🏳️⚧️ Commodore says Trans Rights NowI had a fascination with protectivewear/gear as a wearable kink (fetish) at a very young age. Grew up on the coast of southwest Florida so of course I had a wetsuit; I pined over motorcyclists since before I ahad a driver's license.
(I digress; my own origin story can be some other thread.) 2/
In college in 1994, I found the personal websites of people showing the heavier gear kink fantasies I'd already come to lust over by then.
These were aesthetics rarely seen explicitly even in printed porn magazines of the day. And from real people I could talk with, not a magazine publisher. 3/
But these were still just a few people out in the ether, not a community.
I knew about some events like IML by then, but the Leather community of the time didn't have the different kind of tone I was looking for: something a little more playful and modern, even futuristic. 4/
So I started a wonderfully Web 1.0 generation website, basically a gear-fan (and gear-porn) pic gallery. Whatever I found, scanned from magazines, categorized and glamorized. I set up a page for people to be able to contact each other. I gave it a pretty simple sounding name.
Gearfetish(dot)com. 5/
I started getting emails from site visitors: People wanting to put their own websites or email addresses on the contact list page. Offers to submit their own media to the categorized galleries (which I often accepted). Thousands of visitors a day, and just because people could find each other. 6/
It got busy enough by mid '95 that I had to add a very primitive contact list search engine (for the coder nerds, imagine this: written in *m4*) to keep it usable. I started an email mailing list for whoever wanted it.
I didn't know the words for it then, but I had created a social network. 7/
That incarnation of Gearfetish lasted a few years. The media re-rendering I first had to perform to keep it usable over my abysmally slow home connection of the day (128 *kilobits* per second) meant some pretty crunchy JPGs, but that connection got thankfully faster over time. 8/
By 2000, there were a few sites like that, notably Rubber Lovers Contact List (today RubberZone). The idea of an online kink community was real and spreading.
Years before MySpace, people wanted to make personal connections through kink at the modern speed of the Internet. 9/
(Aside: I'm not disparaging some kink communication methods which existed before then. Usenet alt.sex.fetish.fashion as one very influential example. But it wasn't until the mid-'90s that those became as immediate as webpages.) 10/
Partly relationship troubles, and partly a feeling of being too distant from this community I brought together, compounded each other.
I started to feel like my gear kink wasn't so important anymore, that it was almost toxic, like it was consuming me slowly. I succumbed to the taboo shame. 11/
In early 2000, I grabbed all the kink gear I owned: a couple motorcycle helmets, some wetsuits, some leather jackets and pants, a dozen gloves, some boots, jocks and cups, etc. — my entire gear collection up to that point — and loaded up the trunk of my car and drove to an undisclosed location. 12/
I'd already cleared and prepped the site for safety the previous weekend, so I put on my gasmask (that would be added later), piled it all up as planned, added accelerant, and lit it.
My entire kink life was literally going up in flames in a bonfire, as I watched with a strange sense of calm. 13/
My lingering doubt over my own passions led me to one hell of a ragequit, and the users of the old Gearfetish website didn't even get to see it.
They only got a blank webpage announcing the abrupt closure of the site. Visitors tried to fit their interests into other sites available at the time. 14/
Somewhere along the way in 2000, I got an email from a previous site visitor roughly my age, who wanted to take on the website name and re-create the community with profiles, picture galleries, and more interactive messaging than just the contact list. He'd been friendly before, so I said yes. 15/
In late '00-early '01, he launched the newer version of Gearfetish from scratch, and it brought back many users... including me.
It took a while, but I eventually accepted that my interests weren't going away. I returned to that community, this time as a spiritual father figure. I felt "home." 16/
The site ran with only one major overhaul through late 2015, and had a few hundred thousand user accounts by then.
Some even had professional careers in technical gear or costuming. I encountered some kink researchers, and mild celebrities, in private almost confessional-like conversations. 17/
But then in the middle of September 2015, users found another error: DNS failure. The site simply went off the air without warning, or this time even an acknowledgment or apology. I was furious at the owner, of course. I built that community, gave it to him, and it was just gone again. 18/
The death of Gearfetish left a huge hole (and not the usual one) in what had become a very big community, one that had influenced both trends in huge ways.
That site was the origin story for several famous kinkwear shops. The community's take on wearing gear influenced high fashion and art. 19/
The tragedy of Gearfetish's demise isn't perhaps how it scattered our community, though. Sure, I was mad at the owner, even though I had agreed to give it all to him.
Rather, it was a conversation I had with him over the phone a couple years later. I found him and I really wanted to understand. 20/
I won't detail his own emotional pain, but basically, he gave up because he became afraid of his own passion, in a time he wasn't feeling as connected to it.
All the things I felt in the months leading up to the nastiest bonfire I've ever attended. I wasn't angry anymore, just disappointed. 21/
Other Gearfetish clone site attempts popped up, but largely failed (though GearFetishX is still running today AFAICT).
The way social networking worked was changing. Web forums were dying; we were already well into the corporate social media era.
So we rebuilt on Other People's Platforms. 22/
Gearfetish keft behind a giant impression on the world of kink and fetishwear. It's cool to wear technical clothes that feel protective and strong for fun, for style, for sex. It's *everywhere.*
I'm deeply grateful that the gear community is still here even when I don't feel connected to it. 23/
The reason the community was hit so hard, twice, is because of shame around grey-asexual feelings that can, sometimes, make us believe that the kinks were all a mistake.
The parts of our brains saying that maybe we should even keep them out of our sight. The parts that give us doubt. 24/
But the kinks we enjoy for ourselves, which change how we see our identities, which make us feel like whole people, are not mistakes.
Yes, passions can fade over time, and they can return just as strong. We should embrace the joy we previously had, even when it doesn't feel the same now. 25/
I'm still a part of the gear community. (I don't have much of a choice; I've been told that I'm a godfather or something!?)
But it's not a deep calling right now. I can put it on the shelf for a while and appreciate it from a distance. I can remember my joy, not the pain of disconnection. 26/
So don't let your own down periods keep you from remembering your joy. Human brains are fucking complicated.
You're allowed to have other interests take over. Who knows, those kinks might come roaring back sometime, and you'll suddenly become an unwitting kink elder too. Ask how I know. 😁 27/end