The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

LAURA ANTONIOU (lantoniou.com) is the author of the well-known Marketplace series of erotic novels, now being published by Circlet Press; they are all being converted to e-books as well. She has also edited the groundbreaking Leath-erwomen anthologies and several other collections of fiction and nonfiction. Her first book, The Catalyst, now renamed Cinema Erotica, is now available as an e-book through Ravenous Romance; the fiction she has written under her gay male pseudonym, Christopher Morgan, is being released under her real name as well. She travels around the world leading workshops for the alt-sex community, ranging from gentle introductions to role playing to weekend-long intensives on BDSM protocols. Follow her at her website or find her on Facebook, Fetlife, and other online communities.

PATRICK CALIFIA (née Pat Califia, prior to a gender transition from female to male) has been writing about sex practically since this activity was invented. SRSLY. He is the author of a dozen or so nonfiction and fiction books that explore the issue of sexual variation, the parameters of gender, and confronting the repression and social control of pleasure. He currently lives with his cute boy (six years and counting) and three fluffy, vogueing, caption-worthy kittehs, and hopes to welcome an Empowered Femme of Color to the household once everybody has moved from California to Florida. Patrick is currently doing research on FTM sexuality and working on a sex manual to accompany publication of the questionnaire data. But if you see him at a party, please don’t ask him how the new book is coming!

BARBARA CARRELLAS (barbaracarrellas.com) is the author of Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century and Luxurious Loving: Tantric Inspirations for Passion and Pleasure. She is the founder of Urban Tantra^®, an approach to sacred sexuality that adapts and blends conscious sexuality practices from Tantra to BDSM, and the cofounder of Erotic Awakening, a pioneering series of workshops focusing on the physical, spiritual, and healing powers of sex. Barbara was named Best Tantric Sex Seminar Leader in New York City by Time Out New York for her Urban Tantra^® workshops. Barbara delights in blurring the lines between sacred and profane, enlightened and perverted, mystical and scientific, pleasure and pain. Barbara’s most recent endeavors are her Urban Tantra® Professional Training Program (which, in its first year, graduated participants from 12 countries) and her new book, Ecstasy Is Necessary, a practical guidebook for ecstatic explorers (Hay House, 2012). Barbara is a proud graduate of the Coney Island Sideshow School with a double major in fire eating and snake handling.

EDGE is an author, mentor, teacher, and hard-core player from Florida with 20 years of experience in the scene. As his name and online moniker would suggest, he enjoys a wide range of edge play activities, from breath control to weaponsex, though he also has a passion for stogie scenes, clean Japanese rope bondage, and prolonged, intimate inner thigh beatings.

FIFTHANGEL (fifthangel@artofbdsm.com) has spent many of his nonworking weekends traveling throughout North America teaching at BDSM events for the last 11 years. He has written two books, The Finer Points of Pain and Pleasure, a how-to guide for using pressure points in BDSM scenes, and Your Pain, My Pleasure: Inside the Mind of a Sexual Sadist, as well as many magazine articles and interviews. FifthAngel and his wife, Katie, live a power-balanced, monogamous marriage that is very much SM oriented. Edge players in all aspects of their lives, they enjoy vertical rock and ice climbing, blasting zombies at the gun range, and whitewater rafting. When not dangling by a rope off the side of a mountain, they are at home on their five-acre farm on the outskirts of Denver, where they care for a growing family of animals.

HARDY HABERMAN (dungeondiary.blogspot.com) has been an active member of the leather community since the late 1970s and a member of many BDSM/fetish organizations, including NLA-International and Discipline Corps. He is a founding member of Inquisition Dallas. He is a gay activist, filmmaker, author, and speaker on aspects of the SM/leather scene. He was awarded NLA-I’s Man of the Year award in 1999 and the NLA-I Lifetime Achievement award in 2007. In 2010, he received the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Leather Leadership Award. Since April 1995, he and his boy, Patrick, have been living together in Dallas with their Feline Mistress, Elvira, and troublemaker Jack-the-Cat.

LEE HARRINGTON (PassionAndSoul.com) is a passionate spiritual and erotic educator, gender explorer, eclectic artist, and published author and editor on human sexuality and spiritual experience. He’s been traveling the globe (from Seattle to Sydney, Berlin to Boston), teaching or talking about sexuality, psychology, kink, faith, magic, and desire since 1995, and has no intention of stopping anytime soon. Along his journey, he has been a brainy academic, a female adult film performer (under his previous name, Bridgett Harrington), a world-class sexual adventurer, an outspoken philosopher, a longtime sexuality and spirituality blogger (since 1998), a spirit worker and priest, and an award-winning writer and artist. Overall, Lee is a nice guy with a disarmingly down-to-earth approach to the fact that we are each a beautifully complex ecosystem, and we deserve to examine the human experience from that lens.

His books include Shibari You Can Use: Japanese Rope Bondage and Erotic Macramé, Sacred Kink: The Eightfold Paths of BDSM and Beyond, The Toybag Guide to Age Play, and Shed Skins: Journeying in Self-Portraits. He has worked as an anthology editor on such projects as Rope, Bondage, and Power and Spirit of Desire: Personal Explorations of Sacred Kink, while contributing actively to other anthologies, magazines, blogs, and collaborations internationally. Check out the trouble Lee has been getting into, as well as his regular podcast, tour schedule, free essays, videos, and more on his website.

MIDORI (www.FHP-inc.com) is a renowned educator and writer on sexuality and SM. Dubbed “the supernova of kink” by Dan Savage, she emerged from the Sex Positive Movement in San Francisco in the early 1990s, soon becoming a much sought after international presenter on sexuality, personal fulfillment, and kinky adventures. Considered a pivotal figure in the leather and BDSM communities, she is also a critic, activist, and agent provocateur. Her reputation as an authority and leading expert on alternative pleasures stems not only from her unique and entertaining process of teaching concrete skills, but from her ability to deconstruct and distill complex matters of desire into surprisingly accessible lessons with eloquence and humanity. She is known for tackling challenging topics with fresh and relevant insights, using what she calls her “head–heart–hands” method for creating a space where people are allowed individual self-exploration.

Midori is fundamentally motivated by a desire to help people create authentic and intimate relationships while emphasizing self-actualization, shame reduction, acceptance, and justice. She is the author of The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage, Wild Side Sex: The Book of Kink, and Master Han’s Daughter, as well as numerous articles and columns. In 2001, she founded Rope Bondage Dojo^©. She has trained many cadres and still leads many dojos each year. More recently, she formed ForteFemme, a unique women’s dominance weekend training and empowerment intensive. Born and raised in Japan, she is now a resident of San Francisco, where she shares a home with her wonderful spouse and severely spoiled four-legged furry beings.

For more than 17 years JACK RINELLA (leathermusings.blogspot.com) has been writing about kinky sex. He is the author of The Master’s Manual, The Compleat Slave, Partners in Power, The Toybag Guide to Clips and Clamps, Becoming a Slave, and Philosophy in the Dungeon, The Magic of Sex & Spirit, The Dictionary of Scene-Friendly Terms, and More from the Master. He has been active in the leather scene since 1983, is a founding member of MAsT-Chicago, a member of the Chicago Hellfire Club, and serves as a director on the board of the Leather Leadership Conference.

IGNACIO RIVERA, aka Papí Coxxx (ignaciorivera.com) identifies as a queer, gender-fluid, polyamorous, kinky, Black-Boricua. Ignacio is a descendant of colonized and uprooted Taíno and African slaves. Ignacio’s people are from Borikén, also known as Puerto Rico. Ignacio, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” is a lecturer, activist, sex worker, sex educator, and performance artist who performs spoken-word, one-person shows and storytelling internationally. Their body of work focuses on gender and sexuality, specifically queer, trans, kink, and sexual liberation issues within a race/class dynamic. Their written work has appeared in ColorLines, Ebony, Yellow Medicine Review, and in three chapbooks: Las Alas (coauthored with Maceo Cabrera Estévez), Ingridients, and Thoughts, Rants and What Some Might Call Poetry. Ignacio is the recipient of a Marsha A. Gómez Cultural Heritage Award from LLEGÓ: The National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Organization. They are the creator of Poly Patao Productions (P3), which is dedicated to producing sex-positive workshops, performance pieces, play parties, panel discussions, teach-ins, social/political groups, and educational opportunities that are specially geared toward queer women, transgender, multigender, genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, and gender-variant folks of color. Ignacio is also one of the founding board members of Queers for Economic Justice, a progressive nonprofit organization committed to promoting economic justice in a context of sexual and gender liberation.

FELICE SHAYS (brutalaffection.com) thrives where respect, sex, playing hard, laughter, safety, love, and talking shit all intersect. She’s a sex and BDSM educator and coach who travels throughout the U.S. and Canada teaching at events, sex-positive stores, universities, conferences, and community organizations. Felice has appeared on British TV and in national and international print and digital media (including Marie Claire and The Village Voice). Her hands-on work with individuals, couples, and other partnership configurations ignites mighty, sexy self-discovery. Felice’s decade’s worth of events and venues include Good For Her, Black Rose, Pacific Friction, Dark Odyssey, Lesbian Sex Mafia, SheBop, KinkFest, Thunder in the Mountains, and many others.

Formerly a longtime sex educator at Babeland and one of the coproducers of New York’s famous sex and BDSM play party, Submit, this Brooklyn femme currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is an ASL interpreter, a Queer Jewish event host, and a performance artist. Her one-ish woman shows include Felice Brutality, Jew Hungry?, Psycho Semitic, The Temporary Flesh, and The Possibility of Response, which have been produced at numerous theaters and festivals in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Portland, and Baltimore. Her shows require her to hang—singing—from the ceiling and fist watermelons (somewhat akin to her life off the stage). Her essay is an excerpt from her first book, Brutal Affection: Playing with Rough Sex, which is coming soon, she promises.

SARAH SLOANE (SarahSloane.net) spends her time educating and writing about sexuality (both traditional and alternative), alternative relationships, and the lines of sex, gender, and politics. She has presented at some of the largest alt-sex events in the U.S. and overseas, as well as at sex-positive boutiques and to professional groups and universities. Her writing has been featured in various online publications, on her website, and in a few anthologies. You can find out more about her work and her upcoming events on her website.

MOLLENA (MO) WILLIAMS (mollena.com), “Delicate, Trembling Flower of Submission”^©, is a New York City born and raised writer, leatherwoman, actress, BDSM educator, fat fetish model, and executive pervert. In the kink and leather communities, she identifies as a power slave who submits to only one. She is extremely honored to have served as International Ms. Leather 2010 and Ms. San Francisco Leather 2009. Mollena is a coalition partner and supporter of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and a former board associate for the Folsom Street Fair, and she was featured on the Folsom poster for 2010.

Active in the leather and BDSM communities since 1996, she keeps it real all over North America and Europe, teaching on myriad BDSM, leather, and kinkcentric topics. She is deeply honored to have been nominated for the 21st Annual Pantheon of Leather’s Woman of the Year Award and the Northern California Regional Award. She is a founding member of San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theater Company, and she writes a blog called The Perverted Negress. Mo is the author of The Toybag Guide to Playing with Taboo and coauthor, with Lee Harrington, of the forthcoming book Playing Well with Others. She has been featured in many interviews and has written dozens of articles, including “BDSM and Playing with Race,” which appears in Best Sex Writing 2010.

LOLITA WOLF (leatheryenta.com) is a native New Yorker who discovered the BDSM scene back in the late 80s when “online” meant being on the phone sex lines. She is an activist who defends the sexual freedom of all consenting adults, spreads the word about BDSM, sex, and poly, and helps the community grow and flourish. Yet her goal remains to have fun. Lolita’s many specialties include bondage, sensation and impact play of all sorts, poly relationships, and social skills. She has taught for organizations across the country, including TES, GMSMA, Black Rose, Living in Leather, South Plains Leatherfest, Thunder in the Mountains, Portland Kinkfest, Frolicon, Dark Odyssey, and many others, and she has presented seminars at Columbia, Yale, NYU, The New School, Bard, and Rutgers. Lolita is an emeritus board member of the Leather Leadership Conference and The Eulenspiegel Society (TES). She is a former Chair of Lesbian Sex Mafia, an honorary member of GMSMA, and an associate member of New York boys of Leather. She is active with the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and Leather Pride Night.

Lolita is the author of Spanking and CBT in a Nutshell. Her writing has appeared in On Our Backs, Prometheus, and The Lust Chronicles. Recently, she was featured in the New York Times’s “One in 8 Million” series. A six-year-old Princess who lies about her age, Lolita manages to stir up shit and get her own way (mostly). She is part of a far-ranging leather family and considers herself a versatile opportunist.

MADISON YOUNG (feministporn.net) is an international award-winning feminist porn star, director, gallerist, artist, and new mom. She has been called a “sex-positive Tasmanian devil.” She has been directing and performing in erotic films for nearly a decade and has won great acclaim for her video line, Madison Young Productions, and her network of erotic websites, the Feminist Porn Network. Her films have screened at film festivals through out the States, Europe, and Australia. Young values sexual education in her work and has taught workshops and lectures and served as a panelist on the topics of sexuality, feminist pornography, and kink across the U.S., including at Yale University and UC Berkeley. She has recently finished a memoir, Breathe: The Sexual Evolution of Madison Young, based on her experiences in the adult industry, due out in spring 2012.

Madison has contributed writing to Baby Remember My Name, edited by Michelle Tea, Rope Bondage and Power Exchange, edited by Lee Harrington, and In-Soumises, edited by Wendy Delorme. She has been featured in numerous documentaries including Virginie Despentes’s Mutantes: Femi-nisme PornoPunk and has been featured on the Independent Film Channel, Spike TV, The History Channel, LOGO, MTV, and on HBO’s Real Sex. When she isn’t documenting hot sex on film, she is running her own nonprofit community art gallery in San Francisco, Femina Potens Art Gallery, which focuses on the expression of art, sex, and gender. Ms. Young resides in San Francisco with her partner and Dominant, James Mogul, and their daughter, Emma.