I knew what I wanted when I walked into the gay bar. Accepting it, and preparing for it, had taken me seven years.
I was taught cognitive therapy techniques at fourteen. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Of course I applied the tool set to every aspect of my life. Some, it proved useful. I methodically worked through what turned me on, finding out what I actually wanted sexually and coming to terms with it.
Early experimentation proved that I liked sex with both primary plumbing configurations, and was enthusiastic about performing oral sex on just about anybody. I was submissive, an exhibitionist, and developed an immediate fetish when I learned about pony play.
I knew I wanted a man about ten years older than me, enough of an age gap to create a power dynamic, but not enough that it got weird. I wanted to be that woman in the video, pulling the cart, with my owner riding in it and driving me. Miss me with the head plume, though. I was not a show pony. I was a draft animal. I wanted to be taken out to the field and worked hard, driven like an ox.
By the time I reached that point mentally, I'd already been doing prep work for two years. My right knee developed issues, needed corrective surgery. I leaned into the strengthening exercises before and the physical therapy after. The work got done, with not even the slightest scrap of enthusiasm but with a grim determination that began to concern my parents.
I lived in a homophobic, redneck neighborhood, and attended a redneck, homophobic magnet school in the next neighborhood over. Cover was required for survival. The Appalachian Trail had deep lore, especially when you got to Through Hiking. I became a trail enthusiast. A map went up in my bedroom, and I started plotting routes. My neurodiversity lent itself readily to front loading Trail info, and infodumping at the slightest provocation. My parents and then pretty much everybody else learned to not ask questions about my exercise regimen, my diet, or really much of anything, as I would link it to my plans to Through Hike the Trail and go on until their eyes glazed over. I did meet my first actual boyfriend, though, another hiking enthusiast who became the first guy i sucked off outdoors, then the first guy to fuck me outdoors. We saw, well, a lot of each other for a few months, but then his father got a job in Cleveland and we didn't dare write.
Getting my academic shit together was hard until I discovered the Dayrunner. I quit trying to remember shit, and wrote it down. Once I let my OCD tendencies loose, and got maybe a little neurotic about checking the book, my grades came up. I ignored my guidance counselor, and put in for a history scholarship at a historically Black university in the next state over. Five were supposed to be awarded every year. I was one of three applicants, and not being Black, was quickly recruited for racial balance, which sounds bigoted and kind of is. The state in question was no better than where I grew up, and white folks tended to shun the university in question, making it hard for them to achieve their federally mandated quotas of non Black students.
Going there meant my parents distanced themselves from my life. Fine with me - I stayed with local friends over the Christmas break and gave myself a present I couldn't have gotten at home: an orchiectomy. Cost me six months of crappy student wages, but I got it done by a butch doctor who did sliding scale work for the queer community. He did a great job, too, took out the excess scrotal tissue and left me nice and tight behind my dick, just a single thread of scar tissue, hard to see if you weren't up close.
That made changes in my body that were noticeable. No replacement testosterone for me. My hair lightened, but was already so fine the texture change was minimal. I lost the incipient beard that had been trying to form. I was a late bloomer in the facial hair department. No great loss. I rounded off a little. Brushing it all off as side effects of physical conditioning wasn't quite believed when I went back to my parents' house that summer, but my father decided I was doing steroids to put on muscle instead of working out, and I left him his illusion.
My sophomore year, I only made two modifications, but they precluded my going back to my parents that summer. The livestock ring i had put through my cock could be hidden with baggy pants. The piercing ran side to side through the shaft, just behind the head, where a foreskin would have been if I hadn't been circumcised at birth. The ring was large enough that it went around the head of my cock when I was fully erect, and could be flipped over to lie against the top or underside of my shaft.
The second livestock ring went into my nose, and that was where the line got drawn. It went through a hole in the cartilage made with a dermal punch. Hurt like hell and gave me two black eyes, but I had a stainless steel ring that flared my nostrils and hung down past my lower lip, big enough there was no mistaking it for anything but an animal restraint. That was when I started wearing a Pony Pride t-shirt.
I spent that summer on a queer collective farm in the not too distant mountains. I lived mostly nude, but then so did several of the other residents. I slept initially on a cot, and then on a bed of hay I brought in to replace the cot. Seriously, sleeping on hay on the floor was more comfortable than the scout camp surplus folding cots they had. I worked in the fields, volunteered for as much grunt labor as I could handle, and spoke less as the summer wore on. And yes, i sucked a lot of cock, ate a lot of pussy, and got railed up the ass on a regular basis. Talking wasn't necessary after I'd established what I liked, what I was willing to do, and that I was generally available for fucking. I told my parents at the start I was going off to live on a farm, then just stopped communicating with them. I had no further financial obligation to them, and emotional connections just weren't their thing. They dropped out of my life like they'd never existed.
And so it came round to my 21st birthday. I had five semesters towards a history major with a 3.9 GPA. The Dayrunner, and the meds I'd scored along the way, had helped, but nobody's perfect. I'd trained for distance, strength, and endurance. I had livestock rings in my nose and cock that made it clear when I was nude that I was a gelded draft animal. And I started running an ad in the gay papers.
Draft gelding seeks actual farmer with heated barn/stable for long term relationship. Serious only.
The first few responses got tossed, but then I expected bogus ones from people who thought I was joking or making some kind of double entendre. The one who asked me if I was hung like a horse? Got a note back to look up gelding. The one that just sent "moo moo buckaroo" got a chuckle as I recognized the punchline he'd quoted, but likewise got tossed.
Then one arrived with a Polaroid of a beat up Ford truck with farm plates sitting out in front of a barn. The note on the back just asked, what do you really want?
I posted my reply to the classified desk under the reference number, and the paper forwarded my reply to keep us both safe until we decided to meet.
I want to live in your barn in nothing but a collar with my tags on it, I wrote back. I want to be hitched up and worked hard by someone who likes watching my naked ass sweating. I want my owner to fuck my mouth and ass frequently and with enthusiasm.