For readers who know BDSM and fetish, Greta Christina’s name shows up first on the novella Bending and the collection Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. Pitchstone Publishing brought the collection out in 2015. The stories are explicit, and they put pain, power exchange, religion, and surreal material on the same pages. She is also a well-known American atheist activist, speaker, and editor. Born in Chicago in 1961, she has one career, not two: the freethought stage and the years spent in sex work, porn, and erotic comics sit on the same line.
Christina graduated from Reed College in 1983. In her twenties she legally changed her name, dropping her family surname and taking her middle name as her last name. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1984. Her parents divorced when she was twelve. Her mother died of cancer at forty-five, when Christina was seventeen. She later wrote those facts into work on death, grief, and living without religious consolation. In San Francisco she worked at the underground publisher Last Gasp, worked at the Lusty Lady peep show, and performed in pornography. That is the life in which she came to treat desire as material for craft, and it feeds the prose: dirty, and alert to power.
She calls herself sex-positive. She is a feminist, pro-choice, and in favor of same-sex marriage and of group marriage. She is openly bisexual or pansexual, and she is polyamorous. She co-organized and co-hosted the Godless Perverts Story Hour and the Godless Perverts Social Club, rooms where atheism and explicit sex shared a microphone. She has also written about her own participation in BDSM.
Her nonfiction starts in 1989. From 2012 she worked full time as a freelance writer and speaker. She has written for AlterNet, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist. She opened a blog in 2005. By 2009 The Friendly Atheist had ranked it among the ten most popular atheist blogs. In 2016 she co-founded The Orbit, which she called “the first atheist media site founded explicitly to work on all forms of social justice.” She has spoken for the Secular Student Alliance and the Center for Inquiry, on church-state separation and on ending bigotry against atheists, among other subjects. She has argued that anger is one of the emotions that drive atheists, and that the movement’s goals go past that emotion.
The books cover both sides of the career. Besides the kink collection, she published Why Are You Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (2012) and Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why (2014), on atheist anger and on coming out. Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God (2015) and The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life (2016) followed. She edited Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients and the Best Erotic Comic anthology series. Her fiction has appeared in three volumes of Best American Erotica. The public record is a writer who did not hide the sex and did not apologize for the atheism.
On her home life, she has written that as of 2010 she and her wife Ingrid had been “happily married” for “six and a half years (or five years, or two and a half years, depending on which of our three weddings in the shifting same-sex marriage winds you’re counting).” In 2012 she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer and treated with a hysterectomy and oophorectomy. She has lived with depression and expects to stay on antidepressants. She has also written about cats for Catster and for Femme Feminism. Honors include Foundation Beyond Belief’s International Team Honored Hero award in 2013, the LGBT Humanist Pride Award from the American Humanist Association, and a feature with Ingrid in the photo book A Better Life. She has served on the FBB board, is an SSA advisory board member and a lifetime donor, and encouraged Rebecca Hensler to found Grief Beyond Belief.
Bending matters on a kink shelf because it will not keep the “serious author” in one box and the fetish stories in another. Pain, power exchange, religion, and absurd unicorns share the page. The sex-worker guide, the peep-show job, and the godless erotic story hour are the same argument in a résumé: desire does not cancel a public mind. For the stories about pain, power, and dirty imagination, start with Bending. The atheist books are the public life those stories were written inside.
