A CONVERSATION WITH KATHARINE GATES

Katharine Gates is a writer, anthropologist, publisher, artist and curator based just outside New York City. She is the author of Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex (originally published in 2000 by RE/Search Publications, and reissued by PowerHouse Books with the amended subtitle A Tour of the Erotic Edge in 2017, and was the curator of KINK: Geography of the Erotic Imagination, an exhibition hosted by the Museum of Sex, NYC, in 2006.

Katharine was the curator, owner and proprietor of Key Gallery, an independent, avant-garde contemporary art gallery in Richmond, Virginia, from 1991-93. Between 1992 and 2008, she also ran an artist’s publishing house — Gates of Heck — which would publish works by Annie Sprinkle, Charles Burns, Gary Panter, Joe Coleman and Art Spiegelman, amongst others. She is also the creator of the Kinkmap, an attempt to chart as many niche kinks and fetishes as possible, and the connections between them. The Kinkmap has been reprinted in Human Sexuality, a college psychology textbook, and can also be found online.

In this recorded conversation, conducted with Abigail in September 2023, Katharine discusses the origins of Deviant Desires — in particular the research process that went into creating both the original 2000 edition and the book’s dramatically reworked 2017 reissue, which involved tracking down and interviewing the leading figures of several niche kink communities — and the desktop publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, which triggered the printing and dissemination of numerous niche erotic magazines proudly portraying kinks that had never previously been represented in print or the public consciousness, prompting several new divergent kink communities to coalesce into being, and providing a paper trail of uncommon erotic practices and their practitioners for Katharine to follow. Furthermore, Katharine discusses her experiences visiting and speaking at SizeCon — an annual convention for Giant(ess)/tiny and body expansion kinksters, held just outside New York City — and how her personal explorations of her own sexuality, gender presentation and neurodivergence helped inform her research practice and interest in unusual kinks.

This interview is part of a series examining the function of the erotic imagination in helping individuals with marginalised or non-normative anatomies, neurologies or neurotypes, gender identities or queer sexualities explore their relationship with their bodies, their brains, and their relationships with/perceptions of the world around them. Focusing upon size kink communities — consisting of individuals or collectives whose erotic fantasies predominantly involve giants/giantesses and tiny folk, superhuman growth or shrinking, or the particular expansion of certain body parts — this series explores how figures within this particular niche kink space have used the limitless creative potential of their erotic imaginations to empower themselves: to help accept, or even embrace and take pride in, their unique bodies and neurologies.

An A3, Z-fold riso-printed zine documenting this interview and providing further context to certain topics discussed within, can be purchased from Abigail’s online shop.