For adults who use dungeons, leather, or relationships with more than one person, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) is the practical layer between private sex and public law. Susan Wright founded it in 1997 under the New York SM Activists umbrella. The main office is in Baltimore, Maryland. It works for equal rights for consenting adults, especially in BDSM, leather, and fetish. Swing and polyamory were written into the mission formally in 2002.
The work is de-pathologizing and anti-discrimination. NCSF sits with more than sixty supporting members and more than one hundred coalition partners: law firms, mental-health professionals, clubs, and other businesses. The public mission is a political, legal, and social environment in which alternative sexual expression is not treated as a disorder. The practical help is a therapist who will not call a BDSM inclination a mental illness on contact, or support when police misread some sexual conduct as “indecency.”
Surveys and the DSM
The 1998 Violence & Discrimination Survey found that 36 percent of BDSM-identified respondents reported violence or harassment because of their practices, and 30 percent reported job discrimination. A 2015 survey asked 816 people. Only 9.8 percent were completely open about BDSM involvement. The rest stayed closeted to some degree because of stigma. A majority reported victimization histories: 26 percent assault, 42 percent sexual assault. The participants themselves showed low rates of aggression proneness, sexual aggression, and rape-myth endorsement. 7.7 percent said they had been victims of a hate crime based on BDSM status. Read together, the surveys say stigma is still real, and that kink communities are not a special reservoir of violent perpetration.
The clearest institutional change was in medical classification. From 2005 to 2013, NCSF’s Incident Reporting and Response program (IRR) collected cases in which the American Psychological Association’s DSM-IV-TR was misused in family court. Kink-identified parents were painted as unable to control their behavior, and custody was taken away. NCSF pressed the APA to separate paraphilias from paraphilic disorders. In 2010 the APA’s draft DSM-5 revisions adopted that split. DSM-5 was published in 2013. In custody hearings, kink alone stopped being treated as a harmful factor. Custody-related IRR reports fell from 124 parents in 2008 to 15 parents in 2017. That is one of the clearest numbers in kink legal advocacy.
Nitke, Miles, and FOSTA
Nitke v. Gonzales, in 2001, was a federal suit. Photographer Barbara Nitke and NCSF challenged the obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act as they applied to internet content. Counsel was John Wirenius. The claim was that those provisions violated free speech for internet content providers and chilled sexual discussion among consenting adults.
United States v. Miles, in 2014, was a military case. Marine LCpl Miles was convicted, after a consensual threesome, of attempted consensual sodomy and of “indecent conduct.” NCSF won leave to file an amicus brief. The brief argued that convicting him of attempted consensual sodomy under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice violated the liberty defined in Lawrence v. Texas, and that the code’s rules on consensual, non-injurious sex did not match contemporary American sexual mores. What succeeded at that step was permission to file the brief.
In 2019, in Woodhull Freedom Foundation et al. v. United States, NCSF joined allies challenging FOSTA, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017. The statute’s stated aim is anti-trafficking. Its collateral reach covers online sexual speech, advertising, and community infrastructure. NCSF’s part was a brief in support of the appellants.
Directories, media, Consent Counts
Since 2006 NCSF has kept the Kink And Poly Aware Professionals Directory, formerly the KAP list. Professionals volunteer to be contacted. People in leather, fetish, or polyamory who need a therapist or a lawyer can look there for someone who already knows the context and will not pathologize them at the first meeting.
The media program supplies sound bites, tactics, and training so advocates are not ambushed when cameras and tabloids arrive. Consent Counts grew out of a leather leadership roundtable at the 2006 Creating Change conference, focused on decriminalizing BDSM. NCSF took a leadership role in that project in 2007. The program that tracks what kinds of crises actually hit constituents is IRR, not Consent Counts.
NCSF received Pantheon of Leather awards in 1999, 2002, 2005, and 2010 for its nonprofit work. The surveys still show most kink-identified people hiding because of stigma. Court wins and DSM wording help only if people know the tools exist. On an adult BDSM site, NCSF is the infrastructure that tries to keep consensual kink legal, reportable, and defensible when stigma still costs jobs, children, and housing. Document discrimination through IRR, hire people from the directory, and use the media training. The point is durable national advocacy for consenting adults who play hard, love more than one person, and are not apologizing for either.
