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about those movements? Would you consider being part of those movements?

RB: My only fear about those movements would be if they didn't exist! My neighbor down the hall for the past 25 years built my dungeon and was a co-founder of Gay Male SM Activists, but I always had too much hot sex going on at home to be interested in meetings. Plus, I never stopped feeling like a pariah in the gay community because of the attacks on me and my writing since AIDS began. You reach a point where you just assume people hate you because it's easier than trying to figure out who doesn't.

I fiercely support BDSM advocacy, but mainly from a distance. There's a limited number of body blows any activist can take before we just retreat. I had my fill -- but the response to Sex Positive and the new Obama era is nudging me out of my shell. I had a breakup a few years ago that devastated me, so I've been out of the scene for almost three years. Now I'm trying to reinvent myself, find one person I can retreat from the world with. I've never lied about S&M being an intrinsic part of my sexuality, and because of my early bad experiences with BDSM, I'm thrilled and inspired by advocates for it. If there had been BDSM advocacy when I came into BDSM, then I don't think I would have had the bad experiences I mentioned earlier. As a BDSM sex worker, I met so many men who had horrible tales of being hurt in scenes, and I did my best to be an antidote for that.

CT: On my blog, you commented that "Of course BDSM was a source of joy in my life but I put it aside when it robs me from having a platform to champion safe sex to the largest possible audience, which BDSM often has." Could you talk more about that?

RB: Smear campaigns are hard to pin down, and there's no way to know how much of the contempt against me or my writing was due to my BDSM, my sex work, my safe sex evangelism or simply me. I'm just a dangling pinata for people who have issues with sex!

There are gay people of my generation who are as uninformed and rabidly anti-BDSM sex as homophobes are about gay sex.

I can't think of anyone who has gone on film with such brutally honest testimony about their radical sexual history as I did in Sex Positive. It felt like a huge risk and you can see my anxiety in the film, but to me, this level of honesty is crucial to pro-sex activism. People are so dishonest about sex; many would never talk publicly about their private sexual behavior -- and they don't want others doing it either, so it's not easy.

There was a doctor I saw once when AIDS began who heard I was into S&M. As he went to take blood from me, he stabbed the needle into my arm. I bolted out of the chair screaming, and he said coyly, "Oh, sorry, I thought you liked pain." How can I not feel reticent talking about BDSM considering so many people I've met like that? And then I think, how can I not?

I've seen the most courageous pro-sex writers and activists attacked, pilloried and silenced because of their honesty in writing about their kinky sexual histories. I shudder when I recall the vicious smears against pro-sex feminists by anti-porn feminists back in the early 80s. I don't want to invite that bile into my life, especially now, when my circle of gay male friends are no longer alive and here to support me when I go out on a limb with my personal radical sexual issues in public.

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