A journal about rope, and the people in it

How the site started

Before DeLano Bound there was DeLano In Distress, a site DeLano began more than seven years earlier with the idea of being, in his words, a male Bettie Page: someone who had bondage adventures, camped it up, and traded on a pun for a scene name. It was meant to be fun, and it was.

What changed was a growing realisation that the commercial side of bondage imagery was not where the interesting work was. As a male bondage model working in a market largely built around women being tied, DeLano found that the industry framing limited both his play and his photography. A club performance shot with an old friend made the point sharply: the pictures looked flat because the connection was not there.

DeLano Bound was the answer to that. Instead of performances for a room, it would be private shoots with people he trusted; instead of glitz and flash, it would be rope and relationship. The mission statement on the homepage has said the same thing since 2004: to create art through ropework as a bottom and as a top, and to be part of the art of people he admires.

What the journal contains

Each entry pairs an essay with one or more sets of photographs. The essays cover classes and events, shoots, friendships, and what suspension actually feels like from inside the rope. The photographs are made mostly in collaboration with the photographer Michele Serchuk, whose work appears throughout the archive, and with rope tops including Midori, Skye, Mistress Yin, Emma Hui, Monk and others.

The result is a fairly unusual document: a first-person account of rope bondage written by someone who was tied for most of it, with a photographer’s record of the same sessions alongside.

Consent, age verification and copyright

Three policies have governed this site from the beginning, and they are worth stating plainly:

• Consenting adults only. Every model featured was aged 21 or over at the time of photography, and gave informed consent to be photographed and published.
• Documentation on file. Signed model releases and proof of age and identity were collected for every shoot and are retained by the publisher.
• Respect for copyright. Photographs remain the property of the individual photographers as watermarked. No image may be reposted, rehosted or redistributed without the written permission of the copyright holder.

A note on safety

Rope bondage is not a safe activity. Suspension in particular can cause nerve damage, loss of consciousness, falls and, in the worst cases, death. The journal describes scenes that were carried out by experienced people with equipment, spotters and negotiated limits. They are a record of what happened, not a set of instructions. If you want to learn rope, take an in-person class from a qualified instructor — see the safety and consent guide.

The original masthead

These graphics headed the site between 2004 and 2009. They are reproduced here because the design they belonged to — a fixed-width page of absolutely positioned layers — is part of what DeLano Bound was, even though it no longer works on a phone.