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.
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.