Fetish Pride

Note from TFG:  I feel this topic is so important, I'm leaving it up all week.  I'll go back to posting the kinky stuff again on Saturday.  Until then, I will do a few updates and previews to my tumblr and my Captured Heroes blog if you get antsy.  ;) 

But check back in again on Friday, when I hope to reveal my new blog redesign.

You know, kinksters need to come out twice... once as gay, and once as a kinky.

One is not necessarily easier to publicly announce than the other.

It's gay pride month, and I think we should talk about this from a kinkster point of view.

I personally realized, acknowledged, and came to terms with my passion for bondage way before I acknowledged I was gay.  Thanks to the 60's TV show Batman (it played in reruns as I was growing up, I'm not quite that old yet, lol), I knew I loved being tied up.  I would constantly roll myself up in blankets as a kid in self-mummification, and my family owned a very long jump rope that I would tie myself to a chair with constantly.  (And I've noticed that jumpropes have been the gateway toy for many a budding kinkster.)  I knew somehow it was "wrong"... I would do it only when I was alone, when the rest of my family was out.  I still remember being self tied to the chair in the living room alone, and then hearing the garage door open, and my panic to quickly undo myself (I did).  I never really discussed it with anyone (remember, this is before the internet), but I knew I liked it probably by at least the age of 10 or 12.  Feet crept up on me later, but I did consciously realize I was looking at guy's feet in high school, although I didn't really understand why.

But I didn't come out as gay, even to myself, until I was away at college.  I was a virgin until the age of 21, and even then, it was vanilla sex from a 43 year old guy I meet from a personals add I created in a local paper, seeking "Discrete Adventure".   And let me just say it was so not like me to post something like that.  I guess I'm lucky the one guy who answered it was a very nice guy that I ended up being friends with for casual sex for the next few months, until I was done with school.  Not sure if that's common or not, I'd love to hear from other guys about their experience.  Especially those who went through this in the pre-internet days.

Now that I'm older, I have absolutely no shame about being gay, or my kinks.  But, this blog aside, I do remain pretty quiet about my kinks outside of my BF.  I wish I could be more public and open. But sadly people with jobs in politics, education, entertainment, high profile executives... any sort of public figure has to be careful.  We all see stories in the media constantly about public figures who get caught up in a "scandal".  And sometimes, it can ruin their lives and/or cost them their jobs.

We're now reaching a state where younger and younger guys are coming out as kinky.  Because of the internet, guys are discovering their kinks early on, and also finding out they are not alone.  There just seems to be a never-ending supply of supple new twinks that are anxious to try out what they've seen online, whether it be YouTube foot or light bondage videos, browsing kinky social networks, or viewing kinky pay sites.

In conversation with a fellow kinkster, I realized another reason that many seem fairly quiet about it... sharing a fetish is an intimate thing, and maybe it's not comfortable or appropriate to tell everyone. After all, we know straight people, but do we ask them how they're having sex?  If they're comfortable telling it, fine.  But it's not typically something one volunteers, especially amongst straight friends and family.

However, for the gay community, it seems much more open.  Margaret Cho said, "If you're going to be oppressed for who you fuck, then you're going to kick up your heels and fuck."  Because of this, it is inspiring to see the gay community, even many vanilla guys, embrace the ideas of kinky sex.  And I really have to thank Tynan Fox for really trying to get out there and educate people, both gay and straight.  It has been so inspirational to see him on the college lecture circuit.  A big part of me wishes I could be right next to him, spreading the message openly.  Sadly, because of personal situations and out of respect for my BF's privacy, I have to remain behind this blog, face hidden.  But I can at least use it to speak up, and at least make sure we are proud within our own community.

Even though I didn't go, I heard a lot about IML that happened recently via other blogs and twitters.  So many speak of a strong, connected sense of a kink community.  And for us truly kinky people, we do have to bond together.  Because even within the larger gay community, we are a bit of an outcast.  Have you ever tried to date someone that you didn't discover on Recon or GearFetish?  Look at those Grindr profiles (which tend to be pretty vanilla), and then imagine telling one of them how kinky you really are.  Some are accepting, and are open to try it.  Some rave about how kinky they are because of that one time they used fuzzy handcuffs.  And some gays aren't accepting about kink at all, and think we're a bit freaky and deviant.  Isn't interesting that some conservatives think the same about them.

So kinksters need to come out twice.  Once as gay, and once as kinky.  And one community doesn't always accept the other.  Hence my personal theory of why the gay kinky community is such a close one.

The month of June is Gay Pride month.  Even Target is getting into having pride, as you may have seen in my post from a few weeks ago (Update:  the shirts appear to be sold out now).  The Los Angeles Gay Pride event is this weekend, in fact, which is why I time this post now (which always has an Erotic City kink section to it).  But in honor of fetish pride, I created some banners.  Feel free to use them and spread them around as much as you can--I've posted them to my tumblr as well, for easy reblogging--but I'd appreciate it if you kept my small credit tag in the corner.  I really did create these myself, and I'm not really usually much of a graphic designer, so a little acknowledgement would be nice.  ;)

I hope I've done Tynan, and all of the kink community, proud.  I'm glad to be a part of it, in my own way.