Lord Morpheous: Rope Classes, Three Beginner Books, and a Public Suspension Show

Lord Morpheous is a Canadian sex educator, author, and photographer based in New York. He holds a B.Ed, an honours BA in visual art with a minor in English, and a degree in broadcasting. That mix shows up in how he packages kink: a teacher’s sequence, an eye for how bondage looks on camera, and ease with mainstream media. He teaches adults who have agreed to be there, whether they are students, people in community groups, or players looking for something more advanced. He treats BDSM as something that can be taught in order, shot, and filed by mainstream institutions.

The trilogy and the archives

Newcomers usually meet him through a practical trilogy. How to Be Kinky: A Beginner’s Guide to BDSM (2008) sets the basic frame. How to Be Kinkier: More Adventures in Adult Playtime (2012) pushes adult play further. Bondage Basics: Naughty Knots and Risqué Restraints You Need to Know, issued by Quiver Books in 2015, stays on rope. His work is archived in the Sexual Representation Collection at the University of Toronto’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, and at the National Archives of Canada. Classes on his site Altsexed are aimed at human-sexuality and psychology courses, LGBT organizations, undergraduate orientation weeks, and related adult education.

Morpheous’ Bondage Extravaganza

He also founded Morpheous’ Bondage Extravaganza, or MBE, an annual rope-bondage art installation. It began in 2007 as a public rope display during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, in a storefront window on Queen Street West. It was not an official Nuit Blanche program. It was timed to the city’s all-night art audience. Over the years it grew to a venue of about 4,000 square feet, added live internet streams, and ran satellite events in Orlando, Florida, and San Francisco, California. Programming ran about twelve hours, from simple floor bondage to aerial suspension. Suspension has real risks: falls, nerve injury, and circulation injury. A public display is not a reason to skip negotiation, spotters, or a way to stop. Organizers reported on the order of 6,000 people in person across the three cities and about 75,000 watching online.

An app, a column, and the on-ramp

He built the KinkMe app around kink compatibility. Users fill a checklist of activities and bump phones to compare interests, a negotiation worksheet turned into a small game. Altsexed also carries his lectures for universities and community education. He writes a BDSM and rope column for Hustler Hollywood, aimed at beginners, on consent, communication, safety in kinky sex, and how to raise BDSM with a partner.

The lane he built is meant to be easy to enter: a first single-column tie in a class, a checklist on a phone, aerial suspension at a public art night. Rope, in that career, is a teaching tool and a gallery object. The suspension is still the dangerous part.