Pictures of my life. #1

I don't know what this says about me that I just keep this above my fridge at all times...



But I'm not actively going to change it. I just would like to not that the Bourbon is the most empty. I'm a good ole Southern boy at heart.

Gear Review: KinkLab bitgag.

So, I'm starting to do some kink reviews for TLA Gay Adult Toys' Kink section, as they asked me because they knew I was one of the kinky fucks in Philadelphia, so I thought I'd put it down here as this is a good collection of all my kink-related activities. Here's the Kinklab Rubber Bit Gag (priced at 32.99 USD, which is pretty good) that they gave me to try out. I've always wanted a bit gag, so it was neat to play with. Plus I still have it. hehehe.



Sure this piece has a bit of a salesman vibe, but it happens, I really like the piece, but there's more to the review than "this is awesome." It's also used in a really hot scenes with Nick Moretti and Nomad as well as Zach Alexander and Christian Wilde on BoundGods, which was really fun when I saw these scenes and said "Hey! I know that gag!" These pics make it look less horsey than thought when I first got the gag.

Moretti and Nomad on BoundGods

Hi-ho silver! This piece from Kinklabs really has a truly good concept. Bit gags have many advantages when one compares them to ball gags. It keeps a face that is halfway between smiling and grimacing, and, lets be honest, your submissive bitch is smiling on the inside when he’s grimacing on the outside. Also, as the boy continues throughout the scene, the pervert will start to dribble saliva over the gag, humiliating him due to his slobbering. This is definitely a good drool gag for the people that are into it, and for me, that’s half the fun of gags. Moreover, a bit gag is perfect when it comes to fitting a sub, as the gag part is not too big for anyone, but will keep them plenty busy, depending on how tight you make it.

This bit gag has a hard but chewy rubber mouthpiece, so the sub can really bite into it when you deal out your punishment, and makes the gag not quite comfortable, but close enough that they can concentrate. He won’t forget it’s there, but he’ll be able to focus on what you want done.

Depending on the purpose of this gag, the gargantuan metal O-rings can be fun or ostentatious. If you want this gag to be about pony play, then the metal rings are perfect to hook the bridle in and get on it, Tonto! But if you’re looking for the gag to be just a way to stifle your slave boy’s moans of pain and pleasure, then the gargantuan rims on this gag may distract you. It’s some serious bling, which I found disconcerting, but this gag from a pragmatic standpoint is exceptional. The O-rings have grown on me more each time I buckle it onto my boy.

The lockable buckle in the back is a really great feature, since you can make your boy submit up to your whim and even if he’s not bound, he’s still stuck with it. Definitely perfect for a “if you really want to talk to me, you have to finish the scavenger hunt” type of game. You can even ride him around the house while he finds each clue! In the end, this piece is a good basic addition to the spicy collection of fun in anyone’s toy chest, but is better suited for the people that are starting to be into pony play.

Wilde and Alexander on BoundGods

Until next time,
Bo

PS MAL was great. Post soon, I promise. Plus a lot of fun that has to do with Sparky and MDW, two of my fellow bloggers!

Question of the week 1/10/11

Hey all, I've decided since I've started getting feedback on recon and here from people about my blog that I'll start a new thing where I'll answer questions I may get. Leave a question and I'll try to respond via post, if it's good! Liam from Australia had a good question, so I'll bring it up here.

Got a question, which was triggered from something you said on your blog, if you don't mind!

I'm a pretty kinky guy, but I'm really not open at all about it, and have yet to have the guts to go out to one of Melbourne's fetish bars in my rubber gear. Part of the reason of that is that I don't think my love of rubber is entirely a defining element of who I am as a person, whereas for most of the guys who frequent those places, rubber and leather are their lives.

For me Rubber is something I absolutely love getting into, and gets me harder than pretty much anything else, but I don't feel that it defines who I am as a person. For you, Rubber seems to be a much more integral part of who you are, so maybe you're not going to relate to this so much, but I thought maybe I'd ask.

Sorry if this is a bit rambly, it's late. Appreciate any advice or reassurance or anything really. Just like need talk to kinky guys my age I suppose!

-Liam

Well, first I'd like to reference something really clearly spoken by Johnny Gear, here:

And in this society, we have a significant uphill battle to express our sexuality. We have to look out for each other's well being, even reaching across gender and fetish boundaries, whether we like it or not we are inextricably linked.... It's far more important than any particular gender, or fetish. I consider my fellow kinks to be brothers and sisters, people worthy of respect and dignity. We've all struggled to be who we are, and we're all struggling to figure out how best to express it. These are the things that make us a community.

I feel that being a kinky gay automatically puts you in a subculture inside the gay community, and that is something that you seem to have come to terms with. In a lot of ways, coming out kinky is very much like coming out gay and you can display this in different ways: keep it nebulous, keep it hidden, talk about it openly, be proud of it and display your sexual agency, or a mix of these. Personally I mix it all. I wouldn't ever say that kink is my life. My job is my passion in life, and always will be, but kink is something I think is an important part of me no matter what and I think it's important for me to express it, just like being gay is something I express. Claiming my sexual agency via these avenues is crucial for me, personally, to develop as a sexual being. Kink is not my life, but it is a part of it, and I'm not going to deny myself the opportunity to explore this avenue to its fullest. Just as you would say that being gay is part of your life, kink is part of your sexuality so it's a part of your life. It's easy to think that people online that have kink blogs or are really kinky have only kink as their life, but really the majority of us have lives, quite active lives where kink is just part of it.

With that comes becoming part of the community, and wearing gear in public at a bar is part of it. I find that there are two parts to wearing gear out in public. Firstly, it's extremely liberating. I was really worried when I wore rubber out to the leather bar for the first time. MAL was great and I enjoyed that, but I was really concerned the first time I did it. I was meeting a friend at the bar, and I didn't wear rubber in, I had it in a bag. We went to the lockable bathroom and I changed with his help into my rubber. I was worried. Really worried. But in the end, I got more attention at the bar, I had much more of a blast at the bar, ended up meeting some cool people and really enjoyed being in gear in public. It really bolstered my self-confidence as a person that I wasn't delimited to only wear this in private, that I was fully expressing my kink in a community that embraced it. It definitely was great. Nowadays I do it almost every time I go to the leather bar just because it's really easy to do, it's a great conversation starter as rubber isn't that big in philly and I'm exposing a lot of people to it, and it's just plain fun.

The other thing is that it is kind of a pay-it-forward thing to wear gear in public. I kind of reference that here, but it's really true. By us wearing gear out, we're developing the community better and really making a great atmosphere for kink. The basement in the bike stop in philadelphia in the summer is laden with flip-flops and cargo shorts. This makes the mood of the bar somewhat spoil at times, so it's much better when people just take the plunge and go for it. But also, the great thing is that it shows the curious, the worried, the kink-confused a good face for the community. I've seen a lot of people in the leather bar that are worried and concerned but really kinky walk in. Having a face in gear that is normal, not creepy and just another person really helps them out. I have had a lot of friends confide in me that they are closet kinky just from seeing me in gear or me talking about kinky to them. It really lets them let go and exclaim something that has been deeply suppressed in them. So for a selfless reason, it's great to go out in gear to get a community open and developed.

And the purely selfish non-mental reason: I get phone numbers of the hotter guys when I'm in gear. Just saying.

-Bo

Assimilation for Rights

Every once in a while, I end up in the gayborhood of Philadelphia and decide to go out to the vanilla/standard gay bars. I ended up at Tavern on Camac in the piano bar with one of my friends and his crew. Somehow, invariably when I'm out with the vanilla gay, someone makes a fisting joke and then someone says "Ow" and then I feel like a teaching moment can occur. So I continue talking about fisting and typically I get one of three responses: "Yeah but still seems like it would hurt," or "Yeah but I pride myself on having a tight hole," or "Yeah but I don't know." All of them include my least favorite coupling of words when it comes to an argument "Yeah but" as it's clear that the teaching moment is going ignored. This is something that I've noticed about a lot of vanilla guys and their reactions about kink. They seem to want to justify why they don't want to do it, but really "I get you. It doesn't really get me hard though" would be fine. Someone being kinkier than you is not an affront to your character. Just like I don't take someone it scat as better or worse of a person than me, just another person that has a kink that's more taboo than the majority than mine.

At any rate, then the conversation came onto the topic of monogamy. I said that I was not monogamous, feeling that, for me, it just leads to me feeling trapped in a relationship. A couple of guys and I were in this conversation and they claimed "Oh you mean like playing together, yeah that happens and it's cool." I clarified, "No, I mean where each person can just play with who they want, and just be honest with one another." This was kind of a shock to both of them and one of them piped up and said, "Well, I don't really see how that would work, and that's kind of what is an issue with what's going on with gay marriage and such you should really figure out what you really want."

I was kind of shocked at what I was hearing. This is something that bothers me to no end, that somehow a kink relationship or a non-standard or, dare I say it, DEVIANT relationship is somehow less serious or less valuable then another form of relationship. We're now apparently pressuring one another to live a more standard life in order to gain acceptance from the straight community so we can get rights? I'm not down for this.

I want to get rights for our community, but I don't think that we should ever try to become something we aren't in order to get the rights we rightfully deserve in the first place. That would just make us have more work to do when we get the rights. There needs to be acceptance of us as a community. I have heard arguments that "The leather community kind of hurts us from an activist's perspective." This regarding to people thinking that venues like IML show the gay community as a sexual community, and representative of all gays. Well, first off, we are not representatives of the gay collective body, but we are members, and we should have the sexual agency to do what heart feels is appropriate. Second of all, we are fighting for activism just as hard. With leathermen like Mark Leno in the CA Senate working for LGBT rights, it's kind of absurd for people to think we are selfish for doing what our sexual agency allows.

CA Sen. Mark Leno (center)

Also, on another note, queer open relationships have worked. I woke up today to seeing two of my kink friends with an open relationship having a new facebook album, entitled "Marriage" (they got married in Ottawa). I don't know how many open relationships I see working in the community as people are honest and find rules that work for them. Well, congrats to them not compromising themselves for the sake of some ignorant assimilationist that wants to push their internalized homophobia on them. :-)

Rant over.

Until next time.
Bo.

Self-Masochism vs Self-Mutilation

This has always been something that I've been concerned about. Masochism is a great kink and there's a great number of ways to do this, many I enjoy which are not limited to Cock, ball, and tit torture, but sometimes you've got to take a step back and curious "why am I into someone hurting my genitals?" Is it actually because I'm into it, or is there something else going on.

I ask this as I came across a gruesome picture of someone stabbing themselves near the groin with a knife. At first my kneejerk reaction was "Yikes!" as the seemingly kitchen knife looking object was causing a lot of blood and it pierced the skin, went deep and came out of the guy. I couldn't look at it for more than five seconds. I'm the type of guy that wants to desensitize himself from a kneejerk reaction of "Gross!" when it comes to someone's kinks, so I kept looking back at it. The guy is semiflaccid in the picture, and it's obvious it's been in the skin for long enough for him to take a pic and the blood to seep out (I'm sparing y'all the picture for your own sake), so he's not instantly getting hard in the sensation. I looked down the page with comments and noticed my friend had responded saying they knew this person.

Well, I asked my friend. He's not sure if this person ever really got over being gay, and has never really had a relation besides someone beating his genitalia.

You have to ask yourself, is this punishment for being gay? Is this person mutilating their genitalia and groin region for not acting straight? So, sometimes I feel you have to ask about each of your kinks, is this healthy? Am I doing this because it legitimately turns me on or is it because I have an issue? The answer should be always be "because it legitimately turns me on." I'm not saying that your history cannot influence the kinks becoming what they are today. I am just saying you need to make sure that everything about your kink is healthy, and that you are in the right frame of mind, instead of a cyclone of self-destruction.

I'm not going to say kink doesn't have therapeutic qualities. It definitely does. I have heard of cases where a woman has been stabbed once and knifeplay got her over the post-traumatic chronic fear of being stabbed and got her through her coping. This happens; however, one needs to be careful and make sure it's working well and actually helping.

When I was a young kinkling and hadn't really experienced any kink, I went to a "Facilitating Public Health in the Kink Community" workshop at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Creating Change conference 2008 in Detroit, MI. It really focused on one thing, how to find abuse in the kink community, and all the same reasons are there. Well, all the same mental reasons that are the pinpointed things about an abusive relationship in the vanilla community are there as keys in the kink community. So, to think that we're a special case when it comes to abuse in a relationship, it happens just as well with us, except our physical bruises aren't a good clue. You have to look inside, in your heart, and see whether or not you're trapped, you're walking on eggshells everyday, you're scared of who you think you love.

Use kink as a vehicle for happiness and self-confidence, not a way to stay in a rut of self-pity/hate. Even a humiliation fetish can get someone happier, you just have to have the right outlook.

I am just tired of hearing self-mutilation stories ending with people in the hospital. Let's take care of ourselves as a community, kinksters.

-Bo

PS It's late and I'm sleep deprived, so give me a pass when any of this is poorly worded. I blame MascDudeWriter for getting me on such a shitty sleep schedule.

Mid-Atlantic Leather coming soon!

For all of you that do not know, Mid-Atlantic Leather (MAL) is coming up this MLK weekend. What a better way to have a Day of Service than a Weekend of... uhh... Service! Since the number of days before it is now in single digits, I thought I'd like to take some time to say some things about MAL as a venue.

First off, MAL has a reputation of being the "friendliest" of events. I will tell you one thing. My MAL experience was not as friendly as my other experiences at events, but I did have a Dom hovering making sure I didn't play with anyone else last time, which kind of dampered everything last time, while at other events I've had the opportunity of going stag. This time I'm bringing a good friend to his first kink event, and I'm hoping he has a good time, and is a good pig in his own right.

The best part of MAL, as I had said in my review of MIR, is the lobby. There was a rumor that the lobby was now non-existent as MAL changed venues, but I can assure you that this is not the case. Two friends and I were in DC and decided to venture to the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill to investigate, and the lobby is actually better. The Washington Plaza hotel was dirty and small which is fine, but this new lobby, as long as they give us free-reign, will be really huge and great for everything. My favorite part is the entrance, which will be a great vista into kink on Friday and Saturday nights. When you walk into the revolving door, there's a balcony overlooking the entire lobby, and then you take an escalator down to the lobby itself. What a great way to cruise.

I think the lobby will stay a crucial part to MAL and the best part of the socializing aspect of MAL, and it will help it's tradition of being a friendly kink event, and a perfect first event for people. Another thing is the openness of types of kinks MAL kind of opens things up to. The pictures on the webside include more rubber than leather, actually.

Buahahaha, we're taking over. And also I really want those gloves, and have no idea where to get them.

Now, one pet peeve has already happened with MAL this year. They have a new admission policy to the market, of a person having to pay 25$ for the whole weekend in the market. This is bothersome for me. I feel like for some of the younger crowd, the market is their first way to do hands-on exploration of kink. A lot of these kids are local and a lot of them are going to feel hard pressed even for the 10$ day pass to not explore the kink in the market. Recon has a great policy when it comes to young students at events that they are at, which is that they have a history of giving free premium to someone until they turn 25 if they see you at an event and you fill out a form. I'm happy to say I have free premium for a couple of years. The young ones are the future of kink, and I feel like even I have an obligation to help the ones less experienced figure things out. MAL is not helping at all. They just want cash and I find this greedy, as some people can't afford that.

In all, it's going to be a good weekend. The Hotel is sold out and it has an indoor pool that's heated. I'm excited for the hilarity. I'm bringing my speedo, I don't know about you. Oh yeah, and my rubber to have shittons of fun both in and out of sleepsacks.

Until next time, I wish you speedoes, spitting, and spelunking,
Bo

The Don Juan of Vibrators

So I was at my friend's apartment for New Years hanging out and having fun, and we played a game and winners got booby prizes. My friend works for TLA Studios, so you never know what that means. At any rate, the winning team opened the boxes and what do we find? A selection of toys TLA has chosen not to sell, and for good reason, if you ask me. I give you, the Masturazor:


What the hell is this? Sure, we know it's an insertable, and the box even says phthalate free, so it has some quality; however, what the fuck is the clip on, is it like so you can put it in your pocket protector? Are you going to clip it in? If so, how? I'm so confused... But the best part of it is here:

It has a razor in it. One of those microtrim razors that were all the rage on TV infomercials. Why? Just I don't get it. If you get it, lend me a comment, but I'm just flabbergasted. The vibration of the vibrator is not created by the razor itself, as we took it apart and it still vibrated when you took the razor hardware out of the vibrator. Also, it says it has safety precautions where the razor and the vibrator can't be used at the same time. Then what's the point!?! Just buy a vibrator and a razor and be done! I'm so confused/amused by this piece of industrial design.

Oh! And on the back it congratulated you on your purchase, called it the "Womaniser" of sex toys and the spanish was endearing and called it the "Don Juan de vibradores"

What's the next great idea that this Edison of Sex Toys will come up with? I can't wait.

Until next time, I wish you kinky thoughtfulness in your sex gear.
Bo