Weirdos

The Small Midwestern Town where I became a porn star is dying. The houses look as old as they are: rockers languish on sagging, screened-in porches, condemned signs curl in cracked windows, junk cars cower in oil-stained driveways. The squat homes have no fences; lawns spill into each other, sloping inevitably toward the creek that crawls through town.

The Small Midwestern Town wears its history. In a row you’ll find the Historic Jailhouse, the Civil War museum, and a brick Town Hall buttressed by a block of feeble mom-and-pop shops. Flung an hour from any major freeway, swallowed on every side by endless farmland, it seems the kind of place nobody would ever come on purpose, the last place you’d expect to be the headquarters for a gay male kink website. Yet, the defunct Historic Jail, now owned by a bondage enthusiast called Ben, serves as his kinky channel’s homebase. On the site, you can find men in ropes and chains, men in cages and jail cells, men in uniforms, in rubber, in leather. Even extreme cases: men in full body casts, men buried alive.

My invitation to the Small Midwestern Town came during the sweet summer moment between the COVID vaccine rollout, and variant viruses emerging to wreck new havoc. I’d weathered quarantine isolation by messaging fellow kinsters online, and when I came across Ben’s blog, I felt I’d found a kindred spirit. We exchanged emails until Ben sent me his filming schedule, inviting me to participate in a shoot.

By the time I nosed my car into the dirt lot, dusk had blanketed the Historic Jail. In the kitchen window men sat playing cards. The game turned out to be a variant of strip poker; each loss resulted in another shackle or chain until only the winner was free. They dealt me in. I felt shy, the odd one out. We sized each other up over our fanned-out cards; these men had years of kink experience on me. We traded bait and banter, as luck shifted from one player to another. My jitters began to settle. By the time I found myself chained spread eagle on the floor, I felt I was one of them.

For those of us who love it, bondage offers a pause button. Stuck in a chair or a box or in solitary confinement, you have the pleasure of sloughing off time. You find yourself jettisoned to a footnote of your life that has no bearing on your story. Anything is possible in this moment: you can be a dangerous criminal, a kidnapee, an inanimate object. So settle in. Your concept of reality wriggles like a caught fish, slips from your hands and back into the sea of time. Shed your worries; in this state you can do nothing about them anyway. Stay bound long enough, and boredom will bludgeon you into a euphoric headspace, a DIY sensory deprivation tank.

After cards, Ben offered to lock me in a cell for the night. The Jail itself was not large: four neat cells behind heavy metal grates. An austere two-story residence connects to the jail via an intake room whose yellow walls are studded with police paraphernalia—black and white photos, framed Sheriff's badges, defunct handcuffs hanging from a corner hook.

When it’s not used for filming, the Historic Jail serves as a kinky BnB. Men fly across the country and pay top dollar to have the authentic jail experience Ben advertises on his site, and now he held open the cell door, offering it to me for free. Being jailed has never been my fantasy, but as someone who enjoys a submissive role, it seemed appropriate to take him up on it. I surrendered my personals for an orange jumpsuit. “You’ll want cell two for sure,” he told me. “It gets the best light. You’ll see.”

In the morning, Ben and I shared our stories over coffee. We have a lot in common—we’re both defectors from the Mormon faith. Ben told me, “I was an Elders quorum president, a bishopric member, I taught seminary and institute. When I say there isn’t any archeological evidence for the Book of Mormon, I know what I’m talking about.” He was preaching to the choir, but I can’t imagine many bondage freaks can follow this Mormon lingo.

Another commonality: Ben and I aren’t particularly interested in sex. I identify as asexual, and Ben says that bondage is essentially all the stimulation he needs. To this point, the site run out of the Historic Jail is not technically a porn site, and to be fair, I did not become a porn star. No porn, the site declares on its home page. No nudity. In a world where kink is often a lead up or accessory to sex, a site committed to bondage without sex is a bit of an anomaly, but Ben’s page has its devotees.

I asked about the people who sign up for jail role plays. “Are they all kinky?”

“More or less,” Ben said. He stirred milk into his coffee, told me of the man who wanted to better understand his incarcerated brother’s experience, and the one who wanted simply to get away from his family so he could read his goddamn book. “Then you get some guys who claim not to be turned on by it, but when we do the strip search, their cocks stand right at attention.”

If Ben represents one side of the kinky spectrum, I embody the other. I’m a weekend kinkster, happy to indulge in the occasional role play, where Ben’s life is centered in kink. Running his site and playing warden to visitors of The Historic Jail has become Ben’s full-time work.

 I didn’t have a job. I’d just finished grad school, the better part of which was spent cloistered in my one-room efficiency, dodging COVID and Midwestern winters. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but a quick dive into the world of kinky content creation seemed like a great last hurrah before settling into a 9 to 5.

If bondage is a pause button, Ben’s life has been on hiatus for years. At first I found this pitiable, but I came to see the progress within the pause. Maybe success is finding a group of guys into the same weird shit as you and creating a haven for them. Maybe being the gatekeeper to such a haven is a full-time job, as noble and fulfilling as any other.

Ben showed me the screenplay for his current project. “It’s a riff on Carrie,” he told me. “A young man uses his telekinetic powers to restrain his enemies. However, he’s also repressing his own interest in bondage. In the end he learns to accept himself with the help of a therapist.” Ben shuffled through the pages. He said, “It’s about me, I guess.”

Filming was slipshod. Ben bundled whoever was handy into a makeshift film crew. We huddled within the confines of his experience, becoming sudden cinematographers, a special effects team. He’d done this enough times to know such methods produce a passible product.

 Like any kinky scene, the minimal screenplay encouraged improvisation. Our ad-libbed dialogue carved strange paths through the plot, following the instincts of roleplay rather than performance. We waited after each take for Ben to shake his head and feed us lines, or else to shrug and say, “Yeah, we can use that.”

New actors trickled in each day: weekend regulars who lived an hour away, office workers who took time off to make their yearly pilgrimage, old friends just passing through, and first-timers like myself. The cells filled. A hired cook set up camp making three meals a day. There were too many of us to fit around the kitchen table; we ate in shifts or took our plates out into the summer sun, a cluster of orange-clad convicts at the picnic table.

One actor called himself Kitt. He bore a bear-ish figure, a braided beard and a shaved scalp. I couldn’t get his bright blue eyes out of my mind, even after I strapped him down and shrouded them behind a blindfold.

Kitt trussed up was all need; he blossomed until I had access to a rare vulnerability, like the trembling stemen at a bloom’s sweet center. When I removed Kitt’s gag, his mouth opened rapturously. I traced his pink lips with my thumb, and his tongue darted out, the only part of his body free enough to caress me. I was the trapeze from which he swung, the roller coaster track he barrelled down. It was intoxicating to hold these reins, to curate someone else’s fantasy. With Kitt, I began to develop, for the first time, my dominant side. I decided to kiss him, and then we did kiss, sweet and long and desperate.

We became cellmates, and he left his bunk to curl up beside me in the dark. I mentally filed away each touch; already I could hear the music that would accompany my memory of him. We established a weeklong, no-strings-attached fling. The Historic Prison felt like the perfect place for such a romance, a sidestep from reality, with no bearing on our everyday lives.

The Historic Prison became a parenthesis, a hideout from the rest of our lives, a detox from responsibility. In a world where many of us felt the need to cover our kinky sides, it was a relief to wear our secrets openly, to drape our everyday lives in anonymity. In a fast-moving world, it was good to be held fast.

The front room overflowed with hoods and mitts and collars. Straps spilled from suitcases, straitjackets lined the closets. We took turns fitting each other into inescapable positions. Sometimes Ben swooped into the room with a camera, calling directions. Sometimes Ben was already locked away, hogtied in one of the cells. If you restrained someone you became tethered to them, keeping an ear cocked for the call that meant they need out. But sometimes these bondage sessions created a domino effect; one afternoon Kitt strapped me into a chair, and then was caged by Ben, who was straitjacketed by someone else, and so on until only Ben’s partner, Arthur, was free. The behemoth chair held me fast; I could barely wiggle. I heard Arthur treading through the hallway, up and down the stairs, making his rounds. He moved without speaking. I imagine he stood in each doorway, watching each body squirm against its bonds, not in a bid at freedom, but to confirm our delicious paralysis. I imagine he felt some satisfaction, some proxy pleasure, knowing he was the key to our deliverance, knowing too that he did not want to deliver us, and that we did not want to be delivered.

The house was suspended in time, all of us waiting for the terrible moment that pleasure tipped into discomfort or pain, hoping that moment would not come. Minutes stretched like taffy, threatening to harden into immortalizing amber. No cameras recorded this afternoon, but it felt preserved somehow. If I were return to the Historic Jail in the Small Midwestern Town, even now, I feel certain I would find one of us roped up in each room, Arthur padding benevolently through the halls, all of us waiting for the church across the street to toll the hour, and the next hour, and the next.

On the website you can speed up or slow down the videos. You can stop the clip before the man is released from his chains, and skip back to watch him bound again. You can pause the video as he is trussed up like a Christmas turkey, and you can keep him that way as long as you like. Tell yourself the man in chains is you. Feel the cold weight of shackles on your wrist, the hug of the leather. Pause the video, and you are stuck. Tell yourself you will never release yourself, not until you are satisfied, and you will never be satisfied.

I feel a certain responsibility on my first day of shooting. On screen, I would be a stand-in for the men who will watch me be gagged, straitjacketed and locked up, the men who will think I wish that were me. I felt these men like a physical presence standing guard outside my cell, ensuring my capture. I opened myself to them until, like an act of possession, my body was no longer mine, but theirs.

The jail accumulates history. Men claimed to hear the decades-gone jail dog scamper down the hall. Inmates swore they saw jailers poised outside their cells at times when Ben hadn’t been in to check on them at all. Over dinner Ben described a gay inmate he dreamt up, who spent days curled on his cot in a baggy, gray uniform. The other inmates heckled him at yardtime, calling him “Weirdo.” The dream clung to Ben, the way some dreams do. In Weirdo, Ben saw what his life might have been had he been born just a few decades earlier.

Later, Ben connected with a woman whose father was Sheriff of the Small Midwestern Town in the 1950s. “Did you ever know of a gay inmate?” he asked.

“You mean Weirdo?” she said. “How’d you know about him?”

I spend an afternoon tied down in cell one, a blindfold obscuring my vision. In the intake room, Ben negotiates a movie scene, correcting lines and directing whichever hands he’s given the camera to. “Quiet on the set!” he calls before each take.

Jail scenes demand hush; sound echoes through the cells. I hear take after take, and struggle vainly in my restraints. They know I am one cell over; a single shout and I could be tugged from the ropes. I wait quietly, knowing they will come for me when the scene is done.

And then comes that dreamy headspace, the familiar aim of every bondage buff, lifting me out of myself until I seem to float above my body. Men shuffle past my cell. I feel insubstantial, barely here. If I call, would they hear me? If I struggle will they see?

Perhaps the ghosts are no different than we are, literally bound to a single spot, unable to move, or exert any real influence. Perhaps we are the ghosts, turning spectral by binding ourselves to this place. Perhaps that is why they can communicate with us.

If any part of Weirdo still inhabits the jail, I think he might approve of its transformation into a kinky getaway run by faggots. We are not so different than he, only we managed to make it to this chapter of history, where the Historic Jail can be a haven for gay deviants.

We are lucky.

We are young and we are old, we are largely submissive, we are experienced and we are novices, we wear orange prison jumpsuits, we come in many sizes, we are gay or mostly gay, or actually not gay at all, we are horny, though we are not necessarily looking for sex, we jerk off secretly behind closed doors, or else we wear chastity devices that prevent us from jerking off, we are from the Midwest and Florida and California, we are here for a few weeks, we are here for the night, we sleep behind the bars of the prison, we sleep in the padded cell, we sleep on couches, on floor mattresses. We are camera shy, we are exhibitionists, we get into locked rooms and boxes, we are strapped to tables, to chairs, we are hogtied, we are gagged and blindfolded, we are left alone for hours, we listen for those who are restrained, we listen for evidence of need, we listen to each other.

 We are prisoners and we are weirdos. This is what we want to be, and this is why we come here, to be the thing we cannot openly be anywhere else. We are spectors, we haunt the prison, we reclaim it, we are a part of its history now, its history is a part of us, the prison holds us, and the restraints hold us, and the camera holds us, and in the privacy of their own bedrooms, unknown men hold our image in their phones, pausing and rewinding, binding us over and over to this place.

When it comes time to leave the Small Midwestern town, Kitt grips me in the doorway, drawing me closer each time I threaten to pull away. In my car, I weep through two counties of farmland. After my confinement, the world seems immense, full of improbable images—a half dozen locals dangling lines into an elbow of spring water, billboards condemning the unsaved to hell. My future hangs over me like a storm. Caught up in the flow of life, I want nothing more than to retreat back to that kinky wonderland, to be tethered to something other than time.

When the videos are released, I will need only to click a button to find myself back in the Historic Jail, surrounded again by men like me, though we have long since dispersed back to our colleges and corporate jobs, our families and our retirements. We will be able to hold each other on our screens, to hit that exquisite pause button. We will each finally be able to possess our own image, and we will see ourselves and think, I wish that were me.

Holden Tyler Wright is a queer writer whose prose has been published in Ninth Letter, Salt Hill Journal, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter: @holdenwrightnow