Conversio Virium, CV for short, is one of the oldest university student-run BDSM education groups in the United States. It is the central Columbia University student organization for people at the school who practice consensual BDSM and related activities. The group is not-for-profit. It argues hard for sexual self-expression, and it tries to give students a safe, welcoming place to explore non-mainstream sex, especially consensual dominance and submission. The people in that room are negotiated adults, not minors.
In the kink history of elite campuses, CV is a flagship case of students teaching consent culture. It shows up at sexuality-community events in New York City alongside groups such as The Eulenspiegel Society, rather than staying shut in a dorm. City-level ties matter. A club that stays isolated has a harder time building allies when administrators or the press attack. CV’s public work treats student interest in D/s and SM as something that can be taught, instead of treating it as a pathology.
The record is a campus fight and a reinstatement. In 1994, soon after CV began, a Columbia Christian group accused it of violating its own constitution, and the university expelled it from campus. The accusations were eventually shown to be untrue, and CV was restored as an official student organization. Along the way it picked up allies inside and outside the BDSM community, including Robert B. Chatelle, then a board member of the National Writers Union, who wrote in support. Religious opponents, administrative overreach, and a return once the facts failed: that pattern is familiar in campus kink history.
In 2007 CV made national television. Fox News brought on Ann Coulter to comment on a New York Daily News piece titled “Wild Sex 101,” which criticized the university and its sex clubs. A student group whose work was education became culture-war footage. Even with a mission of consent education rather than shock, CV was an easy national target.
CV’s papers are at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, inside the main institutional memory of leather and BDSM history. Groups often listed next to it include Cuffs at Iowa State University and other campus BDSM clubs. Expulsion attempt in the 1990s, work with the New York community, the 2007 media storm, and an archive that a leather institution actually keeps: that is how a set of young adults organized around D/s education and left a paper trail.
