Tag: LGBTQ

Bondage Crossdressing and why it turns me on

Thanks so much for having me here. Well, yes, I’m a crossdresser and a huge bondage fetishist. For me, the two interests have always been there for as long as I can remember. For me, crossdressing and bondage are primarily sexual fetishes. They turn me on. And the style of bondage that I prefer the most is damsel in distress bondage, which as the name suggests has an element of danger or peril in it, though quite often it can be done in a rather tongue in cheek manner. The things that turned me on as a boy were detective movies and TV shows where a smartly-dressed woman ended up tied up and gagged. I always identified with the damsel and wanted to be her. I didn’t want to see her actually being hurt or raped or anything really bad happening to her, but the element of danger and the sense that she was in a situation where she might be forced and used or come to a bad end was terribly exciting. Sometimes I would see these shows as a child and pray that none of my family there in the den with me could pick up on how fascinated I was by these images on TV.

So from an early age, I was intrigued by and attracted to women’s clothes. I didn’t have a sister, but like many crossdressers, when I was a teenager I would sometimes try on my mother’s clothes when I could get away with it and remember it being a huge thrill. I know it sounds, well, I hate to use the word creepy, but yes, some people would see it that way. But believe me, if you’re a “CD” you have to find the clothes somewhere when you’re starting out, and if the opportunity arises you’re probably going to act on it, especially at that age when all the hormones are racing.

Many CDs will deny that there’s a sexual component to their dressing and for some of them I think that’s true, that it touches something else in them, or perhaps they have a stronger feeling of being transgender or gender dysphoric, (basically deeply dissatisfied or uncomfortable with one’s “assigned at birth” gender). But for me it definitely has its roots in fetishism. I think that’s why I now try to take sexy pictures, because I’ve spent a lot of time looking at these kinds of fetish images and imagining myself in the role of the damsel in distress.

As for gender, yes, I’ve certainly had those thoughts wishing I’d been born female, especially when I was younger. I can’t say that I’ve ever been thrilled to be male, but at the same time it hasn’t tormented me in the way that a trans person likely experiences. But so much of my dressing started out as a sexual thing so it’s pretty clear to me that I’m a crossdresser or to use the clinical term, a fetishistic transvestite. There is that whole other question – do crossdressers fall on the trans continuum? Some days I’d say yes, some days no. And in the trans community, where there is very little agreement about much of anything, you can safely say that opinions vary. One thing I remind myself though whenever I wish I’d been born female is that females for the most part are not fetishists – it’s pretty much a male game, although there certainly are women who are into bondage, some heavily into it. But they’re not into the clothes the way that a CD or transvestite is. So obviously if I’d been born female, this whole website thing most likely wouldn’t be happening for me.

As for the clothes themselves, I’ve always been drawn more to clothes that are “dressy”: skirts and blouses, stockings and high heels, and my favorite look is probably the sexy secretary or sexy librarian. I know these are clichés and some might argue that I’m just objectifying and fetishizing women, but that’s what happens with desire. We get focused on something that turns us on and there’s no arguing with it as to whether it’s objectifying or not, or politically correct. And well, I love to be objectified myself. I find it very sexy if I know someone likes my pictures enough to get off to them. That’s really my goal. And some of my favorite fan mail is to hear from guys who say, “You know, I’m a straight guy who’s never had any interest at all in crossdressers but I get really turned on looking at your pictures.” That’s just the best!

Image courtesy of Sandra Gibson
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April 24, 2015
Trannies in Trouble

Well, for many years I had fantasies of modeling for bondage pictures, so it’s been a long path to finally get to Trannies In Trouble. I’ve been around quite a while and plan to continue on as a bondage photographer once I feel I’m too old to be in front of the camera. But when I was young and in college, I used to go to adult bookstores to look at bondage magazines – this was really before the internet had become popular – and I remember what a thrill it was and how forbidden and even risky it felt to go to these stores. The first time I saw a wall of bondage magazines in an adult bookstore, I was stunned. It was like, OMG, I’m not the only one who’s into this stuff. Nowadays erotic material is so easily available that it’s really lost some of the charge that it had back when you’d have to go to a special naughty bookstore and summon up the courage to walk through the door, usually hidden around back.

But even back then I wanted to pose for bondage pictures and take photos of other girls and other CDs. There weren’t many images of CDs in bondage but there were a few and I remember wondering if I could look good enough to take some nice pictures someday. I started rather late with dressing more seriously, and probably didn’t have a halfway decent “look” put together till well into my mid-thirties, and then when I finally moved to L.A. back in 2001 I met up with a nice group of people who ran the website “SweetTies,” which is still online. I was able to pose for some photos for them a few times, and then when they moved away, I started taking pictures on my own. It sounds crazy but I actually came up with ways to tie myself up and take photos of myself with the camera on a tripod, using a remote control. It was very crude and took forever but some of those photos are still on my website and some of them were pretty effective. I’d like to think that I’ve improved some since then and I’ve certainly met many excellent photographers and models over the years who have helped out so much, especially my friend Delilah Knotty, with whom I’ve been shooting for years. She no longer models on my site but that girl still ties my ass up tight!

But basically the whole concept of Trannies in Trouble was just to do damsel in distress style bondage but feature crossdressers as the stars of the show. This is a very narrow niche, obviously, and there are very few websites in this genre. There is some overlap though, of course, with damsel in distress sites featuring women, as many of my customers enjoy seeing both women and CDs in bondage. But like I say, it’s a fetish and many of the guys who like these sites are crossdressers themselves, or trans, or guys who simply identify with the image of a woman tied up and in danger.

Images courtesy of Sandra Gibbons

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April 19, 2015
Where do we go from here?

No, this is not merely a reference to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical – it is a question that has been bubbling under the surface of the gay and lesbian community, to varying degrees, for quite some time now.

Same-sex marriage has become almost an inevitability across the Western world. Horrified to learn that Australia is now behind even Texas in affording gay and lesbian people the right to marry, I was recently bouyed by an article suggesting that health care was the next frontier in the fight for queer equality. It would seem to me that, once our community overcomes the marriage barrier we have been banging our heads against for the better part of half a century, we must open ourselves up to a much larger, more diverse, but infinitely more complex set of issues to overcome.

I use the term ‘gay and lesbian community’ above intentionally, because these are the people who inherently frame where the debate goes from here. Having all but entirely succeeded in securing the right to marry, we are faced with either resigning ourselves to the white picket fences of our matrimonial dreams or continuing to stand up to queerphobia in every facet of society. Many, I would argue, will see no need to keep rallying, writing letters, picketing homophobes (indeed, some do not see even the need right now). Many will think that equality has been achieved, and that queerphobia is all but dead in the dust as the last vestiges of the older, conservative, bigoted generation slowly fade. This, unfortunately, is very far from reality.

Trans people have known where we should be heading for a while now. In a time when there have been eight reported murders of transgender women in the US alone so far this year (and it is only February); when the suicide of a trans teenager highlights the crucial need for education, parental acceptance, and access to physical and mental health services; when studies find that between 40 to 50 percent of trans people will attempt suicide (14 times higher than their cisgender counterparts); when over 80 percent of transgender youth report being bullied at school. We cannot ignore that queer youth – trans in particular – are being oppressed to the point of illness and death for not conforming to social ideas about gender, and what it means to be a ‘real’ man or woman. We simply cannot erase the fact that this is the same kind of queerphobia that gay and lesbian people have faced for a long time, merely in a different form.

That is only one tip of one iceberg. Queer refugees across the globe are fleeing torture, corrective rape, and execution. This, in the face of countries such as Australia testing the ‘gayness’ of refugees by asking them about their promiscuity or gauging their knowledge of cultural tropes like Madonna, Oscar Wilde, and Bette Midler; or Germany reportedly advising refugees that Uganda (home of the ‘Kill the Gays’ legislation) is a safe place to live for queer people; or the United States deporting a queer refugee, who was then tortured and executed in a Honduran prison. We cannot ignore the fact that we live in a very ‘privileged’ society – one that does not condone our torture, rape, or execution based solely on our gender or sexuality. We owe it to queer refugees to, funnily enough, provide refuge from that level of violent, lethal queerphobia.

As a community, our fight extends beyond the white picket fence. Our straight allies have stood with us in the long, arduous battle to gain rights, whether they be to marry, to adopt, to surrogacy, wills and estates, powers of attorney, or to be free from discrimination in the workplace and the schoolyard. Now, it is our turn – our duty, really – to show that same level of allyship to those in our own community that are facing some of the most abhorrent forms of queerphobic oppression. Oppression that is resulting in their deaths by the droves.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock
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April 16, 2015
Gay Circuit Party Finale: WASH and PHARAOH

All good things must come to an end….

Image courtesy of gCircuit
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April 13, 2015
Gendering Outside the Lines (Part 2)

Read Part I here

Some of the terms I used in my introduction to describe my gender identity and gender discovery journey are likely unfamiliar to you. Here’s a quick vocab lesson to go with my first post:

Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB), also Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB): these terms acknowledge that the gender that ends up on your birth certificate is determined based on external examination of your genitals and assigned by someone other than the person being born. That assigned gender may or may not correspond to the gender identity that person eventually recognizes for themselves. So, in my case, when I was born, everyone in the room (other than me) took a look and decided I was female.

Transmasculine is a term used to describe people who are AFAB and identify as masculine in some way and/or are masculine in appearance. Genderqueer is a term some people use to describe identities that are not male or female, but perhaps a combination of them or transcending them entirely. I use genderqueer as a shortcut to describe my gender identity which is a combination of male and female, though I do not specifically identify as either.

Because I’m genderqueer, you can also say that I don’t identify with the gender binary. Another term you might have seen is ‘trans*’. This is a term some people use to broadly describe people who identify as transgender, transsexual or other gender non-conforming identities. I sometimes describe myself as a trans* genderqueer butch. Be aware that in some circles, this is a controversial term, however it is one I use to describe myself and other nonbinary identified people.

‘Non-binary’ is another term we should explore and we’ll do that by first talking about what binary means. A binary system is one with two choices, like on/off or black/white. When we talk about the gender binary, we’re talking about male and female being the only two terms we have when describing gender. For most of my life, I didn’t question that system or the limitations it imposed. Our culture uses the gender binary to define what roles, characteristics and appearances are acceptable for everyone based on their perceived gender. When I identified as a butch female, I was gender non-conforming. That means I wasn’t playing by the rules for being a female in American culture. I didn’t wear dresses, or keep my hair long and feminine. I embraced masculinity and put me outside the gender norms. Even as I chafed at the limitations assigned my gender, I still didn’t question the binary itself.

Sit for a moment and imagine living outside that binary, imagine not being constrained by male and female. Can you do it? Can you think of a time when you didn’t feel intrinsically male or female? Even for people who are trans* identified, it can be a challenge. Most people relate to the gender binary in a positive way, for example trans women who identify as female or trans men who identify as male. But I am becoming more and more aware of people like me who occupy that gray area in between (or maybe outside) the binary.

I first discovered this gray area through blogs and essays and eventually met some nonbinary people in person. I had a growing realization that this way of seeing gender, outside the restrictions of the binary, resonated with my internal vision of myself. I began to identify as genderqueer and tell people about the way gender intersected in me. The ongoing challenge is that it is really hard to explain not being male or female to binary identified people. Typical reactions are confusion, disbelief, even mockery – maybe you can relate to one of those.

This being my first post here, I don’t want to go on and on, better to leave something for the next time. In my next installment, I will address a couple more things I spoke about in the second paragraph – my pronouns, name change, testosterone and how that reconciles with not being male.

If you have questions for me on the topics I’ve raised here or questions you hope I’ll address in future posts, please leave them for me in a comment. You can also find more on these topics (and more) on my blog, Butchtastic.

Image courtesy of Photobucket
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April 12, 2015
Gendering Outside the Lines (Part 1)

I was invited to contribute to this site and share my trans* perspective on sexuality and gender. To be perfectly clear, I am only qualified to speak from my own perspective and though my viewpoint will sometimes overlap with that of other people, there are times when it will not.

Since I’m new here, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself. I am a 51 year old transmasculine genderqueer who was assigned female at birth, uses he/him/his pronouns and is taking testosterone (T) to better align my physical body with my gender identity. I recently completed a legal name change to a typically male name which is similar to my birth name. Though I identify as trans* and masculine, I do not identify as male.

I started taking T last year after a lifetime of not really fitting into my expected role as a female. Even as a masculine lesbian female – dyke, queer, butch – there was something that didn’t work for me, like a pair of underwear that rode up in the wrong places and also felt too loose. Yeah, it was that uncomfortable. Over the years, I watched as some of the other butches I knew chose transition from female to male, becoming trans men. I pondered their choice and thought about my own discomfort in being female, but something held me back.

That something was the fact that though I do not identify as female, I also don’t identify fully as male. Combine that with my assumption that only male identified people went through transition and I was at a stalemate. Years went by as I learned more and more about gender identification and how complex it was. I hadn’t put my own situation into words, because the idea of not being female but also not being male wouldn’t fit into my head any better than a square peg in a round hole. You may be feeling similarly at this point, how does a person not feel either female or male, what else is there?

I didn’t know it for many years, but I was on a quest to find the words to describe my sense of gender. The main problem was that the words didn’t exist yet. The words ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ were outside my knowledge until about five or six years ago, and they hadn’t been in common usage much before that. When I came across the definition of genderqueer, I felt like my brain suddenly expanded like a giant sponge animal dipped in water. All of a sudden, there was more room in the world, more reality to explore and occupy. The thing I’d been chasing, my own personal golden chalice, had a name, it existed in the way that it hadn’t before because now I had a word for it, and a new understanding about gender.

I’ve thrown a lot of terms in the preceding paragraphs that may be unfamiliar to you. You aren’t alone, I’ve had countless conversations with people over the last several years about the terminology used to describe gender identity and those conversations started with me being very ignorant.

Read part 2 here

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April 12, 2015
Gay Circuit Party Day 2: NEON

The party continues…..

Image courtesy of gCircuit
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April 12, 2015
Gay Circuit Party Day 1: WICKED

The Biggest Gay Circuit Party, SongKran9, in Asia has begun. There are some of the highlights of yesterday’s WICKED party.

Image courtesy of gCircuit
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April 11, 2015
When I came out to my brother

When I was in the closet for the majority of my teenage years, I was consumed with thoughts about my sexual orientation. It controlled my mind like a disease. I would think about it while conversing with others, while driving, at work and school, while watching TV, during dinner, while lying in bed at night…you get the picture. Furthermore, I always thought my family knew I was gay or had a suspicion. I was so paranoid that I even convinced myself that they talked about it amongst themselves behind my back.

How desperate was I to be heterosexual? When I blew out my candles on my 17th and 18th birthday, I wished to be straight. That’s how much I hated the thought of being different. I wanted nothing more than to just fit in and be like all my other friends and family. God had different plans for me though.

My life changed forever in the Summer of 2010. My older brother Ross, who lived in Arizona at the time, happened to be in Florida for a week on business. His impending presence filled me with terror because I made the most mature decision of my life, being that he would be the first person I would come out to and I would do it sometime that week. My brother is eight years older than I am, so growing up I never really had a relationship with him, since he left for college when I was in elementary school. I knew confining and coming out to him would bring us closer and it would unite us with a special bond.

Before I knew it, his week at home had come to an end and I still hadn’t come out to him. The night before his departure, he joined me in the TV room and laid on the couch, across from where I was perched in the lazy boy, practically shaking with fear. My parents had already gone to sleep and I knew this was my last opportunity to come out to him.

My breathing became shallow and my mind started racing as the thought of telling another person my deepest, darkest secret became very real. We watched TV in silence and eventually, he got up from the sofa, said good night and started walking to his bedroom. As he passed me, I stopped him and confessed that I had to tell him something important, outside. He gave me a perplexed look and than walked to his room to get his shoes.

I walked to the front door and my heart was pounding out of my chest. My hands were beginning to sweat and I really thought I was going to faint right than and there. As we walked down the front entrance way and onto the driveway, I kept thinking “am I really going to tell him, am I really going to tell him!?”

Before I could muster up the courage to start talking, Ross broke the silence and asked, “did you get a chick pregnant??” I looked up at him and said “hypothetically speaking, if I died tomorrow and there was one thing you wanted to know about me, what would it be?” “I don’t know man, nothing” he replied, blank-faced and confused by my question. I held back the tears and released the secret that kept me prisoner to my own mind for far too long. For the first time in my life, I admitted to liking guys.

A surprised “WHAT?!”, followed by immediate support and reassurance that my brother still loved me, was the best reaction I could have asked for. We talked outside for two hours that night and Ross asked me all sorts of questions, processing all the information and validating that everything was going to be okay. The best part is, he was right. I went to bed that night with the most unfathomable amount of mental and emotional weight lifted off my shoulders. My soul felt liberated. Coming out was the scariest, most emotional and vulnerable moment of my life, but it was also the most life-changing, courageous and rewarding.

No matter how isolated you may feel in the closet, how broken your heart may be or how dark life may seem, never let go of hope. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Over the last few years, I’ve come to the realization that being different is beautiful and I didn’t choose to be gay, I just got lucky.

This article has been republished with permission from Jeremy Mannino.

Please visit Jeremy’s website to view the original post and more of Jeremy’s works.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock
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April 9, 2015
GoGo Bo(y)nanza

GoGo boys are mythical creatures in the Queer Kingdom. You will find they that exist in different forms in different regions. In the West, GoGo boys are dancers who are employed to entertain crowds especially in clubs. This began in the 60s and was made popular by musical variety series like Hullabaloo by NBC and Shindig by ABC. However, in Asia the term GoGo boys is synonymous with the sex trade. This was an unfortunate byproduct of the Vietnam War. This week we will have many top Asian GoGo dancers that will be performing for Songkran9 and hopefully, this will help to restore the GoGo boys name to its original glory.

Leading the charge is SongKran9 brand ambassador Peter Le. Peter used to go to the clubs in San Francisco and LA with his friends and they would always pull him up on stage to dance with them. He started to fall in love with being up on the stage. Before he knew it, he was performing as a dancer too. Peter feels that GoGo dancing requires a lot of stamina and confidence. You will have to put a lot of effort to be able to keep your energy level pumping all night long. With many eyes on you, one better be confident about showing off his body for the crowd.

Next, we have Titan who had his first performance during the Heaven party, Shanghai. Initially, he was working as public relation practitioner and stage designer. However, the party planner found that he had the potential to be a GoGo Dancer. Hence, he was invited to join the show even though he was inexperience at that point in time. Titan feels that in order to maintain a good body, one must have the knowledge of physiology and nutrition. These are important for setting up a proper training program and diet program. An experienced fitness instructor can also help you to reach good results with half the effort but Titan feels that passion and constancy are the crucial points at the end of the day.

Finally, we have Sky. Sky was invited by a party organizer in Japan as a GoGo dancer about 6 years ago after his photoshoot for the cover of Badi Magazine. Many of the challenges Sky face in this line of work are related to prejudice against GoGo boys. This is due to cultural differences and the lack of understanding of the nature of their job. Even though being a GoGo dancer is Sky’s sideline work, he has encountered a lot of unreasonable criticism on the internet. Fortunately, the erotic stereotype of GoGo boys is changing through the years because more people now have opportunities to know them through international parties such as SongKran9.

However, there is still more work to be done as many still face harsh criticisms and harassment. More than just a pretty face, the GoGo boy is key to making a party go wild. GoGo boys believe that the eyes are the windows of the soul that will draw one into the crowd and make one immerse in the sensation of the party. With a touch and a kiss, the party heats up as the music unite the crowd and performers together in a night of ecstasy.

Image courtesy of gCircuit
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April 7, 2015