Achilles
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TKLFest Presentation Part 1
🕑 Added 2022-10-22 16:27:06 +0000 UTCTKLFest presentation Part 1:
Hey everyone! I'm at TKLFest in Atlanta this weekend, and it's been a blast so far. The best part has been actually meeting guys in the flesh who I have only seen or communicated with online over the past decades. Everyone has been super nice and I've gotten a lot of humbling compliments.
I put on a presentation that was a brief history of how I discovered the community, how I started doing the drawings in the first place and what led me to start making the art again last year. I thought I'd share it here for the folks who couldn't make it to Fest. I'm going to break it down into a few parts since there were a lot of slides.
I began with the first image I saw that made me aware there was a community of men into feet and tickling: the Foot Fraternity ad in an issue of Bound & Gagged magazine I found in a gay bookstore when I was 19 years old. It was a huge moment of awakening for me and, of course, I bought the magazine.
Etienne was an artist that was hugely influential on me. While he absolutely had a foot fetish and drew gorgeous male feet prominently in most of his art, I don't believe he had a tickling fetish. However, the two tickle drawings in his catalog featuring military guys were the very first erotic tickling art I ever saw. I believe they were most likely commissioned by a tickle fan. The following slide is a collage of some of Etienne's best foot worship art.
The Foot Fraternity was the first mail-order foot fetish club that I joined, after finding the ad for them in Bound & Gagged. For those of you who don't remember, these days were not only pre-social media...they were pre-INTERNET. The only way to connect with other guys into this fetish was to join a club where you got a quarterly newsletter 'zine that had personal ads in it. More on that later.
The Foot Fraternity was one of the first of these clubs available, run by Dug Gaines, and it was a resource for Dug's collection of male foot worship videos and photo sets. Unfortunately for ticklers, tickling was not Dug's fetish. He had some tickle content available but you could tell his heart was not in it. However, in the days where tickling videos (on VHS tape!) were very few and far between, tickle fetishists ate up whatever we could get ahold of and gladly.
Another foot club that sprung up shortly afterwards was the NFN or "National Foot Network". While the Foot Fraternity largely functioned as an oversized ad for Dug's content, the NFN was more of a true 'zine: a collection of stories, photos, artwork and even foot and tickling related content found in mainstream media. They also had a personal ad section and I need to explain to Millennial folks how this worked:
Each personal ad in the quarterly booklet had a number assigned to it. If there was an ad you wanted to respond to, you had to write a snail mail letter, put it in an envelope with the number of the ad on the envelope and mail that letter to the NFN. The NFN had all of the addresses associated with the ad numbers so they would then forward that letter to the person you were trying to reach. This was done to keep everyone's addresses private. This process could take weeks before you would get a response. You kids today have no idea...
Between the Foot Frat and the NFN I developed several pen pal relationships with guys who eventually found out I was an artist. Because content was so scarce at the time, a lot of them wanted me to draw for them in exchange for other material. A guy might trade me a copy of a VHS tape tickle video in trade for a drawing of his fantasy. My earliest tickle drawings were done in ball-point pen and sent off as xerox copies.
To be continued in Part 2!
