Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism, & Masochism Web Page (censorship)

Description of the Art Work

An experimental NCSA Mosaic home page, on the World Wide Web, for those who are interested in Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism, and Masochism (hereafter refered to as BDSM). Contained and had links to:

Stories, Pictures, Information, Personal Ads. and Creative Projects.

These sections in specific carried:

STORIES:

culled stories from the net about alternative sexual lifestyles and situation. Ranging from consensual stories of married couples tying each other up to non-consensual rape, torture, and murder.

PICTURES:

gifs sent to me personally and those culled from the net, ranging from catwoman in leather to amatuer and staged acts of BDSM to bodyart

INFORMATION:

files on: Safe Sex and Health, BDSM, Polyamory, Infantilism, Bestiality, Bodyart, Fashion, Queer Resources, Catalogs, Stores, Books, Events and Localities, Newsgroup discussions, MUDs (Multiple User Dungeons) and misc

PERSONALS:

links to other sites that maintained online persoanls and an experimental online personal service for the BDSM community.

PROJECTS:

Included an interactive graphical navigation through a virtual dungeon, information on CyberSM (tm) from Stahl Stenslie, and the illustrated story Bad Samaritan.

The statistics for the page were: From 4/20 - 5/13 there were 66938 accessess from 4075 unique places.

Description of incident

around Thursday, March 31, 1994 I was asked to shut down my page by an administrator at Brown University. I asked if the reason was net traffic, and I was told, no, it was due to the content I was providing. I asked what my options were. I could either quitely shut down or bring it up before the facilities committee who would, in the words of the administrator, certainly shut me down.

Results of incident

I agreed to shut the page down. I removed the "offensive" material and changed the home page to relate the incident. email of support started flooding in. Some of this mail included offers to host the page from other sites. I took three of these people up and from April though August 94 the page lived on with different parts at different sites in the US.

On Fri, 29 Jul 1994 I found out about the Robert and Carleen Thomas case in Milpitas, Calif, where a MEMPHIS, Tenn postal official caused an adult BBS to be shut down and the couple convicted with counts carrying up to five years in prison and $250,000 fine.

I immediately rmoved the links from the "front door" at Brown University down and informed the other hosting sites to shut down for fear of legal action.

The front page is still up at Brown University but consists only of a relation of the Thomas Court case and some correspondence I had with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The page can be accessed by going to:

http://elbow.cs.brown.edu:8100/dcr/boring_2/bdsm.html

I have received around 590 email messages of concern and support and 1 message of derision. I have saved all of the email and hope to one day compile/edit it into a documentary of the incident.

Thank you for your support.
- Dan Robbins 


 Source: Daniel C. Robbins. I am the creator of the BDSM Home Page.
 


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 record no: s26