Charles Allen Moser (born 1952) is a physician specializing in transgender health, a clinical sexologist, sex therapist, and sex educator practicing in San Francisco, California. His path is unusually cross-disciplinary: a bachelor’s in physics, a master’s in social work, a doctorate in sexology, then an M.D. and clinical practice. That background lets him argue DSM debates with physicians and still do hands-on sexual medicine. Before the M.D. in 1991 he was a California Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a private psychotherapy practice focused on sexual issues, and he served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Sexual Medicine at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS), which closed in 2018.
In kink communities he is best known for arguing—often with Peggy Kleinplatz—that consensual paraphilias should not be treated as mental disorders simply because they are uncommon. That position challenges pathologizing models and gives BDSM-friendly clinicians a reform argument: negotiated SM is a health-relevant topic, not a disease by default. The same fight still shapes how some doctors, courts, and families talk about kink patients.
His publications are dense. “Sadomasochism” in the Journal of Social Work & Human Sexuality (1989) mapped the field early. With J. J. Madeson he wrote Bound to Be Free: The SM Experience (Continuum, 1996). With Kleinplatz he later published Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures (Taylor & Francis, 2014), a substantial scholarly treatment of SM pleasure and practice. He also wrote on other paraphilias, including “Transvestic fetishism: Psychopathology or iatrogenic artifact?” in New Jersey Psychologist (2002), and solo papers in the Journal of Homosexuality on autogynephilia in women (2009) and a critique of Blanchard’s autogynephilia theory (2010).
On the clinical side he pushed for medical settings that do not shame sexually diverse patients. Health Care Without Shame: A Handbook for the Sexually Diverse and Their Caregivers (Greenery Press, 1999), which he wrote alone, remains a practical classic for kink patients and their caregivers. With Janet W. Hardy he co-authored Sex Disasters… And How to Survive Them (Greenery Press, 2011). Together these books give language that treats negotiated SM as ordinary health talk rather than automatic pathology.
Community and academy both marked the work. Moser is an inductee of the Society of Janus Hall of Fame in San Francisco leather and BDSM culture, sitting beside his academic credentials. In 2009 he received the SSSS-WR Outstanding Contributions to Sexual Science Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality’s Western Region. From SUNY physics and University of Washington social work through IASHS and Hahnemann to San Francisco practice, his CV tracks sexology that kept BDSM out of the automatic mental-illness bin while still offering real care to transgender and sexually diverse people.
