Cecilia Tan is an American writer, editor, sexuality activist, and founder of Circlet Press—the small house that made science-fiction erotica (often thick with BDSM) a real publishing lane instead of a dirty secret. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she has spent decades braiding leather community work, speculative fiction, erotic romance, and even professional baseball writing into one unusually wide career. (She is not the cookbook author of the same name.) For kink readers and smut-loving SF fans, Tan is the person who proved you could put safewords, power exchange, and starships in the same sentence and still get literary respect—and then built the institutions (press, flea markets, awards trails) that kept that work in print.
Early life, fandom, and the leather scene
Tan wrote professionally as a teenager—monthly columns for Superteen and features for Teen Machine under the Sterling’s Magazines umbrella—while idolizing Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ray Bradbury and aiming at a science-fiction career. She earned a BA in linguistics and cognitive science from Brown University in 1989, then worked at Beacon Press in Boston. Around the same time she found the leather world through the Usenet group alt.sex.bondage and the SF/fantasy con circuit (Arisia, Gaylaxicon). She was one of five people who started hosting BDSM play parties at science fiction conventions—“asb parties” after the newsgroup. The first landed at Gaylaxicon in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, in July 1991; a Philcon party that November drew hundreds of participants. Other fans later took over hosting while Tan moved deeper into publishing and activism, a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched kink and fandom share hotel function rooms for decades.
She posted erotic SF regularly on alt.sex.bondage in 1991–1992, building an audience before commercial markets caught up. In 1992 she left Beacon for a master’s in professional writing and publishing at Emerson College; on her last day at Beacon, an acceptance letter arrived for “A True Story” in Susie Bright’s Herotica 4—a neat symbolic handoff from day job to erotic literary career. Off the page she played baseball with the Pawtucket Slaterettes women’s league in Rhode Island (retiring after the 2007 season), holds a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do (June 2009), and is a certified Okazaki Restorative Massage technician. She has described herself as Chinese-Filipino Irish Welsh bisexual and as living a polyamorous lifestyle—identities that also surface in the editorial range of her presses.
Leather activism and awards
Tan joined NLA: New England in 1991, founded the Fetish Fair Fleamarket in 1992, and directed nearly fifty Fetish Fair events across New England (Boston, Providence, and other cities) plus Houston, Atlanta, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Those fairs were practical infrastructure: vendors, education, and social space for leather and fetish communities outside purely bar-based scenes. She served on the board of the New England Leather Alliance (NELA). National Leather Association International named her Woman of the Year in 2001 and gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004; the Pantheon of Leather added a President’s Award in 2009. With Sarah Desautels she won NLA-I’s 2010 Samois Anthology Award for the anthology Like a Thorn. She stepped back from formal BDSM organizational leadership in 2013 for health reasons but continues to teach workshops, speak, and appear at leather and fetish events as a writer-educator rather than a board officer.
Circlet Press: SF erotica as a house
While still in graduate school Tan remained in publishing by founding Circlet Press, Inc. Its first title was her own chapbook of erotic SF stories, Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords—a title that still signals the house’s blend of speculative premises and explicit consent culture. Lauren P. Burka’s Mate followed, as did small anthologies such as SexMagick, TechnoSex, and Worlds of Women. After receiving her master’s in professional writing and publishing from Emerson in 1994, she devoted herself full-time to writing and running Circlet. By June 2009 the press had published more than fifty titles—mostly erotic science fiction with occasional forays into related genres. Digital publishing began in 2008; nearly a hundred ebook titles shipped between 2008 and the end of 2013, matching the industry’s e-reader boom. As editorial director she later created Clasp Editions for SF/F erotic romance and Gressive Press for sexuality outside the “big binaries” (gay/straight, male/female), centering bisexuality, transgender themes, and other identities not easily labeled. In 2014 Circlet co-won Bi Book Publisher of the Year at the Bisexual Book Awards. Circlet’s house style always treated kink as narrative engine, not apologetic garnish—exactly the energy adult SF readers still hunt for when mainstream houses sand the edges off power exchange.
Fiction career: from short fiction to BDSM billionaires
Tan’s own fiction has appeared in a wide range of outlets: Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Best American Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Nerve.com, and many others. HarperCollins published the short-story collection Black Feathers in 1998; Running Press followed with the erotic collection White Flames in 2008. She moved into erotic romance ebooks in 2009 with Mind Games and The Hot Streak from Ravenous Romance. The Magic University series appeared in ebook from Ravenous and in trade paperback from Red Silk Editions, an imprint of Red Wheel Weiser—only two of four books made that print run before Borders collapsed and the imprint died—and the series was also published in French.
In 2013 her first BDSM romance from a major publisher appeared: Slow Surrender (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing), opening a trilogy in the industry’s newly minted “BDSM billionaire” category after the commercial shock of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. RT Book Reviews nominated the book for erotic Book of the Year and later awarded Tan the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Erotica; Slow Surrender also won an RT Reviewers Choice Award in erotic romance and a Maggie Award for Excellence from the Georgia Romance Writers chapter of RWA. The Struck by Lightning trilogy saw French publication via Hachette Livre. Another Grand Central trilogy, Secrets of a Rock Star, later appeared in German from Bastei Lübbe. Online serial Daron’s Guitar Chronicles won the inaugural Rose and Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction; The Prince’s Boy earned honorable mentions in the 2010 Rainbow Awards and the NLA: International Writing Awards. As of the mid-2010s she had been multiply nominated for the Lambda Literary Award without a win yet recorded in that cycle. In 2010 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame for LGBTQ writers at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival—recognition that her work sits in queer literary history as well as genre erotica.
Baseball writing and SABR
Parallel to erotica, Tan built a serious baseball byline that surprises people who only know the BDSM shelf: The 50 Greatest Yankee Games (Wiley, 2005), The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games with Bill Nowlin (Wiley, 2006), weekly columns for GothamBaseball.com and YankeesXtreme.com, occasional pieces for Yankees Magazine, and the ongoing online magazine Why I Like Baseball. At the 2004 national SABR convention she won the USA Today Sports Weekly award for best poster presentation for research titled “The Women’s Baseball Marathon.” She has edited the Maple Street Press Yankees Annual since 2007. In 2011 she became publications director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and co-edited the Baseball Prospectus Annual with King Kaufman during a two-year transition from former in-house editor Steven Goldman to the in-house team of Sam Miller and Jason Wojciechowski. By 2022 she was SABR’s longest-tenured publications director in the organization’s history; that year she co-won the Tweed Webb Lifetime Achievement Award with Sean Forman for editing The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues. The double career is not a gimmick—it is the same editorial rigor applied to two American obsessions, sex and baseball.
Why Tan matters for BDSM media
Tan stands at a rare intersection: leather organizer who built flea markets and won NLA and Pantheon honors; small-press publisher who professionalized SF erotica and bi/trans-inclusive lists; romance novelist who rode the billionaire-BDSM wave without abandoning craft standards; and sports researcher who steers SABR publications. Dialogues and interviews (with M. Christian, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Jamie Joy Gatto, Claire Light, Annalee Newitz, Michael A. Ventrella, and others) document her long public case that sex and speculative fiction belong in the same bookstore aisle. For this site’s readers, Circlet’s safeword-aware speculative smut and the Hachette BDSM romances are the direct pipeline—proof that kink literature can be community infrastructure, not just bedroom wallpaper. If you want power exchange that survives plot, worldbuilding, and adult consent culture, Cecilia Tan’s shelf is still one of the best places to start.
