Born: August 20, 1955, in New York City.

Educated: New York public school system; Alliance Francaise/Paris (Diplome de langue, '75); York College, City University of New York (B.A., '77, summa cum laude with honors in English); Columbia University, New York (M.A. in English '78); Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, San Francisco (PhD in Sexuality, Masters of Public Health in Human Sexuality, 2000).

Professional background: A widely published poet, writer, journalist, and former English professor, Glory writes regularly on cyberspace for Cosmopolitan, Working Woman, Know- How, and other major magazines. As co-author of Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission she has been cited as a leading expert on S/M and fetishism in dozens of publications, here and abroad, and has appeared on numerous national TV and radio shows. Gloria is a licensed clinical sexologist, and a member of the American College of Sexologists. For more information on her private practice, see her Therapy FAQ.

For more on her mainstream work and life, visit Gloria-brame.com!!

Don't forget to read the Interview with Gloria and Will.

Born: August 13, 1960, the youngest child of displaced rural Ozark mountain dwellers in St. Louis, Missouri.

Education: various public schools throughout Missouri; Southeast Missouri State University, emerging with a bachelor's (cum laude) degree in anthropology in 1983.

Professional background: Will is a professional archaeologist, formerly a highway archaeologist employed by the Missouri Highway and Transportation Department, the author of numerous formal archaeological reports, site surveys, and historical studies and once editor of a professional archaeological newsletter. His short erotic fiction has appeared in Variations, Hot Talk, and Forum. His first novel, a collaboration published under the pseudonym "Charlotte Prentiss," was Children of the Ice (New American Library-Onyx, 1993). In 2000, Will opened wdbrame.com, an e-boutique offering exclusive, handcrafted BDSM toys. Creator of the infamous "clipples" and other unique designs, Will's motto is "changing the world, one nipple at a time."

Visit Will's wondrous toy shop ~ W.D. Brame

You can email Will at: wdbrame@aol.com

Born: June 11, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Education: Attended various public schools in Pittsburgh, the Hillel Academy, Michigan State University, the Highlander Folk School, and several of the best prisons in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia.

Professional Background: 1963-'64, Northeast Regional Task Force, Congress of Racial Equality; 1964-'67, executive director, Southern Co-ordinating Committee to End the War in Viet Nam; 1967-'69, labor organizer for the Southern Labor Action Movement; 1969-'72, reporter, Atlanta Co-operative News; 1973-'75, city editor, Atlanta Co-operative News; 1976-'79, head of the Southern bureau for In These Times; 1979-'82, assistant editor, Brown's Guide to Georgia Magazine; 1982-present, freelance writer, editor, and photojournalist.

Jon has also worked as an actor and as a musician. He has received several prizes for investigative reporting in the Atlanta area. He is an active peer counselor and is recognized as an authority on alternative sexualities. He lives with his wife in Atlanta.

Jon Jacobs is no longer associated with this site. However you can find him at: http://www.submissivewomenspeak.com/

Q: You describe yourselves as "journalists," and clearly you are reporting on the U.S.-based D&S "Scene," but now that it's done -- what does the book really mean?

A: We were more than journalists: we were social historians. If there's any one great idea we attempt to convey here, it's that the idea of sexual normality is not relevant to sex as it's really practiced. We're not just talking about sex today but sex as it has been practiced as long as humans have existed. Sadomasochism, fetishism, transgenderism, bondage, piercing, tattooing, erotic wrestling, bisexuality, roleplaying: to be human is to have at least some desires in at least some of those areas, even if that interest never extends beyond a fleeting fantasy.

This is the point Kinsey was driving at, and, now as then, this notion is largely suppressed or censored in the mainstream because it threatens the status quo. In fact, what most people consider normal is so narrow and so steeped in religious dogma that it essentially amounts to nothing less than religious doctrine being passed off as scientific theory. Which, by the way, is exactly what early social scientists and sexologists did. There is nothing scientific about any of the works which define so-called abnormal sexuality.

The book's approach was deliberately nonclinical. We do not try to overanalyze or overtheorize; we present facts and an anecdotal chronicle far more ambitious and comprehensive than any other work provides. We interviewed hundreds of people; about 90 interviews made it to the final cut. We let the people who do all these things speak for themselves about what they like and why. Their individual voices are very powerful.

Q: Is this a sex book? Do you think that people will read it and get off?

A: This book delivers what its title advertises: it's about all the known, consensual permutations of sexual dominance and submission. We give very straightforward descriptions of things like bondage, spanking, roleplaying--explaining exactly how people do them and why they do them. In that sense, it's a sex book and a sexy book, and some readers will take the book to bed with them. There are probably very few adults who won't find something which titillates them, particularly in the interviews. One journalist claimed that the book's only flaw is that it's too heavy to hold comfortably with only one hand.

Our goal was to write a candid, comprehensive, nonclinical book about sadomasochistic sex. We wanted to put it in a human context, so that readers could see that it isn't only people on the fringe who enjoy or need dominance and submission in their lives.

Q: Do you think the book will encourage people to "come out" about the way they like to exchange power? Is this a recruitment manual? Could it expand the "Scene"?

A: Readers who aren't already aroused by dominance and submission won't be spontaneously stimulated. But it's our contention that dominance and submission are prevalent aspects of human sexual desire. At best, our book will help people who have been fed the lie that they are mentally or morally ill if they like kinky sex.

Q: The "Scene" really offends most sexual politicians -- particularly feminists. Do you think the "liberals" will ever really get a grip on the "libertines"?

A: Two of the things people fear most are truth and sex. So if you try to tell the truth about sex, you won't win any popularity contests. Feminists aren't any more or less afraid of the truth than anyone else. We're feminists. Sexual politicians who want to legislate our choices, and all people who want to limit them, will be outraged by what we say, but those people are found in every political camp. The people who support freedom of sexual choice should applaud us.

Q: OK, so "normal" is tricky, but what about decadence? De Sade merely wrote about everything he could imagine; your interviews were with people who live their fantasies. Is the "Scene" decadent? Is this a new Roman Empire?

A: Sexual dominance and submission was practiced thousands of years before De Sade ever wrote his jailhouse fantasies and will continue as long as humans exist. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a Victorian medico-forensic specialist, chose De Sade as the exemplar, and it's been a source of endless confusion ever since. De Sade's philosophy embraced, and celebrated, the brutal violation of the individual's rights. Our interviewees--whether they love to worship a foot or a Mistress, to whip or be whipped, to dress in diapers or in rubber, be bound to a cross or pierced through the nipple, whatever their proclivity--they celebrate sex for mutual pleasure.

Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis was a compilation of case histories--actually, it was a more like a compilation of sexual cautionary tales about everyone from relentless masturbators to crazed lust murderers, all of whom were deemed depraved. The book was tremendously influential in its day and remains a kind of Rosetta Stone of modern psychiatry. It helps to perpetuate this myth that dominants and submissives are moral decadents living on the social fringe. Some of our interviewees are politically radical, but most are well within the mainstream of American life. They certainly don't fit the stereotypes of decadence established by De Sade or Suetonius.

Any resemblance to the decline of Rome is superficial at best. There's never been a time in human history when people weren't doing these things; it's just that at certain times in history it was more permissible to talk about them. We think it's the more enlightened--not decadent--age which allows for that discussion.

Q: There's a lot of religious or spiritual overtones to many of your interviews. How do pagan or archaic beliefs fit into the "Scene"?

A: We were, at first, surprised to discover how many people viewed their sexuality as spiritual, and also how many interviewees identified themselves as pagan. Perhaps it's because pagans and New Agers have already questioned and rejected many of the canons of the traditional Judeo-Christian belief system. They can find new contexts for exotic sexual desires. For example, some pagans follow the erotic path to transcendence. We interviewed a male goddess worshipper from a California church for submissive men and dominant women. They publicly enact elaborate rituals patterned after Eastern goddess worship cults. Nude men prostrate themselves before dominant women. It's a sexual charge, for sure, but it is also a religious experience, not substantively different from Holy Rolling.

Fakir Musafar, a major figure in the body-modification cults, told us that body modification can serve any number of spiritual functions. For some people, a piercing is a rite of passage. Fakir uses intense stimulus to take his body and mind on a transcendent spiritual journey.

Probably the most compelling aspect, though, is ritual. Interviewees said they felt an absence of meaningful ritual in their lives; so different kinds of body worship and slave service, rituals involving whips or other implements, and even body modification all provide opportunities for rituals.

Q: How important are on-line systems to the D&S; "Scene"? Could you have done this book without on-line access to the interviewees?

A: We found our interviewees through support groups, social clubs, word-of-mouth, and electronic networks. The so-called "Scene" is comprised of hundreds of independent social groups and publications and--importantly--of mushrooming international cyber-communities. On-line networks have become a central component of the Scene, partly because of the anonymity of cyberspace but also because cyberspace connects people in towns all across America--where there are little or no opportunities to discuss D&S--with; others like themselves.

We could never have afforded to contact so wide a range of people over so many states without computer networks. Over time, the word about our book spread from Compuserve over to the Internet and then to small computer bulletin boards all over the country. People were contacting us from boards we'd never heard of. We've tried to keep up with as many people as possible on-line. When we went on tour cross-country, we posted our itinerary on several boards so people who were interested could watch us on local TV or listen to us on radio. When we got back to the hotel, we could go on-line and read their critiques of our performance.

Q: How big is the professional side of the "Scene"? How many clubs are there? How many pro doms?

A: The consensus among researchers is that roughly 10%-15% of the adult population engages in some form of D&S. If you can extrapolate what kind of a marketplace demand that might create, you get an idea of the market for S/M services. Every big city in this country has professional dominatrices, as do many smaller cities. A spanking fetishist we interviewed said that wherever he traveled, he called the local escort service and requested a woman who would spank him. He always got one.

It's a truism in the Scene, however, that very few professional dominants are sincerely interested in S/M for anything other than economic reasons. A good percentage of pro doms are simply people who realized that they could charge huge fees for domination without performing any directly sexual acts. "You mean he'll pay me $200 to spank him, and I don't have to take my dress off?" Yeah, that's tempting! We chose three dominants who are involved in the Scene professionally and privately. One is a woman who advertises herself as a professional sadist; another specializes in transgenderism and infantilism; a third runs the most exclusive house of psychodrama in the nation. They are all very interesting women.

We're only aware of two "general admission" clubs where D&Sers; openly engage in erotic play, although we're certain that by now other cities have them; both are in New York City. In fact, as you might know, we had our book party at one of them. It was quite an experience seeing hundreds of bewildered publishing and media types walking around, staring at the D&Sers; whipping one another or tying one another up. Someone from The New Yorker made us give him a guided tour of the bondage equipment. Most cities rely on leather bars or party spaces which D&S; groups rent. A few cities have "professional houses of dominance" with live shows--but the main point is to drum up business for the dominants who work there.

Q: You document how the largest part of the "Scene" is heterosexual and not gay -- like the rest of life. It also seems to be driven by dominant women. Why?

A: For years, there's been this misconception--among gays as well as straights--that sadomasochism was more of a gay phenomenon. When we were soliciting interviewees a few years ago, we did a presentation to a group of gay leathermen. They listened politely and then expressed shock that heterosexuals did these things. That there were enough heterosexuals doing them to warrant a book really amazed them.

Gays and lesbians have, over the years, done a tremendous amount of political organizing on S/M issues. They are out, and they are visible. Most heterosexuals, meanwhile, are not out and not visible.

There's another misconception that the Scene is driven by dominant women. In fact, very few people have any real power in the Scene, beyond their own little group of admirers. And, in terms of numbers, dominant women are probably the smallest component of the Scene. The vast majority are submissive men who actively seek dominant women to fulfill their fantasies, and they're willing to pay a high price for the privilege. It's their scarcity that makes dominant women seem so powerful. They become famous quite quickly in their own small worlds. A truly skilled and experienced dominant (whether female or male) may have dozens, if not hundreds, of admirers.

Q: What's the next sexual frontier? What do you think about Cybersex?

A: The issue is not "what's next?"--because what's next is bound to be just another variation on what's always been--but what's going to happen to all those sexual civil rights we once believed were inalienably granted in the 1970s?

Right now, open dialogue on sexuality is generally limited to clinical journals and political rhetoricians. There is virtually no positive information or positive dialogue delivered on human sexuality...except within the alternative sexuality communities. That is really the sad state of affairs in America. Turn on the television, and you'll see reruns of shows and movies from the 1970s which could not be produced today because they would be stepping on Tipper Gore's toes. The only TV channel which consistently broadcasts anything in the least bit sexually daring is MTV, whose videos represent what may be the last mainstream-accessible sexually free images, and even these have recently come under more severe censorship. And, frankly, most rock videos are idiotic, so that's not exactly reassuring.

Cybersex is the ultimate autoerotic fantasy...but better than masturbation, because it holds some promise of future sex. You meet someone on-line, relate to them brain to brain, then take it to genitals-to-genitals, and, if things continue to be cool, you can arrange to meet them. Will and I met on-line. Jon and his wife met on-line. We met Jon and his wife on-line. On-line is no longer a frontier: it's a settled land. The question is whether the new settlers coming in will change the ethos of the territory.

Meanwhile, we're waiting for virtual ecstasy machines.

Q: Will D&S; ever make it onto the tube?

A: We once had this terrifying vision of a sitcom based on our book--you know, the goofy, lovable sadomasochists next door? With cute little subplots like the time "Bob" lost the key to the handcuffs just before "Betty's" Tupperware party was about to begin. Fortunately, there haven't been any phone calls from Hollywood. And, frankly, we don't think TV or Hollywood can handle making a show or film about complex erotic subjects without either moralizing or poking fun. The only depictions we've seen in the mainstream media have been lurid caricatures.

Q: When are you going to stop being so damn objective and start talking about your own lives?

A: If we had written about our own lives, it would have been an even longer book. And we would still have been objective. We didn't see the point in talking about our own experiences when the book documents other peoples' lives. We identify with parts, but not with all, and we certainly didn't want to see discussions focus on us instead of the work we did.