Twenty years ago today — April 29, 2006 — I published the first post on this site. It was called Bed Death, Standard Variety. I was in a relationship that was making me smaller. I was in New York City, in front of a computer at a finance job for the first time in years, and I had stumbled into a just-born world of people writing their lives out loud on the internet. I had started writing things I actually liked. So I did what I’d always done with writing I was afraid to own: I put it somewhere people could see it.
I did not expect to still be here twenty years later.
My Graduate Study in Sex, Gender, Kink, & Relationships (2006–2009)
My first girlfriend said to me, “You’re not really butch. You’re more like … sugar butch.” I took the name and decided to make a graduate study of myself: to read all the books, listen to all the podcasts, ask every teacher and facilitator I could find what their best philosophies were on sex, gender, and relationships. I would use this place to think out loud, and slowly, through the writing, I would become more myself.
That was the plan. And, honestly? It worked.
The early years were raw. I was writing about dates and breakups and desire with very little filter, finding my voice in real time, stumbling through things I didn’t have language for yet. The butch identity. The kink. The femmes I was falling for. The community I didn’t have yet and was reaching toward through a screen.
By year two I’d had the best sex of my life. I had a brief relationship that shocked me back into my desire and my body after years of numbness, and when that ended I fell into the breakup writing that would become the first real peak of this project — the posts that made people think, oh, this person is telling the truth. I started getting asked to teach. Then came dating Kristen, and the many smutty stories about her, our daddy/girl dynamic, and the opening of that relationship. Many of those Kristen stories — I’m Kind of Insatiable, Wait For Me On Your Knees, My Slutty Little Girl, Hogtied — are still some of the most-read erotica on this site.
The essays were getting more ambitious, too. I wrote a lot about butch identity, femmes, queer genders, and strap-on sex; about femme invisibility, about what it means for a butch to come inside, about sadism and the study of pain. I was trying to figure out what I actually thought about things, and using the posts to do it.
The commenters, the readers who showed up every week, the other sex bloggers in New York and elsewhere — they changed this project, too. It stopped being a journal and became something more like a conversation.
Expand, Expand, Expand (2010–2013)
The years between 2010 and 2013 were, in many ways, another peak of Sugarbutch as a public presence. The erotica was getting more confident — Desperation & Dominance, Lipstick Blow Job, Waking Up — and drawing the biggest traffic the site had ever seen. I was teaching regularly at colleges and queer conferences, editing my first Best Lesbian Erotica anthology (2012), and writing columns in half a dozen places. I had a following in the old-internet sense: people who read every post, sent emails, came to workshops because they found the site.
In September 2011, I met rife. We were both attending a kink event, and he messaged me first, with the subject line “butch at your service” and offered a blow job. I thought, hm. Well. I do like those, even if I don’t usually date boys. What followed became twelve years of my life, a full-time 24/7 deep D/s dynamic, a contract, and some of the most significant writing I’ve done here, like Like a Faggot. Whatever I Tell You to Do. Five Blow Jobs. The rife stories are where the D/s writing hit full stride — embodied, specific, the dynamic as texture rather than topic.
By the 7th anniversary I was writing the post from an airplane, always in motion, trying to figure out what to say now that I had everyone’s attention. I knew the site had given me a place to become myself. I was starting to ask what came next.
Becoming More “Professional” (2014–2019)
These years are the hardest to summarize, partly because I was quieter here during them, and partly because so much of what happened didn’t make it onto the page.
I was teaching, traveling, and working day jobs, trying to figure out how to be financially sustainable while doing work I believed in. I published How I Make My Boy Do the Dishes in 2014, and kept exploring all kinds of D/s theory. I launched Submissive Playground (that later became D/s Playground) with rife. Sweet & Rough: Queer Kink Erotica came out and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. I edited five editions of Best Lesbian Erotica.
In 2016, rife and I hit a major relationship rupture that took years to untangle. April of that year came and went without a Sugarbutch anniversary post — the first time — because I was in no condition to write one. What followed was years of couples therapy, of digging into relational trauma and complex PTSD, and doing lots of my own interior work that mostly happened offline. I kept digging hard into D/s, writing about methods of control in D/s and cartography of power dynamics in a more structured, more deliberately useful way — the teacher voice becoming more prominent as the personal voice went quieter.
That’s the thing about any long writing practice: it maps your life whether you intend it to or not. The silences are as legible as the posts.
Everything Changed (2020–present)
The 14th anniversary post went up on April 29, 2020. The pandemic had started six weeks earlier. I wrote it anyway, because it felt important to mark the day — to look back at the collaring ceremony, the marriage, the leather titles, the Patreon, all the ways the foundation had been laid for the next phase of things. I was grateful. I was also exhausted in ways I couldn’t fully name yet.
I launched Writing Spicy in 2020, and it quickly became an incredible resource of queer, trans, kinky erotica writers. I loved the many disabled folks, neurodivergent folks, and folks of color who took part. It really started picking up when I brought in Kiki DeLovely and Tobi Hill-Meyer to assist with it; they had excellent feedback and ideas.
I moved back to Seattle in 2021. In 2022, rife and I divorced after twelve years together. The financial and emotional instability that followed was real and hard and not something I have written about as directly as I probably will someday. The site got quieter. I focused on teaching. Sugarbutch turned 17, 18, 19, and I didn’t write the anniversary posts.
But the work continued. I wrote Is Kink Ever “Wholesome”? and The Lineage & Ancestry of Queer Kinky Erotica and On Developing a Writing Habit — some of the best essays I’ve written in years. I published a leather romance novel, Leather & Lust in 2025 on Theo Reads. I wrote You’ll Take Whatever I Can Dish Out, and almost a dozen more short erotica stories that are more vignettes than stories with fleshed-out characters, mostly based on Writing Spicy prompts. I taught — a lot. At least 25 workshops each year, mostly online. I ran my first four-hour D/s intensive and want to do a hundred more.
The writing keeps going. Slower, sometimes. But it keeps going.
What Twenty Years Means
I’ve been trying to figure out how to say something about this, about what it really means to have written here for twenty years.
This project has been the place where I became myself. Not metaphorically. Literally. The understanding of butch identity, the relationship to kink and D/s and leather, the teaching practice, the sense of myself as a writer — I built all of that here, in public, sentence by sentence, over twenty years.
The early stuff is almost too raw for me to look at now. I know there are things I wrote in my twenties that I wouldn’t say now, and things I did in relationships that I’ve had to make peace with. The archives hold all of it.
I also know that every year, someone finds this site at exactly the moment they need it. Someone who just realized they might be butch. Someone in lesbian bed death trying to figure out if they’re allowed to leave. Someone who wants to write erotica but doesn’t think their desires are worth writing about. Someone who didn’t know there was a word for what they feel in a D/s dynamic until they read it here.
That is the thing that keeps me here. This lineage — Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Patrick Califia, Susie Bright, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Laura Antoniou, John Preston, Jeff Mann, Tristan Taormino, DL King, and so many more, the whole tradition of queer sexual writing that this work is in conversation with — is still being passed forward. There are still people finding their way into themselves through someone else’s honest writing about desire.
I have wanted to be a part of that lineage ever since I started reading those kinds of works in my teens and early 20s, and I hope I’m still doing that. I don’t ever plan to stop. This feels like my life’s calling, my life’s work, and the alignment of most of my deepest passions and interests.
I don’t really know what’s next for Sugarbutch, but this has always been a project that adapts to me and my life, and what I need in the moment, more than it has been anything prescriptive. I’m sure it will keep adapting, to be what I need it to be, to support my own evolution. And I’m pretty sure I’ll keep writing about all the dirty things that rattle around in my mind & body.
Thank You
To everyone who has read. To everyone who has commented over the years, sent emails, shown up to workshops, bought the books, supported on Patreon. To the people who have loved me while I wrote about them. To the people who didn’t know I was writing about them (and to whom I have since apologized). To the people who have been my community, my teachers, my students.
And to this site itself, which has held me accountable to my writing practice, and self reflection, for twenty years.
Here’s to the next chapter, whatever it becomes.
Want to read back through the years? Here are the previous anniversary and year-in-review posts:
2nd Anniversary (2008) · 3rd Anniversary (2009) · Year in Review: 2009 · 4th Anniversary (2010) · Year in Review: 2010 · 5th Anniversary (2011) · 6th Anniversary (2012) · 7th Anniversary (2013) · 14th Anniversary (2020) · Best of 2021 · Best of 2022 · Best of 2025
Portrait of me by photographer Bill Wadman
