BDSM RTV MEDIA NEWS!!!!



27 sept 2010



Sweet Subjugation


Source: www.ebar.com  - Bay Area Reporter - USA


PHILADELPHIA- It's a sure thing many of you have stories like mine. It all started for me with Buster Crabbe. The shiny blond, All-American, Olympic swimmer played Flash Gordon in the serials I saw each week at the Saturday Kid's matinee. The merciless Emperor Ming of the planet Mongo had captured Flash! I didn't really know why, or even care, because this was where Ming's henchman bound the boldly spread-eagled, tortuously splayed Flash to a huge machine that flashed lightening bolts of electricity toward his writhing body that glistened with sweat and bulged with muscle as he struggled against his bonds. Whatta sight. I reenacted this scene a couple times playing Flash Gordon with my best friend, until his mother (a merciless Ming manque) disallowed me from playing with him. She thought I was a little queer. She was right.


But there also was my brother, with his jet black hair and eyes as violet as Liz Taylor's. I can't remember how we developed the interesting game we played, but in his early teens, when I was seven or eight, we played it more than once. I'd be tied to a tree, and he would race toward me on his bike, threatening a collision that would splat me into smithereens. Of course, he always stopped just short of mashing his bike's front wheel into my pre-pubescent privates. What a thrill it was to be bound and menaced by a beautiful man who ultimately showed mercy.

Then there was the really swell time my parents were out for the evening, and my brother had me hog-tied on my bed. Natch, the parents came home early. I was thrown under the covers, still tied up. My mother knelt by my bed and kissed me as I successfully pretended to be asleep. Rat out my brother? No way. I had to wait ages and ages, blissfully bound, until the folks went to bed and my brother could come and let me loose.

So I had a predisposition. Years later, I was surprised. Adults played bondage games? Count me in! Throw in my devout and ever-expanding cock worship, and you can see why I glommed onto Darkholme's website, BoundGods.com. As I'm also into arty books of male photography, I was surely glad when the Master of Bound Gods received tribute in the form of a book. This one's right up your Folsom Street.

Male Bondage (Bruno Gmunder, hardbound, $34.95) was originally published paperbound in 2006, when it slipped pretty much under the radar. Now it's back, unchanged except for the sanctification of hard board covers. I don't think there's been a collection of full-color bondage photos so glamorously and aesthetically rendered. The potent masculinity of the models is only one thing that makes the 80-page collection so striking.

Certainly, Darkholme's photographic technique is appreciable. Its plush, darkly rich colors and especially its presence and clarity of intent are masterful, as is his stylish rope-craft, the Japanese art of Shibatsu, which snares the viewer with calm strength and near meditational respite. It's simple, yet strong. It allows Darkholme to show restraint while depicting restraint. Here are captive enthusiasts in their favorite positions; defenseless, at someone else's mercy, and left alone in their joyful pain. More notably, it imbues his models with a nearly serene composure that encompasses the struggle to escape, and the acceptance of inescapable bondage.

Well-known kink master Van Darkholme explains the link between his sexual activity and photographic art: "I view it as art and JO material more than anything else," he has said. "I love to record a bondage session with photos and/or videos. Then, I really get off on it later." Male Bondage insures that you, too, can get off to Darkholme's provocative beauties.
The artist's provenance is a little misty. Though he was born in Viet Nam, he looks to be an Asian-American mix. He doesn't bother to explain his parentage. Nor will he reveal his birthdate (a coy practice which only makes non-revealers sound older). An Internet search divulged it as 1972, which makes him 39; just entering his prime, if you ask me.

It seems he was raised largely in America. In one interview, he placed himself in the Midwest at age 12, while telling of an event that was obviously a prime factor in his later interests. His friends began taunting the weakest boy in their group. Their childish prank turned into cruelty and devolved/escalated into a bondage humiliation, when they left the boy, finally, stripped and bound to a tree. When the bad boys left the scene that Van witnessed, he sat down and looked at the victim, strung up and half naked, for long minutes. Then he silently helped the boy down. "He was crying," said Van, "and began to hug me....."

Darkholme is now strikingly well-built, six feet of muscle with a 46" chest over a 32" chest,"And, for a couple of freaks out there," he says, "I wear a size ten shoe." He lived in Los Angeles during his young adulthood, the period of time when a fellow gets his shit together, and in which he slowly drifted toward his present fulfillment.

After the end of a three-year relationship, he began filmmaking. The seven DVD editions of the Bound Gods series are a little funky. They're frequently most effective, and at other times rather amateur. He's versatile, and a frequent performer in his movies. Long-time acquaintance Daddy Zeus speaks in the book's Forward of his pleasure at watching Darkholme "emerge from the privacy of his personal muscle bondage lifestyle...into an exceptional source of musclebondage (sic) fantasies and visuals on his websites and videos."

Darkholme explains his development succinctly: "I've been seeking art all my life, and now I realized that my life is art."

That life of photographic and filmed sex/art led to his moving to San Francisco, his founding of Boundgods.com, and the publication of Male Bondage. It's a pity that the strictures of newspaper publishing disallow showing the very thing that makes Male Bondage such a unique stunner. Bound cocks. Cocks made even harder, prouder, more regal, worshipful, and heartstopping, by bondage.

I think Male Bondage is pretty awesome, and lots of fun, if you like the fettered phallus, pulled penis, bulging balls, tethered tit. If these photos don't provoke both earnest appreciation and slathering mouth, your Leather Card will be revoked.