Gloria Brame (born August 20, 1955) is an American sexologist, writer, and sex therapist based in Athens, Georgia. A member of the American College of Sexologists and a clinical sexologist, she specializes in consensual BDSM, sexual fetishism, and sexual dysfunction. She is also an educator and advocate for safe, sane, and consensual relating—especially among BDSM, fetish, and LGBTQ communities—and has spent decades translating kink practice into language mainstream readers and courts can understand. Where many pop-sex writers treat SM as a punch line or a pathology, Brame’s career has insisted that negotiated power exchange belongs inside adult sexual health, literature, and public policy debates.
Education and clinical focus
Brame earned a PhD in Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in 2000 and an M.A. in English literature from Columbia University in 1978. Her therapy practice centers on consensual power exchange, fetish, and dysfunction rather than treating kink itself as pathology—an approach that tracks the larger shift from pathologizing SM to recognizing negotiated adult sexuality.
Books that reframed SM and kink
Her landmark co-authored book Different Loving: the World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (with William D. Brame and Jon Jacobs; Villard, 1993) offered an evidence-based re-evaluation of SM, fetish, and kink as expressions of ordinary minds and lives, challenging the bias that treated safe, sane, consensual behavior as inherently pathological. Come Hither: A Commonsense Guide To Kinky Sex (Fireside, 2000) was selected as the “official guide to kinky sex” by the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
Other titles include Where the Boys Are (Hearst, 1997), the novel Domina: The Sextopians (1998), The Truth About Sex Vol. I: Sex and the Self (2011) and Vol. II: Sex for Grown-Ups (2013), the memoir Naked Memory: Confessions of a Sexual Revolutionary (2014), A Fetish for Men: A Memoir (2015), and Different Loving Too: Real People, Real Lives, Real BDSM with William D. Brame (2015). Her biography of the Marquis de Sade appears in the International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality (Wiley, 2015).
Legal advocacy, Woodhull, and leather institutions
Brame testified against then–U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in Nitke v. Ashcroft, a major challenge to the Communications Decency Act before the Southern District of New York—placing a clinical kink expert in the middle of online obscenity and free-speech litigation. In 2012 she joined the board of directors of the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance and co-hosted web radio on Spreaker. She sits on the board of governors for the Leather Hall of Fame and has been listed in directories of bisexuality-aware professionals and therapists experienced with transgender clients.
Media, teaching, and awards
Brame has given live radio and television interviews with the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNBC, FOX, PBS, and foreign media, and she was profiled in The Washington Post in 2004. She has contributed to Cosmopolitan, Working Woman, and other mainstream magazines as a fetish and sex expert. From 2002 to 2015 she taught at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Earlier she taught English and creative writing as an adjunct at NYU (1987–1991), as a guest lecturer at York College (CUNY), and as associate professor of poetry and creative writing at Hofstra. Online she has hosted the Gloria Brame Show on BlogTalkRadio and Spreaker and engaged professional BDSM/fetish discussion on Reddit.
DatingAdvice.com named her one of the “10 Best Sex and Dating Experts.” The National Leather Association International gave her the Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award (2010) for “Transformation and Transcendence in BDSM.” She appears in professional directories ranging from the American College of Sexologists to bisexuality-aware and transgender-experienced therapist lists, the Lesbian Business Community, MediAngels Global E-Hospital, open-relationship resources, and the Psychology Today therapist directory—practical signals that kink-competent clinical care is part of her public brand, not only book marketing.
Filmography and media citation lists treat her as a go-to expert when mainstream outlets need someone who can explain fetish sex without sneering or moral panic. For adult and leather readers, Brame’s long arc—from the 1993 evidence-based interviews in Different Loving, through Come Hither as a “commonsense” kink manual, court testimony in the CDA era, Woodhull board work, Leather Hall of Fame governance, and decades of radio and magazine education—marks her as one of the public intellectuals who helped move consensual BDSM from the psychiatric margins into therapy offices, classrooms, and sexual-freedom politics. The through-line is consistent: negotiated power exchange and fetish belong in adult sexual health, not only in pathologizing case files.
