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A police advisory group made up of members of Portland’s LGBTQ+ and sex work communities shut down last year after 27 years of monthly meetings. Its chair had stepped down and no one volunteered to take his place.
It was a disappointment to many, including Theresa “Darklady” Reed, who operates a dungeon in the Central Eastside.
“It’s really important to keep those lines of communication open between alternative lifestyle communities and the police force,” she tells WW.
Why? Because Reed, like many people operating in the sexual entertainment business, operates in a legal gray area.
Her business, Catalyst: A Sex Positive Place, is a community space designed for BDSM play parties. (For the unfamiliar, BDSM refers to a set of erotic practices that include bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism.) Catalyst relies on volunteers and is funded through Reed’s writing, door fees and monthly memberships.
But not everything that happens there is strictly legal.
In Portland, which as recently as 2015 was proclaimed the kinkiest city in America by kinkuniversity.com, statutes on the books banning “sadomasochistic abuse” in live shows have been ruled unenforceable by the state’s Supreme Court. Still, aspects of BDSM are illegal even in the privacy of one’s own home—an Oregonian cannot consent to being strangled, at least not according to a recent Oregon Court of Appeals ruling.
Reed hopes the BDSM community will soon have a voice on the city’s latest police advisory committee, the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing.
Meanwhile, although there’s no evidence that police have any appetite for a crackdown, the loss of a direct line of communication still has some kink practitioners edgy.
Those who practice BDSM have long found ways to distinguish between harm and hurt. The law in many ways has not.
As sex worker Elle Stanger explains to WW, “Law experts typically don’t understand BDSM or kink, so they tend to pathologize it.”
Portland has long been a haven for the kink community. Then-Mayor Vera Katz dedicated a “Leather Pride Week” in the summer of 2002, and the city is host to KinkFest, held annually at the Portland Expo Center, which advertises one of the “largest kinky play spaces in the world.”
And Elizabeth Allen has helped teach police how to deal with it.
“I sat down with vice cops and explained to them what BDSM is, so they no longer had a boogeyman to go after,” she says.
Allen, a Beaverton clinical sexologist, had been a member of the Alliance for Safer Communities since its founding in 1995 as a response to harassment of gay men by the cops. She calls its disbanding a major blow, and she’s worried that younger members of the community may not be aware of its importance.
“We would make way more progress for trans people and for sex workers in Multnomah County than they’re going to make without us,” she says.
Furthermore, she thinks there’s a risk that police could return to raiding BDSM parties. “There’s definitely a risk of backsliding—those statutes are on the books,” she says.
There’s no evidence that the police are preparing such a crackdown, and the Portland Police Bureau says it won’t bother Kinkfest or similar events. “I can say with confidence that PPB does not plan to shut down any events related to Kinkfest,” says bureau spokesman Sgt. Kevin Allen. “Consensual activity of that nature is lawful, not uncommon in Portland, and we rarely get calls for service at those events.”
The reason police indulgence matters so much is because the law allows little room for some of BDSM’s common practices.
On March 22, for example, the Oregon Court of Appeals issued a ruling that criminal defense lawyers say amounts to the criminalization of BDSM.
A Linn County man, Sunny Stone, was convicted in 2020 for strangling a woman who was then his live-in girlfriend. Stone did not dispute that he wound a power cord around her neck until she passed out before handcuffing her to the bed. Instead, he argued, it was sexual play in a relationship where BDSM was long treated as consensual.
A jury convicted him of strangulation and assault. The judge had told the jury that in cases of strangulation, “consent or nonconsent is simply not a factor.”
Stone appealed, and won a mixed verdict. Appeals Court Judge Robyn Ridler Aoyagi noted that the Legislature offered three instances in which strangulation wasn’t a crime: in medicine, dentistry and religious practices. But sexual play? Not mentioned. She threw out the assault conviction but let strangulation stand.
The conclusion of Portland criminal defense lawyer Rankin Johnson: “Under [State v.] Stone, BDSM is clearly illegal.”
Johnson noted that the decision could have far-reaching implications. “I have no idea how this is going to play out.”
This is not the first such ruling—a federal court in Virginia ruled in 2016 that there’s no constitutional right to engage in consensual BDSM, citing the need to protect vulnerable sex partners at risk of harm—although it might come as a surprise to kink-friendly Portlanders to see an Oregon court come to the same conclusion.
Stanger the sex worker has a solution: amend the laws. “There needs to be methods for people to be heard when they say, ‘I want to do this, even if it looks harmful.’”
Otherwise, she’ll go on breaking them. During a call with a WW reporter, she described being “very lightly” strangled just minutes before, in the shower by her boyfriend.
“Baby,” she teased him, “you just broke the law.”