Man On The Edge: An Interview With Kink’s Van Darkholme

Ninety percent of the guys we shoot start out vanilla,” says Van Darkholme with a sly smile.  “They get converted.”

Van Darkholme is the driving force behind KinkMen.com, the four-year-old upstart which is part of Kink.com’s porn empire. He’s as massive and imposing as the San Francisco Armory that houses the company – a tower of muscle who wants to change the image of gay bondage and discipline.

“I make it accessible to younger guys,” he says. “The younger generation is interested in fetish, but they have nowhere to go.”

This was the dilemma that Van himself had faced in the mid 1990's in West Hollywood, CA. He was into BDSM, but not the scene.

“There were guys dressing up in full leather and jumping on the sling, but they were older guys. They did some bondage, but it was more like rough sex with a lot of poppers.”

Van was interested in the young, muscular, and attractive guys that he saw every day at the gym.  So he started bringing home jocks and introducing them to Shibari, a ritualistic rope art developed by Samurai warriors back in the 16th century. Van Darkholme’s vision was more about control and less about costuming. He started filming guys in his garage, and after  reading an article about Kink, he decided to contact the company's founder Peter Acworth.  Acworth was intrigued. Soon after, Kink launched the BoundGods.com website.

Mainstream gay porn stars were lining up to get involved, which didn’t surprise Van Darkholme.

“By cutting off the blood flow to the torso, it intensifies the orgasm. If you cut off circulation, it just goes right to the dick. With vanilla porn sex, they just go to the mattress and get into porn robot mode. Here, it’s a huge journey.”

Best of all, he was inducting hot new men into the scene.

“When they're getting tied up for the first time, they freak out and they get dizzy, because everything is a first-time sensation,” he explains. “They get a huge adrenaline rush from the session and it stays with some of them.”

It stays with a lot of them, actually. Dominic Pacifico, Tommy Defendi, Shane Frost, Race Cooper, Leo Forte, and Trent Diesel are just a few of the men whom Van has converted. Sebastian Keys liked it so much that he went out and got a tattoo that said “361”, which is his model ID in Kink's database. Spencer Reed, a committed dom top, has twice put himself into Van’s strong hands.

Soon, Van had built up his own empire at Kink. The Bound Gods site was followed by the launch of NakedKombat.com, a wrestling fetish site that is more Mixed Martial Arts than WWF. “I tell them to pretend they haven’t eaten in two weeks,” explained Darkholme, “And they’re fighting over a piece of bread.” In 2010, Kink Men then launched BoundInPublic.com –  which grew out of the group sex parties that Van had been hosting at the Armory.

This spring, Kink launched MenOnEdge.com, a new site where Van takes control of men's orgasms. Men are tied up and repeatedly brought to the edge until they're begging to unload, but only Van decides when they're allowed to cum.

“With Men on Edge I'm getting back to my roots,” says Darkholme. “You're tying somebody up who you're not supposed to tie up. He's never done it before, but he shows his affirmation with his hard cock. Not with his emotion, and not with his heart – but with his hard-on. That's a really powerful thing.”