I've not only always known, I've always known I was a switch, because I was excited by imagining being in either role. When I was little these were just vague ideas about tying and stripping naked and "doing things" to people, with no clear notion of what the things were, only that they were forbidden and thrilling.

Whether you call the excitement I felt "sexual" is a matter of definition. I don't even know if I got an erection back then, because I was young enough not to notice it unless it got in the way, but I knew that thinking about those special things gave a special sort of excitment.

Eventually - maybe age 10 - I discovered that playing with myself made the exciting ideas even better, but they didn't actually involve sex till I was maybe 15. Not because I didn't know what it was about, but because BDSM was more of a thrill. I recall, maybe aged 13, watching a Western in our local fleapit cinema. The man in the black hat had the busty heroine tied up... he laughed cruelly, he took her in his arms as she struggled and screamed, and he... kissed her? Eeew, I thought; why couldn't he do something interesting, like whip her till she cried? When I finally incorporated penetrative sex in my fantasies it was strictly rape, whether by me or of me.

At first I wasn't sure if I was different, or if everyone was into this sort of thing but you weren't supposed to talk about it. (Like, TV and films and books are full of scenes of tying up and at least threats of torture, and it wouldn't be there if people didn't like it, right?) I remember drawing an elaborate machine to strip, torture and humiliate an enemy, the noteworthy point being that the design assumed that any boy going through this would get a hard-on; I wasn't sure if that was right, but it felt right to me.

Once I had figured out that it wasn't everyone, I became good at finding people who would appreciate the ideas and maybe want to play them out with me. And I still am