Bound & Gagged Magazine: Gay Bondage Periodical, 1987–2005

Bound & Gagged (ISSN 1058-6849) was a New York City magazine published by the Outbound Press from 1987 to 2005. It spoke directly to gay bondage and discipline practitioners. Issues mixed reports of actual encounters with fiction, technique notes, fantasies, and photographs of bound and gagged men. For gay male BDSM print culture it was a specialist bondage title, not a general leather magazine that ran rope shots when it felt like it. The ISSN and the New York headquarters mark it as a real periodical, not a one-off zine.

Bob Wingate founded the magazine. The first issue appeared in November 1987. Wingate owned the Outbound Press and served as publisher and editor. He later put the launch in blunt terms: when Bound & Gagged first appeared, there was virtually nothing else out there. Drummer published bondage stories and photos from time to time, but there was nothing devoted to bondage in all its varied manifestations—from average guys simply cuffing and rope-tying each other for fun, to whole ritualistic lifestyles in leather and latex that used the most elegant and expensive restrictive devices, and everything in between. That range was the magazine’s brief from the first issue onward.

Robert W. Davolt later edited the title. Publication stopped immediately after issue 106 in June 2005, following Davolt’s death. The run therefore closes on that numbered issue, not on a planned farewell. A complete set of Bound & Gagged is preserved at the Leather Archives and Museum, along with the 25-box collection of Davolt’s papers. In 2017 Davolt was honored with other notables, named on bronze bootprints, as part of the San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley. Bob Wingate’s blog remains listed among the magazine’s later public traces. Eighteen years of gay bondage print—NYC headquarters, Outbound Press, Wingate at the start, Davolt at the end, issue 106 as the last number—still sit on those archive shelves and on that SoMa alley.