I recently found myself in yet another conversation with a longtime kinky player who made a disparaging comment about vanilla sex. If you’re not familiar with the term, it pretty much means anything sexual that isn’t BDSM, and it’s often used dismissively, as if sex that doesn’t include leather, whips, or pain is boring. Although […]

One of the most common questions I hear about polyamory/open relationships/non-monogamy (aka poly) is “how is that different from cheating?” I can understand the confusion- if your definition of “cheating” is “having sex with someone other than your spouse,” then you’re likely to equate poly with breaking the rules. But I always wonder about that- […]

I recently had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at Netroots Nation on the topic of sexuality and some of its connections to issues of social justice. The other speakers were amazing and the audience was a lot of fun. I just wish we’d had more time to talk with each other- the rest […]

It’s hard to find good writing about kink. Let me rephrase- it’s easy to find plenty of folks who write about how to do BDSM play, and many of them know what they’re talking about and can explain it well. There are also quite a few bloggers who share their personal stories and experiences of […]

Do you want to do research or journalism about the kink/leather/BDSM community? The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago is an amazing resource and it has extensive collections. Of course, it’s often difficult to get there, especially when you’re a grad student or freelance writer. So I was really happy to see that there’s a […]

I wrote this for the Momentum Conference anthology, to accompany my presentation at the event. What does “queer” mean? One of the things about the word queer that fascinates me is how many meanings it has. It can be used as an adjective, a pejorative, a noun, an identity, a sexual orientation, and as a […]

Though it’s 9 months old, I just got pointed to the article The Lust Frontier: Why Can’t We Make Open Relationships Work?  by Meghan Murphy. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by the tone of the article, which is all about how many people try open relationships and have it not […]