boybound:
I’m pretty sickened at the moment by tumblr’s announcement today. I’ve had his blog for 6 years–I started it before I realized I was gay and it’s meant so much to me. Posting content and reblogging other great content brings me great joy, and I’ve made many lasting friendships and great connections on this site. I will absolutely be saving my content and posting somewhere else.
By the way, while we all search for new porn homes, think about buying a month’s subscriptions to one of your favorite bondage sites. They are the true heroes who have been helped and harmed by tumblr’s free porn life. We’ve borrowed their content for free, and they’ve gotten publicity that way, but they’ve also likely seen a decrease in their sales. Think about supporting them as they’re the backbone of much content that we’ve enjoyed here.
❤ boybound
Even though the expiration date for all of this is unfortunately right around the corner, I just want to take a second to acknowledge the gravity of what we’ve had here because it’s horrible to have to see this coming to an end, but it makes me believe that we’d all be able to reconnect somewhere else in the near future. I am blown away by boybound’s post here because I’ve been acquainted with him since 2015 and never knew that he was here before even realizing he was gay, which means that we must have met not too long after his realization. I find it mind-blowing because we’re about the same age, but by the time I had discovered Tumblr, I had known I was queer for about 8 years, had been officially out to my family for about 2 of those years, and was already coming out of my first serious relationship.
Before making my kinky blog in 2012, I had already been kinky social networking on the old Bound Guys and going on Blogger and Tumblr for free porn for about a year or two. When I made my Tumblr, it really refined my male bondage pallet because I got to see samples from all different kinds of male bondage sites, which really grew me up from just being thrilled about seeing any kind of video or image of a tied up man. Without it, I don’t know where I’d be in terms of my understanding of my fetish and my connections with other fetishists.
Although I’m blown away with the comparison between boybound’s experience and my own, it’s actually very understandable that it took him a minute to realize that he was gay. Throughout most of my childhood, I didn’t know what I was. I developed infatuations with girls because I thought that’s just what boys did. I had a fascination with men’s dress wear and bondage, but knew that it was something weird that nobody I knew would understand. Dating girls in middle school was really shallow because I had no sexual interest in them, yet I developed a huge crush on one of my male friends and kept enjoying the image of him being tied up. Since I’ve never had any lasting friendships before him, which didn’t give me anything to compare my feelings for him to, I just thought that my weird feelings about him were just how it felt to have friends. Fortunately for me, however, I eventually found another friendship through this one, and this guy came out about a year into our friendship, and after I compared my experiences to his, things about me started making a lot of sense.
I always kind of took my friendship with this person for granted while I was young, but as an out adult who mostly interacts with other queer men, I now realize that it was a lot of help to have a close friend who experienced the same kind of stuff as me at the same time. He was pretty much my only friend throughout high school, and he kind of learned “how to be gay” through older gay friends and popular culture, so he was my major influence at that age. If it wasn’t for him, I probably would have remained lost and confused for several more years until I eventually stumbled across male bondage porn when I first had private internet access, then maybe would have put the pieces together myself.
I have always been baffled by how my close friend and others claim to have always known they were gay since before their age was in the double digits. I mean, I was very aroused by seeing Jim Carrie bound and gagged in the mask when I was four, but since there was nothing explicitly sexual in that scene, I couldn’t understand my infatuation with seeing that. After thinking more about my fetish, it makes sense that I was always confused until after puberty while things always seemed to make sense with my friend. He was always directly attracted to the male body and the male instruments, while I was attracted to more subtle things about men (like what they wore and seeing them be submissive). Therefore, in this heteronormative world, if you have these parts and like the same ones on your sexual partner, you’re gay and gayness is something that is easily learned by peers when you’re a boy growing up. However, there was no diagnosis for what I had. After all, I thought I liked girls because I wasn’t choosing to be gay, I had romantic and sexual feelings for my first friend when I thought that was just friendship, and the only actual thing that turned me on had nothing to do with the male anatomy, so all I knew was that I wasn’t normal without necessarily being gay.
This kind of thing makes me realize how much our culture minimizes homosexuality to just dicks and buttholes, which makes that kind of identity seem purely perverse and hypersexual, as well as monstrous and unrelatable to mainstream heterosexual culture. First, it vilifies queer people to prevent anyone from being able to like or relate to queer characters in media. Second, it makes anything gay related seem overtly sexual, thus inappropriate for children. And lastly, it confuses those like us who might be comfortable with living the gay lifestyle as adults, but had no place or way of understanding what we were or our attractions at an early age. However, with the internet and social media like Tumblr being around, it probably has been easier for younger people to have this kind of access, which shows awesome progress, but might be leading to our ultimate downfall.
Even though there is still gay bashing and bullying, gay kids are being a lot more accepted than they were during my generation and the generations before. With things like widespread internet access, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and more accepting parents, kids are coming out of the closet much earlier and learning about gender expression and sexuality that a lot of people my age still don’t fully understand. So, this makes me think that kids who might like male bondage might be finding it and just thinking that it’s just a part of being gay. Although this seems to be a step in the right direction because less kids are going through the struggles we had to, I don’t think kids today are as aware of the stigmas that are attached to drag and fetishism, which probably makes them more open about these kinds of things. With kids being more aware, open, and comfortable with sexual difference, they are probably horrifying their parents by coming out as something that is more than just being gay because they haven’t been socialized to hide as much about themselves as we have. Even though we probably envy these kids because they don’t feel the shame and terror we felt about being open with our sexuality, it might also mean that some kids are moving a bit too fast for their parents by expressing their fetishism since it has been just another thing that can be found on social media. Even though I’m about a decade away from reaching middle age, I know that a lot of people in my age group are still largely socially backwards and probably won’t understand or accept their children’s difference, especially if it’s not only being gay anymore. To be fair, I don’t think that the world at large is that ready for open, sexually aware young people at this time, which means that easy access to these things are going to be challenged.
A founder of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, has always been controversial because one of his major theories was that children, like adults, are inherently sexual, which severely contrasted from the Victorian idea that children are pure and innocent, thus incapable of being tainted with sexuality. So, we’ve been too reluctant to accept these kinds of realities and have decided to try protecting our kids from sex, even though we seem to be okay with exposing them to violence, hatred, and intolerance. We are trained to hate, fear, and shame sex and any kind of sexual difference. Therefore, homophobia, slut shaming, and an overall xenophobia towards fetishism are put in place and become the norm, which makes those of us who embrace this sort of difference essentially second-class citizens. We take two steps forward by fighting for acceptance and normalizing male bondage and general fetish culture, but what is happening with social media right now is hopefully just a step back, which is unfortunately how progress seems to work. I realize that other issues may be at stake behind Tumblr’s change, but I think that this might be a major root of the issue. Tumblr was great while it lasted, but hopefully this change could bring us closer together as we find a new home for our ideas and sexual desires.
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