My beginnings
I suppose I should write a bit about how I got into fetish and BDSM.
I grew up in a very very small midwestern town. There was no library, and the fire station was a good twenty minutes away and on the other side of the railroad tracks. My family was not on a farm but many of our neighbors had horses, cows, chickens and gardens that made them self-sufficient. I had absolutely no exposure to anything except through broadcast TV and the few music magazines I could pick up when we went into town. With one exception, for some bizarre reason my parents thought it was a good idea to send me and one of my friends to see Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was 15. My parents never talked to me about sex. They couldn’t even say the word sex to me. I pretty much got my sex education from Rocky Horror Picture Show. True story.
When I was in high school I was sent off to a school three hours away and lived in a dorm facility. There were a bunch of us there and it was a college town so I suddenly had everything I wanted and could get away with all sorts of trouble. I was a goth kid, and in this town there were about half a dozen goths, four ravers, a couple of punks, and other such subcultural types. We all stuck together because we had to. We all went to the raves, the punk shows, the metal shows, and the goth club night. The goth club night didn’t last very long, and was replaced with a fetish night. You were supposed to be over 18 to get in, but nobody seemed to care much that two high school goth kids were sitting in a bar at the fetish night event.
The fetish night wasn’t really very exciting. There was a belly dancer, a human fruit platter, and a flogging demonstration under dramatic lighting. There wasn’t any more bare skin than what you would see at the beach. I didn’t think it was very scandalous at all. It wasn’t particularly exciting or arousing. It was just a fun night out. I left that small town three months after I turned 18 and came out to San Francisco with a couple of boxes and my carry-on luggage.
The fetish scene out here was very comfortable and natural. I didn’t have any sex toys or BDSM equipment, but I had a hell of a lot of fun at the parties and clubs. It felt like home. It felt healthy and natural. Of all the things I’ve seen and done out here in San Francisco nothing has been as sick and twisted as some of the things I saw in the small town. Out here I run into some, “yeah whatever, freak” but it’s nothing like the “are you serious? that doesn’t seem healthy” that I saw back in the small town. People were seriously repressed back in the small town and it turned into some really unhealthy things. I have not met anyone out here with any sort of fetish or desire that is really truly unhealthy, and people have admitted some serious dark secrets to me.
So that’s me. Rocky Horror Picture Show as sex-ed and sneaking into “fetish” clubs at 16. Actual fetish fun when I was 18 in San Francisco.
