Greta Christina (born 1961) is an American writer, speaker, and editor whose work spans atheist activism and explicitly kinky erotic fiction. For BDSM readers she matters first as the author of Bending and the wider collection Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More—and as an editor and performer steeped in sex-work, porn, and erotic comics. Her public life also includes major freethought books and stages; those facts belong here because they shape the same career that produced the kink writing, not as a replacement for it.
Early Life
Christina was born in Chicago in 1961 and 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—biographical facts she has woven into later writing about mortality, grief, and living without religious consolation.
Kink Books, Erotic Editing, and Sex-Industry Work
Outside freethought headlines, Christina is a working eroticist. She edited Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients and the Best Erotic Comic anthology series. She wrote the erotic novella Bending and the full collection Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More (Pitchstone Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-1-63431-007-9)—stories that put pain, power exchange, religion, and surreal kink on the same page. Her fiction has also appeared in three volumes of Best American Erotica.
In San Francisco she worked at underground publisher Last Gasp and at the Lusty Lady peep show, and performed in pornography. She co-organized and co-hosted the Godless Perverts Story Hour and the Godless Perverts Social Club—spaces where atheism and explicit sexuality shared a mic. She has written about participating in BDSM, and describes herself as sex-positive, pro-choice, feminist, supportive of same-sex and group marriage, openly bisexual/pansexual, and polyamorous. That identity stack is not side color: it is the lived context for Bending’s dirty, kinky, power-aware prose.
Atheist Blogging, Books, and Speaking
Christina has written for AlterNet, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist. She launched “Greta Christina’s Blog” in 2005; it later joined Freethought 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.” In 2009 Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist ranked her blog among the top ten most popular atheist blogs. She created “Atheist Meme of the Day” on Facebook. Professional writing dates to 1989; full-time freelance writing and speaking began in 2012.
Print atheism work includes Skeptical Inquirer, the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, and her books 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 a 2012 Point of Inquiry podcast with Chris Mooney she argued that anger is one of many emotions driving atheists, and that movement goals include church–state separation, ending bigotry against atheists, and—for some—persuading people out of religion. She has spoken for the Secular Student Alliance and Center for Inquiry Speakers Bureaus, including Diversity in Skepticism at The Amaz!ng Meeting (July 2011), the Reason Rally (2012), and the 50th annual American Atheists convention (2013). Rebecca Hensler founded Grief Beyond Belief after Christina’s encouragement. Honors include International Team Honored Hero of Foundation Beyond Belief (2013), LGBT Humanist Pride Award from the American Humanist Association (2013), a feature with wife Ingrid in Christopher Johnson’s photo book A Better Life (2013), and the first Secular Student Alliance Ambassador Award (2015). She has served on FBB’s board and as an SSA advisory board member and lifetime donor.
Personal Life and Health
Christina has written that she and 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 talking about)” as of 2010—a wry snapshot of U.S. marriage-law chaos. In 2012 she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer and treated with surgical hysterectomy and oophorectomy. She has described lifelong on-and-off depression and expects to take antidepressants long-term. She has also written about cats for Catster and for Femme Feminism.
Books at a Glance
- Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless — Pitchstone, 2012
- Coming Out Atheist — Pitchstone, 2014
- Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More — Pitchstone, 2015
- Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God — Pitchstone, 2015
- The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life — Pitchstone, 2016
Why BDSM Readers Should Know Her
Bending earns special attention on a kink site because it refuses to segregate “serious” author identity from fetish storytelling. Pain, power exchange, religion, and absurd unicorn energy share the same collection—exactly the mix of edge and humor that sex-positive BDSM readers already live. Christina’s editing of sex-worker guides and erotic comics, her Lusty Lady and porn work, and her Godless Perverts events all feed the same ethic: desire is material for craft, not a secret that invalidates public intellect.
Greta Christina is a rare bridge: mainstream freethought stages on one side, peep-show and porn résumé plus serious kink fiction on the other. Bending is the title to start with if you want pain, power, and dirty imagination without apology; the rest of the bibliography shows a writer who treats both erotic honesty and godless public life as adult work. Related topics: BDSM writers, erotic anthologies, sex-worker-edited guides, Godless Perverts, polyamorous bi/pan authors, and sex-positive feminist kink literature. Read her for the dirty stories first; keep the atheist books if you also want the full public career that made those stories possible without closet or apology.
