Welcome to Bondage Diaries, a place on the Internet where I can safely and discreetly discuss kinky topics.

I feel like I should introduce myself in this first post. I am in my early thirties, and I identify as male. I consider myself a submissive, first and foremost.

I have known that I was kinky practically all of my life. Something “clicked” when, as a child, I would see a scene in a cartoon showing someone getting tied up and gagged. I particularly enjoyed a very brief scene from the SuperTed episode “Nuts in Space” where a villain gagged a woman whom he had previously tied up offscreen.

Likewise, I would feel uncomfortable watching a scene on television where someone got tied up when family members were present. It wasn’t that I was doing anything that I wouldn’t necessarily want them to see while these scenes were going on, but I was enjoying the scenes in a way that I couldn’t quite name and they were cramping my style by simply being in the room.

Later in childhood, I would tie myself up with the pillowcases in my bedroom at night for a few minutes before falling asleep. This sort of self-bondage wasn’t anything that I could have ever gotten trapped in by any means. I relied on my imagination more than anything else to keep me “bound”. Then after tying myself up for a while, I would quietly put everything back as it should be before going to sleep.

When I got on the Internet in the late 1990s as a teen, I discovered what BDSM was, and I found that BDSM imagery caused that same special feeling as the tie-up scenes in the cartoons I watched as a child. Now something started to feel right. There were others out there with similar interests.

However, as I was discovering this, I was unfortunate enough to live in the central Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, which was and still is a very conservative area. So I knew that there was a BDSM scene out there, but it was a safe bet that it wasn’t anywhere near me. There was also no such thing as Fetlife back then as well. But I was also only a teen back then. I was too young.

In college, I did manage to get tied up once, in a non-sexual way. I went to college in a similarly conservative area, and there was no “scene” to speak of from what I could tell.

I moved to the Washington DC area in 2007. I had heard about a group called “Black Rose” that seemed right up my alley. But for some reason I never pursued it. I don’t really know why, but I waited four years to go check it out. I guess I was shy (which I’m sure would surprise many who know me in person). Go figure.

In September 2011, while I was hanging out with a friend, she revealed to me that she was in a group for kinky folk. That was the spark that got me seriously thinking about getting involved in the scene.

However, it wasn’t until January 2012 when I finally decided to actually go and check out Black Rose. But that’s for another post…