How did you first discover that you weren't the only person in the world who enjoyed playing tie-up games?
As I've mentioned in an earlier thread, one which asked how old you were when you first got into it, I was about four. But while I found friends to play Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians with, I didn't really know if my playmates felt the same intense - um, let's say, excitement - that I did about the bondage part of the game. And for some reason I couldn't bring myself to ask.
As you may have guessed from my nickname on the board, I play the 'cello. I grew up in Milwaukee. There was not a really good musical instrument shop there. Every so often my 'cello needed some sort of adjustment - an open seam, a new bridge, etc. So during the late 1960s/early 1970s I would get on the train and head down to Chicago whenever this happened. I'd leave he instrument early in the morning, and they would have it ready for me in the afternoon.
However, that meant that I had six or so hours to kill in Chicago. One trip when I was about 15, I just started walking around the Loop. I saw a shop with a sign that said, "Bookstore." I was a geeky kid who loved to read (mostly science fiction) - why not check it out?
Well, it turned out that this bookstore was, to put it mildly, not like any bookstore I had ever been to before. Why they didn't bounce me out of there in the first 30 seconds, I have no idea. I was always short for my age, and when I was 15 I could easily have been mistaken for 12. Even a blind person couldn't have thought for an instant that I had any business being in an adult book store. But nobody bothered me, and I found a rack of magazines devoted to women tied up in states of partial (and not so partial) nudity.
That's how I discovered that I wasn't the only person in the world who really had a thing for bondage.