Center for Sex Positive Culture: Seattle’s Wet Spot BDSM Club

The Center for Sex Positive Culture (CSPC), formerly The Wet Spot, is a non-profit membership organization in Seattle, Washington. It is a major Pacific Northwest model of a dedicated physical club for BDSM and allied communities, and it also hosts swinging and polyamory groups. CSPC welcomes people of all sexual identities and aims to cover consensual sexual practices. The Center itself is a 501(c)(7) recreational club; its sister organization, the Foundation for Sex Positive Culture (renamed Pan-Eros in 2018), is a 501(c)(3) charitable and educational body. Play space and education sit side by side.

The first event was a fundraiser in March 1999; the same year it was founded as the Seattle Sex Positive Community Center. Socially it grew out of Allena Gabosch’s Beyond the Edge Cafe, which had already hosted BDSM-related events. Regulars talked about a dedicated space; one hoped for maybe two hundred members. Demand outran that guess: in its first year The Wet Spot registered about two thousand members. By September 2007 registered members hit ten thousand, though not all were current. That year the organization also renamed itself the Center for Sex Positive Culture and opened a second, annex building.

In November 2008 KOMO-TV scrutinized the Center over its non-profit status and the sexual activities on site. The report framed consensual adult play as scandal. Dan Savage and others called out inaccuracies, and the story was later pulled from the station’s website. The pattern is familiar to BDSM venues: local TV hits hard, community writers push back, the piece may vanish, and stigma often stays.

After building problems, shutdown, and a new venue, CSPC regrouped under a new board at Gallery Erato and restarted events at a lower frequency than at the original Interbay location. When COVID-19 hit, both CSPC and Pan-Eros had to stop in-person operations as of March 2020, which also canceled that year’s Seattle Erotic Arts Festival. They moved online, then in mid-2021 resumed some events with limited capacity and protective measures. Closure, digital pivot, careful reopening—the same arc many U.S. kink clubs lived, with the festival cancellation as Seattle’s visible cost.

From the 1999 fundraiser through annex expansion, the KOMO fight, Gallery Erato rebuild, and COVID recovery, CSPC’s membership structure, event calendar, and multi-subculture welcome for kink, swing, and poly have kept it a core Seattle institution for consensual kink and sex-positive community life.