His consistent lack of political correctness has gotten Norman censored more than once. In the late ’70s, a science fiction bookstore in the Bay Area refused to stock his titles because they were supposedly offensive to women. Not even members of the fledgling women’s S/M community could get it together to protest. We were too deeply divided about his work ourselves, even though it was clear that the bondage, piercing, and occasional blows meted out by Norman’s masters were troubling the staff at Another Change of Hobbit just as much as his espousal of sociobiology. There have been many other times when an antiporn, anti-S/M version of feminist sensibility was used to hamper the circulation of Norman’s work.

I’d be happy to support Norman just to oppose this moral intrusion upon free expression of the human imagination. If J. G. Ballard can write about the erotic value of car crashes, surely Norman can be permitted the staff-and-frond brand on the thigh of a newly made slave and her tears at the humiliation of having her earlobes and septum pierced. But there’s much more of merit in Norman’s work than a mere opportunity to shout down the censors. He speaks for a portion of the S/M-D/S-fetish-leather community that suffers from a disproportionate amount of stigma.

Perhaps a little history is in order here. People who like to enact fantasies about dominance and submission have been creating a community and culture for three or four decades in this country. Gay leathermen have been the most successful at establishing publicly accessible institutions such as bars, sex clubs, and bathhouses where experienced practitioners can socialize or play, and novices can begin the process of being socialized into the leather community. Heterosexuals and leather dykes have been close behind, generating support groups, publications, parties, and other means of celebrating our sexuality and making contact with potential new community members. By creating slogans such as “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” and promulgating standards of emotionally and physically safe play, the S/M (or D/S) community has instilled a sense of pride and self-worth in its members. We’ve even begun to defend our legal rights—organizing politically to raise money to defend a couple in “the scene” who lost custody of their children, appeal the conviction of the Spanner defendants (who were jailed in England for consensual S/M activity) to the European Court, protest defamation and negative stereotypes of S/M in the mass media, and argue in court that our literature ought to be allowed to circulate freely across national boundaries.