My first book is now available for pre-order (& free online until June 17th) at www.cambridge.org/core/element.... I extend gratitude to my colleagues who invited me to write it and to my editors and generous readers for their time and engagement. Thank you for your support! 🖤

Thrilled to share that I’ve officially been ratified to the Board of Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum, a unique institution dedicated to preserving the history and culture of leather, fetishism, BDSM, and alternative sexual practices. @leatherarchives.bsky.social

A memorial to Velvet was created by the Heaux History Project and friends of Velvet at the LA&M after their passing in 2021. Contact the LA&M or Heaux History Project to contribute your memories of Velvet to the community archives. 🖤

Mistress Velvet was a community leader, theorist, educator, political organizer and activist based in Chicago. Velvet integrated Black Feminist theory into their work as a professional dominant and wrote on Black Feminism and sexuality.

gonna be so sharp!!

Just got the proofs for my forthcoming book on sex work in crime fiction! Sex Work and Crime Fiction: Margins of Desire is forthcoming this summer from Cambridge University Press 🖤

Last night’s turnout was beyond my wildest dreams. Thank you to our almost 200 audience members joining us in person & online with fantastic energy and positive engagement; thank you to @leatherarchives.bsky.social for hosting us; and thank you to my friend & collaborator Mia Action. You’re amazing.

Join us this Thursday night at 7pm for The Erotics of Disgust w/ Mistress Mia Action and Dr. Kirin Wachter-Grene. What does inclusive sex positivity really ask of us? Sometimes, it means sitting with discomfort and curiosity as we explore the darker, messier edges of desire.

“A fantasy is…quite bothersome, since we do not know where to situate it due to the fact that it just sits there, complete in its nature as a fantasy, whose only reality is as discourse and which expects nothing of your powers, asking you, rather, to square accounts with your own desires” (Lacan).

Quote from by Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies by Juana María Rodríguez (In GLQ Vol 17 No 2-3, 2011). Photo from Tied Vol 1 No 1 (1997).

One week from today! Mistress Mia Action & I will lead a presentation and discussion of disgust fetishes at @leatherarchives.bsky.social! The event is both in person and streaming online. Register here: leatherarchives.libcal.com/event/163589...

Thank you, @leatherarchives.bsky.social, for letting me & Evan Jenkins do a photo shoot at the LA&M before it closes for renovation! It felt important to document the space & we had a lot of fun 🖤

Do you have a community archive project? Would you like to learn how to record oral histories in your local community? The LA&M is excited to announce the Ron Ehemann Community Leather & Kink Archive Grant Program, helping local communities create capacity to preserve their history.

This was deeply inspiring. Pick up Nayland’s book of collected writings and interviews, out with @dukepress.bsky.social

“Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions” - Kathy Acker

Nayland Blake at the Leather Archives & Museum this Sunday! Not to be missed!

LA&M is excited to announce the Ron Ehemann Community Leather & Kink Archive Grant Program, helping local communities create capacity to preserve their history. Applications are due April 15th. Visit leatherarchives.info/community for details!

We are excited to announce the first edition of Black Leather in Color for 2026 is now available for viewing. In this issue, we feature a few of our "Senior Saints", that are icons in the Leather/BDSM community. blackleatherincolor.aflip.in/0ebcfb6d97.h... #blackleatherincolor

The premiere issue of Black Leather In Color, the first SM/Leather magazine created by and for people of color. BLIC was founded by a collective led by Michele Buchanan, S. Guy Giumento, Lidell Jackson and Darrell Perry in 1994. BLIC was revived by Ms D Dom in 2024 @blicmagazine.bsky.social

The LA&M Visiting Scholars & Emerging Artist Programs will be on hiatus in 2026. While we know this is sad and frustrating news, it is for a very positive reason. The LA&M will be closing in Spring 2026 for a major renovation of the building.

Michele A. Buchanan was a member of The Eulenspiegel Society and worked with Leather Pride Night. She was a co-founder and editor of the magazine Black Leather in Color, and an associate editor for the New York Leather and S/M newsletter. She wrote her dissertation about the SM community in NYC.

Quote from Patrick Califia's Public Sex (first pub. 1982). Image from Bondage Photo Treasures No 12 (1986).

Quote from On Becoming a Leatherwoman by Michele A. Buchanan. Photo by Efrain J. Gonzalez from Buchanan's collection at the LA&M. #LeatherWomen

Quote from The Phenomenology Of Sex, Love, And Intimacy by Susi Ferrarello (2016). Photo from Lashes magazine (1981).

CARAS is excited to announce the 2025 “Classics” history and theory reading group focused on Kink and BDSM. More information at carasresearch.org

Clip of Mistress Jill Carter's 1996 IMsL fantasy with her wife Vi Johnson, cofounders the Carter/Johnson Leather Library & Collection. Carter was the 1st Black International Ms. Leather. This year she was one of the first living individuals to be inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame. #LeatherWomen

It’s true: Pod45 is back after a brief hiatus! Here we have an episode based on our Samuel Delany cluster, ed. @blakestricklin.bsky.social . The podcast ft. Stricklin in conversation w @franciscondine.bsky.social, Y Howard, Christopher Breu, Rebekah Sheldon, & @kirinwgrene.bsky.social !

It’s official. I’m tenured. But more meaningful to me is the fact that I was promoted to Associate Professor on the day that my partner-in-crime since grad school, Zach Tavlin, was also promoted to Associate. I aspire to be even a fraction of the writer & thinker you are @zachtavlin.bsky.social

#Chicago!!! Do not sleep on learning more about poetry from one of the most brilliant minds! @zachtavlin.bsky.social on #EmilyDickinson. @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/course...

The brilliant @kirinwgrene.bsky.social and I talking about my new book, In Defense: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire, at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore! It was a great evening.

This Friday the 29th, we bring you “Samuel R. Delany’s Improbably Communities,” on the author’s sex-worlds & the politics of (often) public sex in his essays and novels. Ed. by Blake Stricklin; ft. work by @kirinwgrene, Rebekah Sheldon, Y Howard, and Christopher Breu! post45.org/contemporari...

🪩🔮It's here! The @atpost45.bsky.social Samuel Delany cluster, edited by @blakestricklin.bsky.social, has dropped! Featuring work by @kirinwgrene.bsky.social, Rebekah Sheldon, Y Howard, & @breu.bsky.social, the cluster takes up Delany's writing on sex, community, encounter, and more! 🔮🪩

Very excited for this—read about Delany's Times Square, & also Phallos, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, The Motion of Light in Water, & more! Enjoy this cluster & find wonderful & perverse alternatives to/of consumption on Friday, in honor of the Times Square of yore.

So excited to be part of this with @blakestricklin.bsky.social, @kirinwgrene.bsky.social, Rebekah Sheldon, and Y Howard! My thanks to Blake and Francisco Robles for putting this together! A celebration of the pornographic writings of the great Samuel R. Delany.

🥳🫣 Surprise—there's a brand new CLUSTER COMING TO YOU Friday, on Samuel Delany's Sexual Politics & Paraliterary Style! Ed. by @blakestricklin.bsky.social , ft. Y Howard, @kirinwgrene.bsky.social, @breu.bsky.social, & Rebekah Sheldon. (Photo: Y Howard) Check post45.org/contemporari... tomorrow!

Hard copy of The Black Scholar Black Radical Pleasure II just arrived!🔥

The Black Scholar just published the second issue of Black Radical Pleasure that I guest edited. Thrilled to share this special double issue 🔥: www.theblackscholar.org/now-availabl...

I always have far too much fun at The American Studies Association conference.

Don’t sleep on James Hosking’s beautiful collages, up at Gerber/Hart Library & Archives. Up until March!

It was a pleasure to co-organize this great event yesterday. Thank you, Tina Post, for your refreshing scholarship and for your generosity.

Appropriately opening on my birthday and basically my “Sex in Public” class. Cannot wait for this. Alexis Heller is the curator whose work I’m most excited by. #radicalperverts #museumofsex

Day One: Invisible Man. 15 week slow, deep reading of the novel in context. This is my favorite way to read with students and it is still never enough time for me, or for some of them.

The Whitfield Lovell retrospective “Passages” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art is astonishing.

First day of “Queer Worldmaking,” a studio symposium that’s half history/half installation techniques that I’m co-teaching w/ artist Jade Yumang, starts tomorrow! “A posterior glance at different moments, objects, & spaces might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queerness,” (Muñoz).

Don’t sleep on Glancing Visions: Surface and Depth in Nineteenth Century American Literature (University of Alabama Press, 2023) by Zachary Tavlin, the most graceful and talented writer and thinker I know.

Will hunt down my people’s food.

"It's valid to criticise clifi +ask what it could be doing differently, but the bulk of criticism should go to non-climate fiction that portrays the natural world as a stable reliable backdrop to human affairs. The reality is that those works are essentially all fantasy now." Schneider-Mayerson