At the end of the 1980’s, the nascent world of open, above ground BDSM was facing very hard times. Pansexual BDSM groups had come aboveground shortly after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, and local groups had burgeoned in major cities during the early 1970s. The Leathersex communities’ titleholder events had become national conventions in the 1980s, and in 1983, david stein’s iconic “Safe, Sane and Consensual” campaign had gone viral among the gay and pansexual BDSM communities.
But as the decade drew to a close, Safe Sane and Consensual looked like a PR campaign, not reality. The HIV/AIDS pandemic ravaged the Gay and Altsex communities, putting an end to the illusion of ‘Safe Sex”. The American Psychiatric Association came out with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). Although it had completed the delisting of homosexuality begun in 1974, no such revision included consensual altsex behaviors, all of which were psychopathology in the new manual. Kink was officially n
This article details how the contribution of one man; Charles A Moser, MD, PhD, challenged the clinical assumptions that had pathologized consensual kinky behavior for over a century before he started working to overturn them. It is a story of the struggle to make psychiatric diagnosis abandon conventional and uncritical thinking and garden variety politics, for diagnosis based upon scientific evidence, logic, and thorough observation. Today, the most recent revision of the psychiatric manual regards a m