I was tasked with acting as a guest lecturer for a Sociology of Gender course on the topic of BDSM and kink. I had 90 minutes to lecture. Prior to beginning the lecture, I went out and brought three boxes of pizza. The lecture took place in a classroom that I had taken dozens of other social work courses in. It felt like the natural place for me to examine and explore difficult topics I had taken Sociology of Gender as an undergraduate with this professor. The professor sat in the front and left me full control of this guest lecture. Attendance was optional, which meant every student had already consented to be there. I told them that we would begin the way any ethical scene begins. We would start with consent, set boundaries, and move forward together.

During the first ten minutes of the lecture, I set the ground rules. I explained to the students that this lecture was about the exploration of history and culture. This was not a place to discuss personal stories and individual experiences. I explained that we would avoid sexual detail and focus on power, stigma, and consent. If anyone felt uncomfortable, they could speak up, pause the discussion, or leave without explanation. My goal for this lecture was for students to understand that taboo topics can be navigated with ethical care and examined from an intellectual standpoint. In order for me to responsibly teach about these stigmatized topics, I needed to treat consent as a practice rather than a slogan.

For the first forty-five minutes, I taught about consent. Not in the abstract and not as a compliance form. I framed consent as negotiation, a social process with history and language. I reminded them that this was not a human sexuality course. It was about how people organize power and stigma. Once we had that foundation, we could place kink and BDSM in their proper context.

History came next. I traced the emergence of leather culture in queer communities pushed to the margins of public life during the twentieth century. Bars and back rooms became places where people created rules for power and intimacy. Students were struck by how much of this history was about community governance. I discussed how members of the LGBTQIA+ were often relegated to dark and seedy places. I explained that many of the spaces, including the Stonewall Inn were controlled by organized crime, as police could not be trusted.

People formed organizations and archives while debating questions of ethics and responsibility. I emphasized the lesbian leather scene and the role of groups like Samois, which brought feminism and kink into public conversation. These were both civic projects and contested experiments.

The students engaged with curiosity and caution. Some asked thoughtful questions about history and culture. A few asked questions that crossed into sexual detail, and I said that those were outside our scope. Creating and enforcing this boundary became a lesson in itself. This provided a framework that was always intellectual rather than voyeuristic.

At the time I was finishing my master’s program in social work and working at a gender and sexuality center as a graduate assistant. I had studied leather culture in depth and had spoken about it in an earlier interview for this same class. The professor likely invited me to lecture because I combined that knowledge with training in clinical social work. My diagnostics course (a class on how social workers use structured assessment tools and diagnostic frameworks like the DSM to understand client problems) had shaped how I thought about anxiety and anticipatory fear. If I taught this material in a sensational way, I would shut students down. If I used sterile language and predictable structure, I would lower arousal and invite reflection. So I chose sterile and predictable. That decision was not about sanitizing kink. It was about respecting students’ nervous systems.

One of the richest exchanges came during our discussion of lesbian contributions to kink culture. Students often hear leather history through a narrow male lens. Tracing lesbian debates about feminism, care, and community complicated the narrative. It also showed how the politics of naming and belonging are never neutral. Who counts as a member, what counts as harm, and which risks are acknowledged are all social questions. These questions remain central to sociology, regardless of the subculture in view.

I see this lecture as public sociology in action. Public sociology is not a slogan. It is a practice of engaging people in real problems, using language that is accessible, and building capacity beyond the campus. Teaching BDSM and kink through consent and history treats students as capable civic actors. It invites them to examine how communities make rules, store memory, and confront stigma. It also models how to address taboo topics without sliding into either titillation or moral panic. We learned to ask better questions. We learned to listen for boundaries. We learned to separate sociological study from pathologizing impulse.

My takeaway for other educators is straightforward. Teach consent as a method, not a definition. Use structure and clear language to lower anxiety. By keeping the scope on history and governance I was able to ensure that students could analyze without feeling pressure to disclose. Offer opt out as a standing option. Name the stigma and trace its origins. Invite students to think like sociologists and neighbors rather than jurors or voyeurs. 

At the end, students reflected that they now had tools to examine power, consent, and stigma across domains of social life. That was the goal: to show that taboo topics can be studied with scholarly rigor.

Joey Colby Bernert (any/all) is a clinical social worker, statistician, and MPH student at Michigan State University. They live in Southeast Oakland County and are applying to PhD programs in Sociology, Statistics, Social Work, and Women’s Studies. Their research focuses on rural sociology and the structural determinants of health. When they are not studying, they can be found long boarding or writing poetry.