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Everybody has a different story about how they first learned about sex. When you get into the nitty-gritty of learning about kink, the answers are even more variable. When you ask Lee Harrington—who’s taught more than a thousand classes on human sexuality in all 50 states—how he first learned about BDSM, he’ll tell you: It started at home.
He remembers finding his parents’ stash of porn, and while he didn’t really understand much of the adult content, there was one story that stood out to him. In the story, a woman celebrates her 21st birthday by having a kinky fantasy fulfilled. Afterward, she talks about how excited she was, how neat it was, and how meaningful it felt to have a friend who made her dreams come true.
“What struck me, having read all this erotic material,” Harrington tells WW, “was that this was the only story that was unabashedly happy. There was no guilt, there was no shame. It was just some woman sharing that she was happy.”
What stayed with him was not the erotic aspect of the story. “I didn’t understand or care about those activities,” he recalls. But he never let go of “the idea that I could grow up, have friends, and make my dreams come true, whether they involved adult content or not.” As a young adult, Harrington got involved in the BDSM community and found that while the story he’d read as a young person was just a fantasy, the idea behind it—of people coming together to fulfill one another’s desires—very much existed in the real world.
Harrington moved to Portland in the late 1990s after finishing university in England. He was working for a Christian faith organization, and as a side job, he got involved with porn. That in turn led to teaching kink workshops.
“I had someone in the local kink community say, ‘Hey, we saw some stuff you’ve done at parties and some stuff you’ve done in porn. Would you be game to teach us how to do that?’” Harrington recalls. “I said, ‘Sure—if you cover my way to Corvallis.’”
Harrington is now a popular and sought-after instructor on erotic education and BDSM; he’s taught workshops in all 50 states and in seven countries. But that kind of community-led approach to education, Harrington explains, is still his favorite way to teach.
From there, Harrington started teaching locally and at conferences and soon began working on books. “When I was living in Beaverton, I had started working on a book called Shibari You Can Use: Japanese Rope Bondage and Erotic Macramé. I was working with a publisher, but they ended up bailing on me, and I was left with this half-finished book,” he says. A local friend suggested that Harrington self-publish. “I started reaching out to friends around Portland, asking, ‘Hey, would you be game to be in photos?’”
Portland is known as a place where creative thinkers can easily connect, and Harrington experienced that firsthand. As he put together Shibari You Can Use, people from many different communities—including pro doms, friends from Burning Man, and members of Portland’s gaming community—all came together to make the photographs happen.
“It was so Portland,” Harrington recalls with a laugh, noting that everything about the project—from the publishing to the photography—felt uniquely possible because of the kink-friendly arts community Portland is known for. Harrington is currently based in Denver, but still feels a strong connection to the Rose City and its kink community.
After nearly 30 years in BDSM, what keeps Harrington excited and engaged is the same thing that drew him to it in the first place. “For me, my passion stays ignited through the deep friendships that help make those magic moments happen,” he says. “It took time to get here, but I’m very blessed to have it.”
