By Lars
Originally published in Drummer magazine
Part 1: Preliminaries
In our introductory correspondence, when the cowboy first used the term, it turned me off. Boot slave. Hell, I craved boots, leather and bondage—even rigid bondage—but somehow I preferred the image of “prisoner” or “convict” not slave. The gay connotation of “slave” was, well, too slavish to suit me. Homosexual slaves, it seemed, service their masters voluntarily, wimpishly, without genuine compulsion. Conversely, prisoners and convicts pulled time involuntarily.