I met Suzanne Forbes at one of the BEDx events, organized by Cameryn Moore each month. She did a short presentation about her live drawings, a lot of them wonderfully sexual and explicit and I was captured by her art and story. Coming to Berlin from New York via San Fransisco, having experienced sex-postiive and kink cultures in all these places, worked in comics, and being open about her experience with addiction were all things I wanted to know more about. Some of them I can also relate to. Do checkout her Flickr account for more documentary art from the Berlin sex positive scene and the city in general

Vanina You moved to Berlin from San Francisco via New York. How is it different here from the US in terms of sexual positive communities, and sexual expression?

Suzanne I moved here to Berlin from the San Francisco Bay area four years ago with my third husband. I had been living in the Bay area for 18 years, and my husband had been living there for a shorter time. We wanted to move to a place that was like the Bay area in terms of sexual freedom and openness and the ability to be sex positive. Where sex work was decriminalized, and there were sex parties. A place that had socialized medicine, and affordable living and a place that had tech culture. Berlin was one of several cities that we considered and in the end it seemed like it was the best choice. Now I'm really, really, really glad we didn't move to London.

On the difference between Berlin and San Francisco in terms of sex positive culture, events that we can go to, how people feel about kink and about sex in general - I would say that I lived in San Francisco during a period from 1997 to 2015 when the sex positive culture was really thriving, was really amazing, and there were just so many wonderful things to get involved with.

There was Madison Young's Femina Potens Gallery, which was a queer, kinky, gender diverse, inclusive, sex positive space where artists and sex workers came together and performed. There was the upper floor at kink.com where there was real time 24/7 BDSM lifestyle and lots and lots of open porn shoots, and I drew at so many of those. There were queer porn companies and small, independent porn companies who invited me to draw during shoots.

The culture was amazing for a long time, and the changes in San Francisco, I don't know if they've destroyed it, but they've certainly crippled and debilitated it. They reduced it in a horrific and unbelievably depressing way, because no one can afford to live in San Francisco. Because people whose lifestyle choices are non-traditional are being overwhelmingly either forced out of the city or being treated as a live zoo exhibit for the tech workers who want to have some kind of wild and exciting San Francisco life in whatever single serving doses they choose to pay for it.

So, I would say that it WAS great in San Francisco. It IS great in Berlin. And to me, the part of the BEDx event where we met that felt like San Francisco in the old days was that it felt homey and inclusive. There are a lot of events at the Schwules Museum where I feel safe and included and seen, where my fat body isn't shamed, but welcomed. Where my age, the fact that I'm in my second half century of life is not a problem. The KitKat is welcoming, inclusive, and I love talking to women my own age at the KitKat.

So, here in Berlin there are many ways in which I can go to sex positive culture and feel safe and valued and seen and included, and also be able to make art that has, for me, my core values of representation and diversity. Because I don't want to draw just a straight cis man tying up a slender cis woman. I want to draw all people in all bodies, and I feel like there's a space for that here.

Banquet at The Upper Floor by Suzanne Forbes circa 2010

Berlin is great. I always say that Berlin is like New York in the '80s. I was born in New York City in 1967, and I was a teenager in New York in the '80s. And I used to go to places like the Hellfire Club and Rawhide. So, I was involved in kink culture in New York as a teenager and knew sex workers and had a life that was much like my life here in Berlin. And for me this life here in Berlin is like that life in New York in the '80s except that there's a lot less crime. There's a lot more human dignity. There's a lot less suffering because of socialized medicine, and because the rents still being a little better than they were in New York in the '80s, because culture itself has advanced a little bit, and we are more inclusive, and we're consciously diverse in the circles that I move in. So, to me this is just like a miraculous second chance to live my adolescence over again in sobriety, and I'm just so grateful for it.

Vanina Okay let's go back a bit and talk about your time at DC Comics. The comic industry is one notorious with its sexism, starting with the oversexualization of female superheroes. What was your experience, being in the industry?

Suzanne

Well, historically, and we'll make an exception for Wonder Woman who was created by an unusual person and has an unusual history, but in general, historically, the female superhero has been grotesquely objectified, has been appallingly used and abused and degraded. And comics is a frighteningly misogynist culture today as much as in the '80s and early '90s when I worked in the industry.

It's an industry that is composed of the hegemony of white males who are terrified of any kind of threat to their authority and to their ownership of this pocket universe that has gone from the obscure arena for the shy housebound collector to this international, corporate, economic juggernaut. And it's terrible to be a woman in comics, and the experiences I had were very, very damaging and very bad. And I loved comic books, and I loved superheroes so much that it was all I cared about as a teenager. All I wanted was to be a comic artist, and I survived and endured really terrible things in the industry to get to a position where I was drawing comics professionally. And even then I was hired by a woman editor. I don't know if a male editor would ever have given me a chance.

I was working on Star Trek, which is very different from the superhero comics that I really wanted to work on. So, once I was working professionally my experience was great, because my editor Margaret Clark was wonderful. And I was treated with total respect and dignity and safety during that period. And there was really very little problematic sexuality in Star Trek as a comic. So, I was in that sense while working professionally insulated from the toxicity and dysfunction of the industry, but when the Star Trek books were canceled during the great economic collapse of the comic industry in 1994 - 95 I left the industry and it was clear to me that I could not go back, that it was poisonous for me.

Vanina Is this when you actually started drawing your sex positive drawings?

Suzanne No, there was a 10 year gap. I took 10 years off from being an artist, and I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, and I did a lot of other kinds of work. I worked in the food business, I worked in the tech industry, I just took a break. I was really battered by my experience working in comics and the comics industry, and I took a long break. And then when I went back to drawing in about 2005 my friends in the Bay Area were goths and Burning Man folks. Almost immediately I had an experience where I was at a goth club drawing, and I heard a flogging start across the room. And I had this feeling of security and comfort that I was at home and among my people. This told me I needed to return to kinky sex culture and to begin making my art about sexuality.

Vanina Okay, so let's go through the history of you and kinky culture, and how did you get into it? When did you get into it?

Suzanne I was exposed to kinky culture from early childhood. It was not in a positive sense: my unsafe childhood had an abuser in it who was a kinky sex practitioner. Despite that, it was clear to me as a child that there was an internal through line in me that was drawn to this culture as well. That there was a separate part of me that authentically and truly of my own volition was drawn to kink culture, was drawn to the aesthetic, was drawn to the literature. So, I grew up in a house that had a copy of the Story of O in it, and I can't remember how young I was when I read it but probably 14. And I was around kinky sex practices from childhood, and I knew when I was a young teenager, when I started having sex when I was 14, that I wanted to have all kinds of sex, queer sex, kinky sex, group sex, and I very, very quickly did.

But the problem was that I was also an alcoholic from a very young age and self medicating with alcohol and drugs. So, my entire youthful kink experiences were in an environment where the people practicing were not clear about safe, sane and consensual. That wasn't yet a part of the culture. And where everybody was pretty high. It was incredibly unsafe. You can't imagine how unlikely it is that I'm alive. What a miracle it is that I'm alive. I got sober, when I was 22, at a treatment center in the Midwest and began doing, pretty much right away, intensive survivor therapy for my PTSD. And so, during those years when I was doing all that kind of work all the time I really felt like it was safest to have vanilla relationships. And I didn't go back to having the kind of kinky, queer relationships that I had had as a teenager until my 40s.

punching by Sadie drawn by Suzanne Forbes Nov 17 2017

Vanina Okay, sobriety and addiction. I just quit drinking a year ago, after 20 years. BDSM helped me a lot with dealing with my sobriety, just because of acceptance and vulnerability and the whole process of actually dealing with yourself and the fact that this all is an integral part of BDSM. I was just wondering, if it was a similar experience for you or you had to heal first and then you were ready to get into kink again? Is it connected at all for you?

Suzanne I think it is connected, and for me I needed time to heal, but also I needed to start to learn that the culture had evolved. Like I didn't know until I got back around the kink scene and especially the sex positive, kinky, queer scene in San Francisco around 2005 onwards. I didn't know how much the concept of consent had evolved, and there were people around me who were doing really important work about consent. Like my friend Kitty Stryker who's a blogger and author and activist who's written a book called "Ask", which is about consent. And Maggie Mayhem an activist who's very involved in the consent project. Professional sex workers who really, really, really were working to concretize boundaries, safety, bodily autonomy and dignity for people in the scene and particularly for femme presenting people. And as I began to meet these people it became clear to me that there was a kind of clarity and safety and security in BDSM practices that hadn't existed when I was young. And so, I just found it very beautiful. And I had so many experiences in the Bay area that had so much to do with just witnessing the trust.

And also, in the Bay Area that is one area where San Francisco has Berlin beat all to hell, which is that nobody drinks or takes drugs in dungeons in San Francisco. At every piece of BDSM furniture at a dungeon there was a station with sanitizing products, with rubber gloves, with condoms, with lubricants, everything to make sure that blood products were contained, that body fluids were handled safely. There were dungeon masters who were constantly passing, observing for consent, observing for boundaries. There was a sense that everyone was doing their best to do better, and that it was the work of the community.

And of course there were bad actors in the system, but the fact that nobody was using and nobody was drinking, that drinks weren't served at the dungeons, at the play spaces I think really made it easier to have this community intent about boundaries and consent.

Upper Floor 2011 Big Red and friends by Suzanne Forbes Sept 3 2011

And when I go to clubs here and I see people drinking and playing or using and playing it's very shocking to me. And when I see that there's careless handling of blood products - I am a child of the AIDS generation, and many people that I loved died. And I've been tested approximately a million times. I take blood care practices very seriously. And so, to me when I see people handling blood carelessly, handling semen carelessly, body fluids of any kind, female ejaculate, it's shocking and appalling to me, because I feel like part of bodily autonomy is that everyone's body gets to be separate from everyone else's body, that you get to choose that. That's definitely one area where San Francisco historically has been better. I don't know how it is now.

Vanina So you started drawing actually while you were in San Francisco. You started drawing the art that you actually still draw. Can you talk a bit more about that?

Suzanne I started doing live documentary art. I had always done portrait sketches of the people around me, and there was a period before I broke into comics in the early '90s where I carried a sketchbook with me and drew everyone around me, which I just think is a great practice for an artist. And then I was a courtroom artist, which is a thing that used to be more possible in the US, before court TV. I was a courtroom artist for several years before I even finished art school, before I worked in comics. So, I got very used to drawing people moving around, and got used to drawing people live in a scene and having to have my work finished by the end of the day and just hand it over.

And the other thing is that as a person who doesn't drink and who is actually by nature extremely introverted it gives me something to do. Like if other people are drinking or if other people are partying, or even if it's just a regular social event, the fact that I have a sketchbook with me is a great conversation starter, ice breaker, a way to meet people, a way to be of service to be people by documenting the moment, a way to connect with people. And it just keeps me comfortable, because I have this in my hand and I have something that I'm doing. And when I began to seriously think about myself as a documentary artist, around 2005 - 2006, I started going to fetish parties and Folsom Street Fair and all kinds of events, costume events, Renaissance fair, goth clubs. When I began to think of myself that way everything clicked. I realized that this was the work that I was put here to do, that it's a form of service, that it's a way to give people something, and it's a way to interact with people that feels very safe for me. And it doesn't have the problems of drawing comics, for example, where you're alone at home on deadline everyday , the whole month. I do the work while I'm with the people, and then it's done.

But the years that I did it in San Francisco from 2005 to 2015 it was really only possible because there were several periods where I was on unemployment insurance for a long time. There were periods when I was on disability insurance. Like the fact that I didn't have to have a job was what made it possible for a lot of the time, and it wasn't really understood by the audience in San Francisco. The art that's valued there is Burning Man art, it's technology based art. And so, my old fashioned illustrations, like everybody was glad to have me, I always got in everywhere for free and got drink tickets and whatever, but people didn't get excited about what I do the way that they do here. Like the fact that I'm making art is treated as precious here in a way that it just wasn't in the Bay.

Vanina Why do you think that is?

Suzanne

European art culture is just really different. This is a place where artists get grants, where art is publicly funded. Art is seen as a public good, whereas in San Francisco technology is seen as a public good.

Vanina So, partially the reason for you to move here was partially your art as well, and the ability to be to do it and present it in front of people who enjoy it?

Suzanne To feel like my work as an artist was not something trivial that should shunted to the side, but something that was part of the thread of the community. I don't want to be fancy about my art. I want to be a member of the community. You have your plumber, you have your doctor, you have your documentary artist. It's just like somebody in the community who just shows up and does their job. And I really just wanted to be able to do it. And when we moved here I had never gotten paid to do this work in San Francisco. I got portrait commissions and was paid for those, and people sometimes bought the original drawings now and then. And when we were leaving and everybody realized that I was gonna leave and take all these drawings, then dozens and dozens and dozens of people came to our going away art sale and bought drawings, but before that it was always just taken for granted.

Viva Lamore with bits at Full Moon Cabaret Berlin Burlesque Week June 3 2019 by Suzanne Forbes

And so, when I came here, we were really struggling when we first got here financially, because we had been living just hand to mouth even on tech worker salary in San Francisco. A bunch of my friends suggested that I start a Patreon, and it was early enough in the life cycle of Patreon that you could still do it. You could start a Patreon and get enough people to make some decent money, and the minute I did that everything made sense. Because I had always released my drawings open source. They've always been posted on Flickr creative commons. They're licensed, attribution, non commercial, non derivatives, which means that as long as you use my name with the art credit “Suzanne Forbes”, and it's not for personal profit, like you're not making tee shirts with my art and then selling them and as long as you don't make a derivative, you don't color them in or Photoshop them or whatever, you're welcome to use and share my artwork for anything. For Christmas cards, for your prints in your salon, prints in your bar. You can print them on a tee shirt for your own self. I don't care. That's fine. They belong to the community. And I had always done this, and it has always been central to the work. I've been on Flickr since 2005, and I'd been posting since then and saying, "These are yours. This is my gift back to the people who've inspired me." And I just hadn't gotten any money for it.

So, then once I started having a Patreon, my patrons sponsor me to make art and release it into the wild, which is amazing. To me, for me personally as a person who always intended to be a commercial artist, a comic artist, and always intended for my work to be mass produced, mass distributed. I don't have any kind of fine art attachment to the work that it's precious, that it's only for galleries - it's for everyone. So for me this is the perfect solution.

Vanina This reminds me of a lot of a talk I listened to by Amanda Palmer. She's talking about content creators and artists and the way that we create art and the way that it should be created for the community and you should ask the community to provide whatever they feel is appropriate. She says this is the future of content. Do you agree in a sense?

Suzanne I do. I know Amanda, and I agree with that absolutely. I know Amanda, and I agree with that absolutely. And I feel like it's true for me, I don't feel like it's true for all content creators. I think if you're a sculptor and they're only going to be 10 bronzes of your work then that's not for everybody, and the individuals who want to have that casting in their home need to pay for it. And if you're a portrait painter (and you know I still do portrait paintings), and there's only one of those. It's not for all content but for content like music, for content like my documentary art, for documentary filmmaking, for anything that can be digitally distributed I do think it's the future of content. I do totally believe in crowdfunding.

Vanina Still on the subject of Patreon because Patreon also had issues after SESTA/FOSTA. How does this censorship that happened on Patreon affect your art?

Suzanne It affected me enormously. The changes brought about by SESTA/FOSTA for all US based companies are devastating to all creators, absolutely devastating. They're devastating on a non-financial, on a literal life and death level for sex workers of course. For me as a content creator I have the privilege of working in safe spaces and creating work that doesn't involve needing to vet the people that I work with or find safe places to work, but the chilling effect has been enormous. The censorship has been profound. I mean, it's gone to hell in a handbasket, and it's only going to get worse.

The problem with Patreon is that I initially had an adult account, and that was fine. It cost me money, because when you have an adult account you're not visible to Patreon internal search. Like people have to have the link and know how to find you, but I was willing to pay that cost in solidarity with sex workers. And I think of myself essentially as a sex worker. Then SESTA/FOSTA happened, and it became clear that eventually Patreon is gonna dump all the adult accounts. Anybody who wants to believe that's not true is perhaps being unrealistic.

They're putting all the adult content accounts in a bucket, and when they're done they're gonna dump that bucket. And either people will be harried into completely PG-ifying and censoring and family friendlyizinging their accounts, or they'll be driven off the platform. Now, Jack Conte started Patreon. He's a musician I think. He's not opposed to queer, furry, sex art. I think he's really happy that there's queer furry sex art and was happy that his platform was funding it, but I just recently learned that somehow Patreon at some point accepted funding from the brother of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump's husband. Jared Kushner has a brother that's a venture capitalist and he runs his venture capitalist company, and they gave Patreon 60 million dollars at some point during some funding round. So, now Patreon is in hock to these people, Trump relatives. And they have investors that they have to make a return to. And they're in this SESTA/FOSTA situation where the fact that Patreon money is specifically used to create sexual content really, really exposes them to SESTA/FOSTA prosecution.

I mean, the people who run Patreon could go to jail. So, you can't blame them for not wanting to go to jail. You can't blame them for not wanting to take away the livelihood of thousands of musicians and programmers and scientists and movie makers, political cartoonists and people, creators, artists of all kinds who are today funded by Patreon. If Patreon is shut down, and it could be in a heartbeat under SESTA/FOSTA, not only would the creators of Patreon have to deal with those investors, it would have an enormous impact on creators all over the world.

Part of the problem is that the legal changes based on SESTA/FOSTA and the potential of SESTA/FOSTA prosecutions are all brand new. It hasn't happened. Nobody knows what's gonna happen. Nobody knows. The law is incredibly vague. All of this is just out there at this point. Nobody knows how the cases are gonna play. Nobody knows if people are gonna be really be sent to jail. So far there's backpage, and that's about it. So, people like Craigslist, which was the very first canary in the SESTA/FOSTA gold mine, when they shut down their personals people are choosing to err on the side of caution. And I believe in the case of Craigslist that it was not just out of fear of SESTA/FOSTA, but that it was to strike fear in people's hearts so that people would understand the consequences of SESTA/FOSTA and how dangerous and how poisonous for US creative culture it was.

Sawa and Husalia at Berlin Poetry Brothel at Lotus Loft May 23 2019 by Suzanne Forbes

But which sites are able to continue functioning, like Twitter, you can go on Twitter and see a gape in 20 seconds. Twitter - loads of gapes, loads of anything want to see you can see on Twitter. And why are some sites still functioning, why have some sites not, it may have to do with the way that they're funded. Are they funded by advertisers? Are they still funded entirely by investors and don't take any money from users? So, that may create a loophole in terms of their exposure to persecution under SESTA/FOSTA? So, that's part of it. The tube sites, it may be a similar situation, or they may just be run by people who are like, "We're gonna get the money now. When they shut us down, they shut us down."

Vanina We're seeing all this censorship and closing down places and sites that were really good for expressing your sexuality and expressing artistically yourself. And on the one hand we're seeing this but on the other we are seeing a lot of rights getting recognized, like same sex marriage is now legal in so many places. We're seeing positive changes. It's very hard to judge where we are going. Are we going in a positive direction or are we going backwards in a way?

Suzanne

I really am so glad that you said that. This creative censorship, for the generation of young people who flowered and bloomed and frolicked on Tumblr, they are experiencing loss of safe spaces. At the same time look at India. Millions and millions of gay couples have more rights now in India. So, there are changes that are affecting people's rights in daily life that are glorious, that are profound and that are happening everyday. I'm tracking all those things at the same time as I look with shock and horror at the US and the UK and their increasingly puritanical crushing of sex positive exploration.

And we know that a lot of it is driven by the payment processors. That essentially it's the credit card companies that PayPal and Stripe work with, and PayPal itself which also has a grotesque puritanical culture, that are pressing these laws into place, that are pressing these restrictions onto the platforms. And will crypto create a backdoor for financial support of sex positive content? I don't know yet. Nobody seems to have worked that out yet. Will new platforms emerge that are based in Europe and that aren't subject to US laws? I don't know yet.

I have scoured my Patreon account and removed all of the sensual, sexual, romantic content. It was devastating. It represented a lot of content loss, even though I'd never put anything really shocking. Like I never put any fisting or anything on my Patreon. It was always completely compliant with their terms.

But when I went from having an adult account to a regular account my Patreon became all about the social justice and human empathy part of my work, which is about making a drawing at 3 o'clock in the morning of a homeless person in U-Bahn Station. Making a drawing of immigrants waiting for the visa at the visa office. And documenting queer culture in terms of people like the elders, like Dirk Dehner of the Tom of Finland Foundation. He's here in Berlin often. And I've been able to document him drawing and meeting with young queers at The Ballery in Schonenberg.

I'm so grateful to be able to do that work, and I'm able to get money from Patreon to do that. I'll continue to take their money as long as I can basically. I'm an artist. I'm pragmatic. I've been homeless. I've had no money for food. I'm gonna take the money, but at the same time I really want to find an alternate platform where I can publish sex positive art. I want to find an alternate platform where I can publish absolutely explicit, kinky, queer art with diverse bodies showing explicit hardcore sex acts. And what that platform will be, I don't know yet. Right now I can't even show that kind of stuff on my own blog because Patreon doesn't allow you to link from a Patreon post to a site that has pornography or sexual content on it. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that yet, and that's insane, right. I had to get rid of a lot of posts on my own blog. But all the filth is still up on Flickr. Flickr hasn't, for some reason, yet changed their terms of service, and so I have a Flickr pro account that I've had for 15 years now and there are hundreds of drawings on there that most of them if they're any kind of sexuality or nudity they're hidden behind the adult restriction. And I've always been in complete compliance with Flickr's restricted content policy, and incredibly they haven't changed it. So, anyone can go to my Flickr, which I'll provide you with a link for, and right now if they have a Flickr account, if they have agreed to see restricted adult content in their safeties they can download as many of my dirty drawings of people of all genders performing all kinds of sex acts as they want. Yeah, make yourself a tee shirt, make yourself a holiday card, make yourself a solstice card with a picture of a trans woman fisting a trans man. Whatever you want.

** Feature image: Betty Fvck at dr Sketchys Berlin by Suzanne Forbes May 8 2018

*** Update: Suzanne is now publishing her explicit sexuality and gender expression documentary artwork to suzanneforbes.com. She is working on duplicating her explicit art archives there as well, in case they are kicked off flickr. She has not yet resolved a crowdfunding model for this work, so if you see her out at a sex club, give her a Euro to help support her work!