Tie Me Up, Nawashi

While sharing trade secrets, Lochai says, he wrapped a rope around Midori's wrist, and she did the same to him. But that was as far as it went, he says; the two dominant personalities all but canceled each other out.

Some of the darker aspects of rope play are embodied in Jimi Tatu, a big, bald, and imposing figure who teaches classes at the Lake Worth facility. Easygoing smile aside, Tatu has an almost drill-sergeant appearance. Where Lochai is affable, approachable, and transparent, Tatu is guarded, intensely private, and extremely serious. He talks about "a sadistic side to rope [that has] a spiritual side too."

Tatu says that some people, "when they're bound, can't resist the pleasure being inflicted on them." A laugh emerges, and his eyes sparkle.

His earliest encounters with rope fetishism were around age 10, he says, when he was visiting a small store in his grandmother's hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. On the counter was a pulpy detective magazine, its front-cover illustration showing a woman bound, gagged, and tied to a chair. "I got chastised for looking at that," he says.

A few years later, he lashed Marcie, a childhood playmate, to a swing set; he eventually earned a merit badge in knot-tying as an Eagle Scout. A love of Japanese culture, traditions, and rituals, combined with an appreciation of pinup models back to the Betty Grable days, fueled his fetish. Basic Western-style bondage — women tied up with unimaginative knots and pedestrian positions — did nothing for him, he says. Turned on by Zen gardens, he wanted his harnesses and hogties to reflect the same thought-inducing style. After a Baptist education in New Orleans — coupled with an introduction to the city's fledgling S-M underground in the 1970s — he ended up in South Florida.

By the mid-'90s, Tatu helped start organizations like SPICE (South Florida People Involved in Consensual Endeavors), and he started a BDSM website of his own. Ds-Arts.com, his latest Internet presence, is a repository of information about Japanese rope artistry.

He's working on a book called The Way of Rope, with a how-to-tie tutorial and accompanying DVD. At ShibariCon, he teaches classes like "Sex, Shibari Style" and "Japanese Chest Harnesses."

When Tatu asked those attending his Lake Worth class (a mix of ages and backgrounds, up to 40 people at a time, he relates) if they'd mind a reporter attending a session, "The response was very negative, as I suspected it would. Most people prefer to do their thing in private."

Once a month, however, the Lifestyle Alternative Centre hosts the Photo Artisans Guild (PAG), "and their photographers and models crave attention," he says. The meeting functions as a contemporary extension of an amateur camera club. On a clear, nearly nippy January night, more than a dozen photographers, makeup artists, and models have arrived, including Tatu, Lochai, Janice, Pixel (a 20-year-old photographer and model from Alaska), and Don, AKA Quietmaster, a retired professional photographer who looks to be in his 70s.

Lochai helps run the PAG along with the LAC's founders, Jeff and Keiki Weigel. The center takes great pains to distance itself from swingers clubs, fetish dungeons, or the like. No alcohol is served, just pop and pizza. Everyone assembled is white and well-off, like Deiter, an architect and amateur photo buff.

Lochai tries to make clear what the Photo Artisans Guild isn't: "It's not a place of pornography or sexual shooting — it's a venue for fine art. We're here to create artistic material — not for websites charging money. You're not going to have people fucking in here. It's not what PAG is about."

Smoking a cigarette behind the facility, Deiter agrees. "I'm here for pure motives of creativity and expression," he insists. "Not anything perverted — it's about the art." Deiter was taking a rope-bondage class from Jimi Tatu when he noticed the photographs in the front hallway and became curious about PAG.

Quietmaster whips out a black notebook-folder and a dog-eared magazine, its cover adorned with a photograph of Bettie Page leaning against an old car. One summer afternoon in the late '50s, Don and a group of photographers were in upstate New York shooting a group of lingerie models at an old farmhouse. A camera club similar to tonight's PAG shoot, no one had any idea of the risque status Page would later attain. "If I had known," Don says, "I wouldn't have shot anyone else."

That one day is his claim to fame. "You shot Bettie!" the other photographers say in amazement. "Doesn't make me a good photographer," Don shrugs. "Just means I was in the right place at the right time."

Piercings, shaved cootches, and tattoos have replaced Bettie's relative innocence, Don notes, but he still loves it all. His folder is full of photos of comely young models he's shot at the center. The models who come to PAG, Lochai explains, are paid with photo CDs or prints from the session. Many of those he's photographing will show up in his newest book, Kirinawa: Rope Cut for a Certain Purpose.

Stasha has driven all the way down from Kissimmee tonight just to be tied up by and among a room full of people she's never met.