• This entire feature article "Rubberotica 1988!" is also available in Acrobat pdf.
• Author's historical introduction
• Actual feature article as published
• Illustrations

Rubber baby-buggy bumpers. I confess. That’s how this kid started out in rubberoticism, moving on immediately to harder stuff like rubber training pants which led inevitably to my summer-camp rubberized swim briefs: mine and the blond hunk of a Norwegian lifeguard whose own latex trunks, white in the style of the 50’s, rubbed up against my hardening 10-year-old body every time he helped me climb into the rubber inner tubes we used for floaters on Lake Winnekaka.

            He once asked me why I kept falling through the rubber ring and always needed his help to mount up again when I knew he knew that I knew I could easily handle the inner tube myself.

            “Cuz you’re the coach,” I said.

            Yeah, buddy! I couldn’t tell him I was in love with him, watching him standing cock-deep in his stretch-latex trunks. But I’ll never forget those summer days being lifted in his strong arms, held for a moment against his great chest and nipples, feeling him drop my butt through the rubber ring into the cold water with the back of my knees and shoulders burning against the sun-hot black inner tube.

LIFE WAS RUBBER-DUCKY

            Once a smart kid gets a good game going, he tries to keep the adult playing it until the adult wears out. I so worshipped that big-shouldered Scandanavian power-swimmer by the time I was 13 that when, at 23, I first saw Tom of Finland’s lifeguards, their huge bulging cocks stretching out their (I imagined latex) briefs, I realized that my attraction to rubber was so far twisted from innocent swimwear fashion that it was in fact fetish. Tom was drawing what I was living. Life imitates life.

            My own Dad helped me along the rubber brick road. He was a mechanic running his own shop in the double-garage behind our house. His fatherly nightly kiss smelled of internal combustion exhaust, grease, oil, gasoline, Camels, and the rubber of inner tubes and tires.

            “Hug me again, Daddy.”

            And he did. What “Sick Click” of trick rubber-loving there was those nights was in me only, not in him. He had no idea in his head what was in my churning little brain pan. Funny, isn’t it? He was the innocent. I was the burgeoning pervert. He had no idea that I loved him not only as a Dad but as a blue-collar rubber man who changed tires to make a living for us.

DADDY MADE ME RUBBERMAN

            On Halloween, the year I was 11, I announced I wanted to go trick-or-treating dressed up like the comic book character Rubber Man. My Dad, swear to God, helped me out. He took tire inner tubes, cutting and glueing them into shape to fit around my legs.

            “They have to be tighter, Dad.” (Even when you’re a little pervert fetishist you want everything exactly right.)

            “Tight you want, tight you get,” he said.

            He re-cut the tubes for my legs. He sliced up one of my old bicycle inner tubes to lengths that fit my arms. My mother hee-hawed and said I looked like the black rubber garden hose, but she too was game for what they thought was a gag, and, using my swim trunks as a pattern, sewed up a pair of black rubber briefs that fit me like a glove, in fact, like the black rubber gloves my dad took from his garage and slipped on my hands. They were so big he had to tie them on around my wrists with black rubber bungee cords wrapped around my arms about six wonderful times.

            My sister, who later turned out to be the best fag-hag a brother could ever want, made fun of me, saying the bike inner tubes on my arms made me look like Hildegard, the cafe chanteuse whose trademark, she said, was black gloves that rose all the way up her arms to her biceps.

            Fuck Hildegard.

            I was Rubber Man.

            So good old sis came up with the idea of making me a rubber vest as a kind of shirt for my naked torso. It’s great when a family can get behind a kid’s fantasy costume for Halloween. My older brother, whose cock was the first cock I ever sucked, dragged out a black gas mask to cover up what he said was my ugly face. (As the perfect older brother, he later on introduced me to my first Trojan rubber, rolling it down my always-erect teenaged dick himself. God! I love fraternal sex education!)

            Anyway, that Halloween, my brother was pretty rough putting the gas mask on me. He nearly tore off my ears and nose, and when he cinched down the straps, he pulled them fast and clicked them tight. The rubber shock to my simmering pervert brain was instant the moment the gas mask locked tight around my face and my only breath came whistling through the mask’s hose dangling in front of my mouth like a long black rubber dick. Then my brother got the bright idea that I wear his black-rubber fishing waders on my feet. I had rather fancied wearing my black swim fins, but he convinced me I could cover more houses and get more candy because I could travel faster in waders than in flippers.

            My mother thought I’d be too hot with the waders on over the inner-tube leggings my dad had made me. Mothers are always right. I was sweating up a drench, but I liked it, so mom lost out when everyone voted I looked every inch like Rubber Man with my brother’s waders turned down and tied off with more black rubber bungee cords circling around my thighs.

            I was in Rubber Heaven.

FETISH CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN

            Maybe all us guys like Halloween so much because as kids we could get away in public with our first beginning approaches to our incubating fetishes. Without a blush.

            At the age of 11, for one brief shining night, under the full moon, I became Rubber Man, heroic, strong, invincible, armored in tight black, steaming rubber. Actually, at least three housewives, just like the housewives in TV soap commercials who sniff their husbands’ shirts and gag and reach for the Tide detergent, tossed my candy at me, making me stand back from their door, because, they nagged, I smelled dirty like gasoline.

            Ah! The secret of male fetish gear was blooming into my boyhood understanding like a raunchy night flower. This was male power: getting dirty and stinky and just a bit sleazy.

            Now that I am a man, I have not, repeat, have not, put away the things of a child. I’m one of those lost boys straight out of Peter Pan. I want to keep on playing. And I do.

RUBBER: CLOSET BONDAGE

            Leather, I love, and rubber, the next fetish step beyond leather, I worship. When I was editor of Drummer, a model who was engaged for a rubber bondage shoot failed to show. That was bad, because we were tight on our deadline. The camera man and the Rubber Bondage Top grew impatient. I had intended to direct the still photo shoot as a fourth party, but, what the hell!

            “I guess I’ll have to play the rubber victim,” I said.

            “But you’re a Top,” the Rubber Bondage Top said.

            “If you, my man, are a good Top, you can top a Top,” I said. What an asshole, I thought, every Top’s a Bottom. Fuck top and bottom. Versatility is where it’s at. Tops need topping too.

            (Editor’s note: The results of that shoot you can see in Drummer 24, one of the most popular issues ever. Here, reprised from that very collectible issue, are a couple bondage-suspension, rubber gas-mask photos for your viewing pleasure.)

THE ART OF HIGH-TECH LATEX

            Currently, a rubber freak doesn’t have to cut up inner tubes to become Rubber Man. The new sophisticated advances in high-tech latex have made tight, form-fitting full-body rubber suits, hoods, and codpieces de rigeur for lovers of the rubber gum tree. Witness the exquisitely elegant rubber photography of Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1978 annual Son of Drummer and whose “Biker Cigar” work graced the cover of the aforementioned Drummer 24. Witness some of the great rubber artists like Martin of Holland, Domino, and the incomparable Rex.

            Martin’s scatalogical European drawings integrate rubber gear as breath-control and force-feeding tubes for sewage flow. Martin is not for the garden-variety vanilla fairy. His rubber sexploitation plumbs the depth of the rubber fetish whose radical roots lie in bondage, submission, and the warm womb waters where we once all floated amniotically in our own piss and shit.

            Domino’s sleazoid New York vision of greasy, sweaty men in rubber work-gear runs the gamut: “fly” fishermen in waders; pissing, rubber-shrouded firemen; and cigar-chomping sewer workers (force-fucking face with big uncut dicks), sitting, swathed in rubber jackets and boots, in open manholes. Domino’s drawing, “Hunting Party,” features three burly rednecks in rubber-booted hunting gear piss-raping a bound, naked, cocksucking young hiker with a double-barreled shotgun aimed hard as a cock at his bouncing balls.

            The fascination of Rex with rubber gear is recurrent subtext of his drawings: a circle jerk of seven fully geared firemen shooting their loads; handsome men with long tongues sucking out used rubbers; full rubber-suited, rubber-helmeted studs, who look as at home in their rubber as the fabled SEALS of the USN look in their scuba gear on rubber rafts; Nazi torturers in high rubber boots and open rubber raincoats exposing massive, dripping, hard cocks; tough dam builders, standing calf-deep in water wearing rubber bib overalls drenched in piss. Rex dares venture even into the world of medical rubber: gloves, surgical gowns, restraints, rubber catheters, rubber ether masks used by mad doctors who know that man is the ultimate experimental animal!

RUBBER COMPLEMENTS LEATHER

            While leather has been somewhat devalued by its trendy “fashion” availability as well as by the theft of its mystique from the true leather community by spiked-haired punks of both sexes, rubber and latex have become the latest hallmark of the sexual, sensual sophisticate. Fortunately, rubber/latex gear is much more pricey than leather, so it’s not likely to be co-opted by the unimaginative mass consumers who so often imitate our hard-driven style. Unfortunately, rubber/latex doesn’t last forever. There’s not a rubber man alive who doesn’t keep a bicycle patch kit in his game room. Every rubber afficionado has his current gear plus old gear worn out by heavy sexual mileage.

THE NIGHT MY RUBBER SUIT EXPLODED

            My full-body one-piece rubber suit that covers a man from toes to the top of the head–the attached helmet having only two breathing holes–came one day to an explosive sad end. After clipping a fuck-buddy’s toenails, and then covering the still sharp little buggers with wool socks, I baby-powdered him completely and had him step into the suit feet first. Very carefully. His dick was immediately at full staff. Next I inserted his arms into the sleeves and began to slowly zip up the suit’s only opening, a zipper that ran up from the small of the back to the top of the head. I faced him toward a large mirror, so that he could see his white flesh transmogrified into an abstract black-rubber form of his bodyshape.

            For several minutes, I let the hood hang down on his chest. I wanted him to drink in the mirrored vision before pulling the eyeless hood over his head and zipping it up tight to the crown. He was crazy with the new-found rubber definition of his body. As I began to work the hood’s noseholes over his face, he suddenly dropped in lust to his knees.

            He wanted to suck my cock!

            What a jerk!

            The scene wasn’t about sexual cocksucking. It was about sensual, complete-body rubber encasement. Some guys just don’t get it!

            Anyway, my friend, I should say, my former friend, was a bit of a porker. As he dropped like a black-rubber mummy to his knees to suck my hard dick, his plump, no, his fat thighs split the rubber suit in a tear from the knee 24 inches up to his bubble butt. The sudden flash of white skin appearing through the jagged tear of black rubber looked like lightning splitting a dark night sky. At that moment, I could have gotten into nonconsensual S&M! But gentleman that I am, I didn’t. Gentleman that he wasn’t, not only didn’t he apologize, he didn’t even offer to help repair the $350 suit, which turned out to be unrepairable.

            So goes life when you’re burning rubber in the fast lane!

            What is it about some of these unevolved guys who don’t understand that some trips, especially fetish trips, just aren’t about cocksucking? Go figure!

RUBBER: FUTURE SEX

            The possibilities of black rubber latex are endless.

            If leather is our heritage from the Brando 50’s, black rubber is Future Sex.

            A man hasn’t lived until he’s been tied up with an inflatable rubber hood over his head, the hood fitted with at least seven gaskets that inflate rubber pads tight over his ears, both his eyes, up his nostrils, and back into his throat. The double-skinned hood’s internal rubber skin presses against the head and face tighter and tighter as the hood’s outer skin expands when air is pumped into the cavity between the two skins. The exotic feel of one’s head, isolated, sealed in pressurized bondage is incredible. The sense deprivation is profound: no sight, no sound; only the smell and feel of black rubber ballooning out around the head and squeezing ever tighter across the face.

24 HOURS IN A SKINTIGHT RUBBER BODY BAG

            The world’s greatest rubber gear is available custom-made and mail-order from England and is distributed on a limited basis in specialty stores in the US, such as Mr. S. The only rubber device that can top the inflatable hood is the inflatable black-rubber body bag.

            Imagine a zipped sleeping bag that lets your head stick out. Then visualize the sealed latex body bag, laid out on the floor like a flat rectangle with a rounded helmet at one end for enshrouding your head. The only opening is at the foot. The Top drops the foot of the two-ply rectangle like an inner-tube over your powdered head and works it down your shoulders and torso and legs, form-fitting you all the way, until he inserts your head inside the soft darkness of the latex helmet. A hard rubber breathing tube forces your lips apart and is your only connection to the outer world.

            Lying flat, so enshrouded, with your arms tight at your sides, you hear a motorized airpump switch on. Air begins to inflate the double rubber bag around your body. The pressure builds with the sensually slow inflation. The inside skin of rubber molds to your body. The air outside that skin is itself trapped inside the outer skin of rubber which is inflating like a large rectangular balloon. The more air pumped in the tighter you are squeezed by the inner skin, until your arms and legs and whole torso and head are virtually crushed together immobile by the air bag surrounding you on both sides and top and bottom.

            You float, free of gravity, inside a skintight rubber sheath, inside a layer of dense air pressure, inside an outer casement of industrial-strength rubber latex.

            There is no quick way out.

            The rubber body bag takes half as long to deflate for your escape as it took to inflate for your encasement. This trip to the moon on gossamer wings is not for the novice; but for the man wishing to probe his deep inner space where there is no time but the beating thump of his own heart-clock, the rubber body bag is the epitome of rubber bondage, whether used for sensuality or for punishment.

            Ground Control to Major Tom!

            A finger, outside the bag, pressed over the breathing tube can take total control of your life. You know exactly where you are in the universe. A wisp of popper lets you know exactly where you are in the cosmos.

RUBBER STRETCHES EROTICISM

            If I weren’t gay, I’d be pissed. We seem to have more fun than anybody. No wonder straights regard us the way they do. They don’t hate us. They’re just jealous. And we’re fools if we don’t continue to press on, pushing out the envelope of safe-sexual sensuality. When a homosexual becomes a homosensual, he reaches beyond suck/fuck to total body orgasm. Rubber is the new frontier. It’s positively California Cosmic, man!

RUBBER VIDEO

            As many writers do, I’ve recently crossed genres, moving into video, trying to capture visually on tape some of the fetishes I’ve tried to celebrate in words. Most all filmmakers start out as writers. A vision is a vision on a page or on a screen.

            Under the sexual-pun name of Palm Drive Video, dramatizing among other fetishes, cigars, muscles, beards, and sexy athletic gear, I fell in, without benefit of a casting couch, with a B-A-D rubber companion. His name: Keith Ardent.

            Keith, hung with 9 long, thick, veined inches, stretches a hairy 6-4 and weighs in at a muscular 210. He’s a real piece of work! Actually, he’s the First Major Erotic Star of the 90’s. He’s appeared with the outrageous video master, Christopher Rage, and with the bondage-and-muscle-dedicated ZEUS studios. Because all his video starring roles had been in films with casts of thousands, I figured to shoot Keith solo: talking nasty to the viewer and flaunting his big dick and engorging his steel-radial 2-inch nipples with a dual tit-pump vacuum machine. Talk about high-tech Industrial Sex! Keith is more versatile than a turnstyle. Not only goodlooking, he’s twisted sexually, and sensually, very nicely, thank you. As a matter of fact, Keith Ardent, one of the world’s great Sexual Stunt Men, is a one-man E-ticket Sexual Theme Park.

THE SMELL OF THE RUBBER,
THE ROAR OF THE RUBBER BEAST

            The point of this? Ta-DA! The world’s first rubber fetish video. Following in the rubber-boot art steps of Martin of Holland, Domino, and Rex, the video, 9-Inch Pec Stud in Black Rubber, is a nasty 90 minutes of spit, piss, verbal abuse, and rubber gear: a full-length black-rubber police raincoat, rubber hip boots, gas masks, rubber tanktop, rubber pec harness, and rubber ballwrap stretchers.

            When two fetishists get together, things go glimmering.

            Keith pulled his rubber gear from his bag piece by piece while I pulled from my footlocker rubber that would make my Dad proud--except, of course, for the full rubber suit that exploded. Our rubber gear combined perfectly; everything that rises must converge. The sight and scent and sound and feel of rubber and oil turned Keith into the complete video Rubber Man who was the dream invention of my boyhood, and spun him even further into a roaring Rubber Beast Manimal exhibiting his world-class rubber tits!

WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR

            You have to be careful what you wish for in your fantasies when you jerk off, because, sooner or later, you’ll conjure up that fantasy in reality!

DIAL 800-R-U-B-B-E-R

            When I collided with the ardent Mr. Ardent, our rubber fetish scene wasn’t just one more great time that happens between sickoid guys and then evaporates. The video camera caught it all. If you don’t own at least a Camcorder, you owe it to yourself to get one now. You deserve it! Years from now, when you’re more wrinkled than a new Goodyear tire, you can relive your most memorable scenes–your very own Performance Art–with your hot palm driving your hard cock while you watch yourself and your fuckbuddy on your 40-inch screen. The video camera is the devil’s own tool and you’ll have a hell of a good time whether you shoot for your own private pleasure, or, as Keith did to share his sexual madness with men too numerous for him to ever meet personally.

            Kodak photos and Polaroids are perhaps a bit passe. They catch only one click of reality. Video is a million “clicks” per hour. You can run clicks in slo-mo; you can fastforward; you can find the one frame that kills you and freeze it on screen until you cum. (You can even buy a gizmo for your VCR that will print out an instant snapshot of any given frame on your video tape.)

            You can see change occur. You can see fetish passion gain momentum. You can see your Super-ego become your Id.

            Keith in the Pec Stud in Black Rubber video starts out as Keith and then changes before your very eyes, like Jekyll and Hyde, into Keith, the living, spitting, hip-booted, harnessed, gas-masked Rubber Man pumping his enormous Rubber Beast cock with both fists, roaring that he’s become a “fucking human rubber dildo, man!” All the while, the dual tit pumps are suctioning his tits out ready for the rubber bands he rolls down tight around their meaty 2-inch base: twin dials of ecstasy with an 800 number for Alpha Centauri.

            Keith Ardent in Pec Stud in Black Rubber is called out here not so much for a Carson Show plug, but rather as an announcement of 1) a rip-roaring documentary video of rubber passion, 2) an erotic Performance Art Video for men who worship rubber already, and, perhaps, 3) even as a Training Video for men curious about bonding into the rubber mystique.

            Whatever.

            Keith Ardent’s solo rubberoticism video is a world’s first!

THE HARDON IS A LONELY HUNTER

            Forgive me waxing on, and wiping, and polishing. Writing is a lonely profession. You do it by yourself for hours, days, weeks, months, years at a time. Shooting video includes at least one other person in the creative process and the socialization on a sexual-esthetic level is exhilarating.

            Men who already know the joys of sweating man-skin in tight black rubber, understand the psychology behind the physical applications of the fetish gear detailed here. You don’t need to be employed by Sigmund Freud to talk of womb experiences, toilet training, bondage, pain, pleasure, and the high quality of homosensuality.

            Ah, RUBBER! Thy name is Lust!

            Latex is a one-way trip. It’s like heroin. It’s so good, don’t even try it once, unless you mean to join Sergeant Pepper’s Rubber Band. Once a man takes a rubber ride, he evolves onward sensually, incorporating all the aspects of latex which is so totally adaptable to heightening all the other pleasures of cocks, balls, tits, fists, bondage, and the mondo way beyondo!

            Men who have yet to Go for It, to experience the transcendent move from leather, which one never leaves behind, to the joys of rubber, are in for greater tricks-and-treats than I ever got that first Halloween night when my sweet, innocent Dad turned me forever, heading down the home stretch, into Rubber Man!

NINE INCH PEC STUD IN BLACK RUBBER!

Palm Drive Video

Pushing New Video Frontiers...

Supersexstar Keith Ardent is a real piece of rubber work! A hairy 6-4, 210, huge nine inches. Major titwork–rubbergear–masks–huge cock and balls–industrial sex. We’re not talking mass-market gay-boy video, here. None of the new obsessed-with-kink studios fits into the old porno categories. Few have plots. You wanna plot? Go watch Casablanca. This is sex action. Rubber action. Piss action. Throbbing dick fuck action. The wonder with the new macho video studios shooting REALISM, the video of sexual truth, not posing, is not that they as video verite are sometimes less than perfect technically, but that they as video–sex video–exist at all.

            That’s the news. This new homoerotic video genre for men who like men masculine exists!

©1988, 2003 Jack Fritscher