were.
John managed to smuggle the book out of Father Leo’s office and to photocopy the pages on this device. We ten then met at night, with John reading the section aloud and passing around the illustration of the device. We laughed and laughed at how repressed our forebears had been, but we were also very turned on.
When we came back from the spring vacation, John had bought enough thin rope to tie up an army. We agreed to draw straws to determine which of us would be the first to submit to the binding. David, whom I’d have loved to see rendered helpless, draw the shortest straw but refused to go along. I’d drawn what was taken to be the second shortest straw and, while feigning reluctance, happily agreed.
We’d drawn the straws in the morning before breakfast, and all that day I had a hard on from thinking about what would ensue after dinner. No one in our dorm, and probably no one in the whole school, confessed to being gay. Seemingly, we were all straight, “all-American” boys who simply found ourselves stranded outside Pittsburgh in an all-male environment in which we were continually told that masturbation was a sin. I knew that I was gay, but then who could tell? Maybe if I’d been surrounded by babes, I’d have turned out to be straight. All I knew was that sex with other boys at this school turned me on from morning to night and that I fantasized forced sex with them.
That evening we dashed from dinner back to the dorm. We couldn’t lock the dorm door, but we did “station” one of us to stand against it and make sure that no one entered. We went about our regular nighttime ritual of putting our dirty clothes away, putting on our pajamas, brushing our teeth, jumping into bed, and awaiting the 10.30 nights out.
Would my dormmates really act on the plan? I had no idea. Was I surprised. Waiting a little while so that things would be quiet, they then proceeded to my bunk—I was on the lower rung—and showed me the strips of rope that they had cut. I wasn’t asked whether I still consented to go along. They pulled off the top sheets and blanket from my bed and held down my arms and my legs. My pajamas was removed. I was wearing skimpy bikini underpants beneath my pajamas, and those, too, were peeled off. I was left with nothing but my socks, and they stayed on.
Even if I’d wanted to resist, I could hardly have done so. I was all of 5’5” and 110 pounds, and I was a weakling. So there was no problem in tying my hands and my legs to the metal springs of the bed. I was spread-eagled on my back, but I wasn’t stretched. But then I didn’t need to be. My legs were wide-open, and my crotch was visible to all. I was embarrassed about how small my dick was and about how little hair there still was on it, but I couldn’t exactly do anything about that now.
Once I was in place, with all the others gathered round me, John read some prayer, spread some lotion on my stomach, and then explained that my dormmates had worked out a schedule—for that night and for the next one. For I was to be tied down for two nights in a row. Two boys would sit by my bed and watch over me—to make sure that I didn’t get an erection and, worse, that I had no wet dreams. If either happened, I was to be awakened and reprimanded.
The first two assigned “guard duty” took their places, and the others went to bed.
It all seemed like a dream. Here I was, being stared at for hours on end by two beautiful classmates, whose sole task was to stare at my genitals. My head was not fixed in place. Neither classmate was wearing a t-shirt, so that I could, without inhibition, fix myself on their thin, hairless, undeveloped chests—chests no different from mine. I wanted to touch their nipples and feel the smoothness of their chests, but I was tied down. The rules were that no words were to be spoken.
How could I not get a hard on? At first, I was mortified that they saw it, but I could hardly cover it up. I’d expected them to wrap my dick with something, as had been agreed, but instead they just looked. I am sure that for all them it was the first time that they could gaze continuously at another boy’s dick. My dick was small, or so I assumed, so that I was doubly embarrassed.
What were my minders to do? Violating the vow of silence, John and Ferdinand decided that the only way to get my dick back to its normal, “nonsexual” size was to empty it of its contents. They claimed that they were performing an exorcism on me: getting out the devil. Only that way would I be free, at least temporarily, of Satan’s control. Each put a hand on my dick, one at the base and one midway up, and began jacking me off. Seeing how close I was to cumming, they kept pausing to say prayers and to sprinkle bits of sparkler on my chest. They went away to confer, leaving me frustrated. But eventually they returned to finish the process.
John and Ferdinand decided that what came out of my dick needed to be collected and buried outside—this to ensure that it did not seep back into my system. They didn’t have condoms, so they used instead an empty milk bottle. They put my dick into the bottle, held it there, and brought me off. They kept jerking my dick to make sure that all its contents were removed.
I remained tied down for the rest of the night, but somehow I was able to get to sleep. The same routine happened the second night, but with Paul and Steve instead of John and Ferdinand. Each milk bottle was displayed in the common book case in our room. As embarrassed as I was, I knew that each of my dormmates would soon be undergoing the same experience and that I would get my chance at bringing them off.
Why had I been chosen first? Probably because I was the smallest kid in the dorm, but maybe because I also seemed to the others the most likely to be gay. We joked about gays but never dared discuss our own homosexual desires. Our common rationalization was that after all we found ourselves in an all-boys’ place, so that we had no choice but to think about other boys. We all appealed to the fact that straights in prison turned to homosexuality as the only sexual release. I myself did not know that I was gay, let alone that I was a bondage bottom. What I did know was that the best sexual experience I, at sixteen, had ever had was being tied up by pairs of fellow twinks, salivated over by them, and given slow blow jobs by them. For Brother Leo, this was a nonexchangeable ticket to Hell, but for me it was a glimpse of Heaven.
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