Trevor H. Jacques (24 July 1956 – 22 May 2021) was a Canadian author, activist, and sex researcher who brought a hard-science habit of mind into BDSM education. The working life runs through physics, IT consulting, and sexual health, based in Toronto. He had a physics degree and field seismology behind him, and he was wary of leather tradition when it was only folklore. He wrote about consensual SM as risk management that can be taught, not as pathology. He was open about being a switch, up or down. He could talk about topping technique and about risk on the bottom, without pretending every educator has to live on one side of the dynamic.
The schooling is where that frame comes from. From 1967 to 1974 he attended St. Joseph’s College, Birkfield, in Ipswich, a De La Salle brothers’ school. In 1978 he took a physics degree from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, became an Associate of the Royal College of Science (A.R.C.S.), and a graduate of the Institute of Physics (GradInstP.). A.R.C.S. is not a professorial title. From 1979 he worked for Seismograph Service Ltd. as a field seismologist off the French Congo and Gabon and in England, for about two and a half years. Then, at Computing Devices Company in Hastings, East Sussex, he designed acceptance-test specifications for a European aircraft missile-management system. He emigrated to Toronto in 1981 and spent nine years at Spar Aerospace on an infrared surveillance system for the Canadian and U.S. navies. Later, at the Toronto database companies SmartStar and Orapro, he headed technical support and then directing consulting. From 1998 to 2001 he was CIO at Stott Pilates, now Merrithew Health and Fitness, and he kept consulting for the firm after that. The line from physical measurement to systems design is what shows up later in the sex education: practical, precise, and closed around risk.
From the seminar room toward the courtroom
In 1991 he co-founded Toronto’s Safer SM Education seminar series with the co-authors of On The Safe Edge: A Manual for SM Play. Those co-authors were Dr. Dale McCarthy (1937–2007, co-founder of the AIDS Committee of Toronto), Michael Hamilton, and “Sniffer,” a dentist and a teacher at the University of Toronto. Jacques organized and taught the seminars for thirteen years, 1991 to 2004. The classes fed the book, and they fed updated versions of Safer SM, a BDSM safer-sex pamphlet from the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT). Alternate Sources is the other manual his name is tied to.
The public-health work sits beside the seminars. He spent years helping ACT in Toronto produce safer-sex pamphlets. His later booklet, BDSM: Safer Kinky Sex, exists in English and French for ACT. It is the third major community-edited revision in that pamphlet line, long enough to count as a real booklet. ACT invited him to launch the French edition in Montréal in May 2011. The path runs from local seminars and printed manuals to a public-health partnership, which is how BDSM education got out of rumor and into a wider sexual-health view.
Sponsorship, and a name in legal argument
Besides the teaching texts, Jacques had a role in gay and lesbian print culture and in legal argument. He edited and published Gay Guide Canada and Canada’s Gay Guide for 1998 and 1999, and he sponsored production of Toronto’s Pride Guide for Pride Toronto from 1996 through 1998. In 2001 and 2002 he edited and published the souvenir guide for the Mr. Leatherman Toronto Competition. He also wrote articles, interviews, and expert comment for dozens of magazines, newspapers, and radio and television outlets in North America and Europe.
In legal settings he was an expert witness, and the book was written into submissions. In 1998 he testified as an expert witness in Toronto’s “Bondage Bungalow” case. After the Spanner case, when the London BDSM community prepared submissions to the UK Law Commission on “Consent in the Criminal Law” (consultation paper 139), those submissions cited On The Safe Edge. That links Canadian safe-play writing to the post-Spanner legal argument. It is not a holding written into a judgment. In 2009 he appeared in the fourth Canadian edition of the textbook Understanding Human Sexuality.
Public talks, broadcasts, and the awards
Jacques treated SM education as public knowledge and showed up at academic meetings and on media platforms. The meetings include a poster at the Guelph Sexuality Conference in 1997; AASECT/SSSS in St. Louis in 1999; the International Academy of Sex Research in Paris in 2000 and in Bloomington in 2003; SSSS Montréal on 8 November 2002; a keynote at TOKink Toronto on 30 April 2006; and a keynote at the 9th International Conference on Bisexuality in Toronto on 16 June 2006. Broadcasts include CityTV’s Too Much 4 Much in 1992, on Nine Inch Nails’ “Happiness in Slavery”; a feature BDSM interview on SexTV, season 1, episode 4, on 7 November 1998; a TVOntario panel in 1999 after the first showing of Tops and Bottoms; and a Sex Matters interview on BDSM on 26 February 2010. Academic posters, IASR talks, and late-night music-video commentary sit on the same résumé.
For work inside leather culture, archives, and public health, the recognition includes the Pantheon of Leather Canadian Award in 1994 and 1997, honorary board membership of the Leather Archives and Museum in 1996, the Mr. Leatherman Toronto Competition’s Francis Robichaud Memorial Award in 2001 for sustained contributions to Toronto’s gay and lesbian community, and ACT’s recognition in 2002 for ten years of outstanding service. He died in 2021. The manuals and the bilingual booklet are the usable footprint: kink made safer, measurable, and possible to defend in public. WholeSM Publishing is another name attached to that print.
