If you want evidence of how much your life can change, look no further than me.
Before Sex Positive St. Louis, I ran an adult education program at a Catholic church. I was also an amateur photographer, and one of my models, a burlesque performer, asked me to shoot one of her shows. Due to a back injury, I had to bow out after shooting the first act. It was suggested to me that, since I would miss the second act, I should go backstage and shoot the dancers in their costumes for act two during the intermission.
So there I was, a God-fearing, heterosexual, cisgender man, walking into a women’s dressing room unannounced with a camera in my hand. None of the performers batted an eyelash; I, however, might as well have been the dad from a 1950s sitcom.
When one of the dancers I was photographing lost one of her pasties, if I hadn’t already been dark brown, I would have turned bright red.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, when I hosted an orgy in my home. I greeted 25 guests, many of whom I was meeting for the first time, while I was completely naked, adding to the growing list of people I know socially who have literally never seen me with clothes on.
I went from being a guy who blushes at burlesque dancers to the guy who finds a room full of strangers having sex in his basement and asks if anybody needs anything. Oh, what a difference running a sex positive organization can make.
To say that co-founding SEX+STL has changed my life would be a gross understatement. My association with this org has helped me book speaking engagements across the U.S. and Canada. I’ve been published and quoted in books. Our parties have made local, national, and international news. I gave a nude lecture at an Ivy League university. I’ve performed for audiences from New York City to London. We’ve brought internationally renowned sex educators to St. Louis. In 2024, I gave a TEDx Talk. Just last summer, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of writing, producing, and performing my first one-man show.
SEX+STL may not have made me a mainstream celebrity, but it definitely took me from being anonymous to being a ghetto superstar.
And now, it’s coming to an end.
And I’m not sure how to feel about it. Being a co-founder of SEX+STL has been the first line of my bio for over a decade. It’s how I’m often introduced to strangers. It’s how I know most of the people I’ve met over the last 15 years.
My association with SEX+STL led me to meet one of my heroes, author Patrick Califia. During his keynote speech at KinkFest, he said words to the effect of, “If you’re the only person in your region who does what you do, and you’re not mentoring the next generation, you’re planning your own obsolescence.” There was talk of finding someone younger to take over the organization, but while SEX+STL is not my baby [that honor goes to Anna Bent], it has been my foster child for 15 years, and it’s hard to imagine handing my kid over for someone else to raise.
What I hope instead is that enough younger people, enough queer people, enough Black and brown people, enough people with disabilities, enough people with more radical ideas about gender, enough people with more radical ideas about sex, enough people with even more unique and less socially acceptable fetishes, will be inspired by our work to start their own groups, not only filling the void left by SEX+STL’s absence, but filling the voids we couldn’t properly fill in our presence.
I’m not a guy who thinks much about legacy, but if there’s a legacy for SEX+STL, I hope it’s a community of people empowered to be their authentic sexual selves. I hope it’s a community of people who understand and respect consent. I hope it’s an end to the notion that your sexuality can be divorced from your identity or your politics, and the expectation that to enter an alternative lifestyle space, you have to check your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression at the door.
And so, SEX+STL comes to an end, not with a [gang] bang, but with an appropriately submissive whimper. Not to break my arm patting myself on the back, but I know St. Louis is a sexier place because we were here.