I've never had as many orgasms in a day as I did the day that I received my copy of Taschen's reprint of every issue of John Willie's landmark fetish magazine, Bizarre. I'd seen some of Willie's artwork on USENET on bondage photo groups (yes, it was that long ago), so I knew that he'd done a lot of work that touched on my primary fetishes, bondage and gags. Although much of Bizarre (especially the later volumes) focused more on other fetishes, the combination of Willie's artwork, photography and writing about bondage and gags turned me on much more strongly than I could have expected, and I spent most of a day pleasuring myself as I kept reading and reading.
Willie worked at a time when he had to couch the fetishes he was displaying in Bizarre so they didn't appear, at least on their surface, as sexual; this is why he famously paired most of his photographs of bound and gagged women with a printed exhortation to women that went, "Don't let this happen to you! Learn jiu-jitsu, the art of self-defense." More subtle was how he often couched bondage in the concept of fashion, inventing things such as a dress that could be lifted over a woman's head and tied off at the top to immobilize the woman's arms. His essay (and accompanying photo and watercolors) about how gags will inevitably become a fashion staple is easily my favorite moment in Bizarre's history, and it still excites me every time I read it.
As I think back about what made Willie's work so powerful and unique, apart from the time frame in which he worked, I've come to realize that more than just portraying various fetishes, Willie was able to create entire mini-cultures through his writing and other art. Nearly anyone can depict a fetish with just a few models and the right tools, or the requisite skills to paint a painting or write a story. Maybe it was due to the constraints he worked under in the fifties and early sixties, but Willie had a real talent for making you believe that people really would wear his upside-down dresses, or gag themselves to be fashionable. He made it all seem not just realistic and possible, but sometimes even inevitable.
Those of us who work in kink often have to put a lot of effort into making sure that our clients feel okay in expressing their sexuality and their kinks; no matter how many kink-themed music videos get made, or how many stores stock fuzzy handcuffs because of the latest trends, there are still a lot of negative messages about kink in the broader culture, to say nothing about sexuality at large. Many of us have to work (sometimes very hard) just to make various kinks seem acceptable, but Willie was one of those rare artists who could make kink seem normal. When I look at the other kink artists whose work has really moved me -- especially the team behind Harmony Concepts, and then later the wave of amateur sites inspired by Suicide Girls that came out once digital photography became affordable, like The Underground -- they all had that ability to create their own culture, a world where bondage and whatever other kinks they portrayed seemed like a daily fact of life. I hope that I can achieve that kind of brilliance in my own writing one of these days.
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