And we moved my domains, and secured my site!
Thanks to my amazing hub, suzanneforbes.com was transferred to a European domain registry and both suzanneforbes.com and my SFW site chipinhead.com are now secure domains, registered and hosted in Europe, baby!! Wooohooo!
With the changes happening in the US because of SESTA/FOSTA, a person like me, who makes erotic art, should not have a digital footprint Stateside.
During the initial burst of shock and horror around the implementation of SESTA and FOSTA, I learned that my longtime host, Bluehost, DOES NOT ALLOW NUDITY. What the fucking fuck, you fucking puritan assholes!
Here Bluehost, have a drawing of a lady with a penis fucking a girl while she sucks off a man with a strap-on!
It’s called “Consenting trans adults enjoy each other!”. I think it’s a beautiful moment of sexual connection in a safe space.
My new host is Leaseweb. They allow porn. In honor of that freedom, please enjoy this selection of drawings made during the years my husband and I were going to events at Femina Potens, The Center for Sex and Culture and the Upper Floor at Kink.com.
During the last ten years I was in the Bay Area I went to so many sex-positive events, parties, porn shoots and venues.
I met my husband at one of them, and after that we went together. We met and made friends with so many amazing people who are or were sex workers.
Porn performers, erotic artists, bondage artists, pro doms, escorts, rubber fetishists, directors of queer indie porn, feminist art gallery owners, activists and educators.
These wonderful people brought their passion, intelligence, authenticity and courage into our lives.
Many of them are deeply political, activists and protesters and change-makers, who work hard to reduce the shame and stigma around sexuality in the US.
Many of them live poor and risk everything to make art about sex, educate people about sexuality, and be true to their own gender identities, sexual preferences and desires.
At a lot of the events I documented, sex workers were donating their time and energy to raise funds for sex-positive art, education or sex workers resources. I have never seen a community give so much.
We saw, and I documented, people showing desire, affection and often love in public sex spaces.
There was laughter and deep intimacy and pleasure. It wasn’t perfect, the heyday of San Francisco sex-positive culture, indie porn and the Kink Castle, but it was an experiment as brave and important as the original Summer of Love. It was queer and fierce and strange, and I love the sex workers we came to know and I honor their work.
Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it and not everybody should, but everybody should be allowed the sexual and gender expression and choices that are true and safe for them.
2010 Armory feature shoot Sept 3 banquet table by Suzanne Forbes
I hope you will be inspired to learn more about the chilling effect caused by SESTA and FOSTA, such as the closing of Craigslist Personals, and the immediate harm to sex workers.
I continue to make erotic art and document diverse, queer, kinky sexuality in Berlin.
And now that my sexy art has a home, I will be posting it ALL THE TIME if you fund me.
I’m working on the crowd-funding setup for this site.