Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein is an author, actor, and activist who’s looking forward to spending time with her/their/its BDSM family—it’s been too long.
Kate formally embraced membership in BDSM as a member of The Outcasts in late 1980’s San Francisco. She/they/it was the first out trans woman/nonbinary/thing to be welcomed into Seattle’s dyke SM community in the early 1990’s, where for a full year, Kate was an owned and collared slave. For her/their/its lifetime dedication and service to BDSM and LGBTQI, Kate has been canonized in sainthood by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as Saint Kate Almighty! Fetching Beacon of Fabulous Nonconformity and Patron Saint of Teens, Freaks, Queers and Outlaws.
Kate has been writing about what’s now called nonbinary gender for over 35 years. Books include the breakthrough, Gender Outlaw: on me, women, and the rest of us; a workbook, My Gender Workbook: a step by step guide to achieving world peace through sex positivity and gender anarchy; and a memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger: the true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the church of scientology and leaves 12 years later to become the lovely lady she is today. In 2006, heartbroken by the rising incidence of suicide in queer teens, Kate wrote the underground classic, Hello, Cruel World: 101 alternatives to suicide, for teens, freaks, and other outlaws. All of Kate’s books are unashamedly BDSM explicit and positive.
Barbara Carrellas
Barbara Nitke
Barbara Nitke is a New York photographer, best known for her exploration of intimate relationships. Her career has taken her from hardcore porn sets in the 1980s, to fetish porn in the 1990s, to the private lives of BDSM lovers for the following decade. Her most recent work, The Luxe Motel, is a series inspired by the movie The Grifters, which explores issues of sexual identity, transience and anxiety.
In late 2001, Nitke sued John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the US (later Alberto Gonzales) over the Communications Decency Act, which regulates free speech on the Internet. The case was lost at the Supreme Court level in March 2006, but set a much higher bar for bringing obscenity cases against artists. She published her first monograph, Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism (introduction by A.D. Coleman) in 2003. It was followed in 2012 by American Ecstasy (introduction by Arthur C. Danto).
She is currently developing a tv series based on her work on adult film sets at the end of the Golden Age of Porn.
Goddess Indigo
The Goddess Indigo is an author and international educator with a unique brand of irreverent humor. She never thought of herself as a ‘dominant,’ people just delight in doing as she requests, such as when she transformed her boyfriend into a house-slave in 1986, decades before happening upon the term ‘BDSM.’ That discovery launched her spiritual odyssey into Master/slave dynamics. This covered Leather Master is the founder and Directrix of DOMINA, the Female-Led Dynamic education and support group as well as a founding member and current President of Onyx Pearls Lustre Southwest. She is Directrix of MAsT Austin, chairs Austin’s ‘Authority-Imbalanced Dynamics’ monthly discussion munch (FirstAID) and a lively monthly international gathering, “Dinner with Goddess & Doc.” Previously, she was the host ofThe Leather Line radio show (KPFT, FM 90.1-Houston). The Goddess is Matriarch of her Leather Family Genus Indigo and owns three force multipliers: Dr. Bob, Sinfully Sill and BBG. She is blessed and honored to be a member of “The Family.” She humbly appreciates the continued requests to keynote, facilitate intensives, present and especially to share about her own personal passion, sustainable female-led dynamics.