I 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/