Remembering an Educator: Jay Wiseman, 1949 - 2026
The last month or so has started to feel like a roster of iconic deaths. The world was only only starting to absorb the passing of Dolly Parton when Tim Curry died. And less than a week ago, Gloria Steinem died. People are still wrangling over what her legacy ultimately means.
Then yesterday, the kinky communities lost their own icon: sex educator Jay Wiseman died at the age of 77, shortly after returning from his honeymoon. He had married Coryl Lassen, his partner of four years, in May.
The exact details of his death are still filtering out, but kink historian Anne O Nomis has written a short account of the facts as they're known at this time:
Jay Wiseman and his wife Corrie had been to Europe for their honeymoon, combined with a teaching gig. Through what Janet Hardy recounts as a "clusterfuck" of circumstances — Mt Etna erupting, a record European heat wave, cancelled flights that involved lots of walking, substandard travel, staying in iffy and non air-conditioned lodgings, all combined to impact negatively upon Jay who developed two serious infections — one from a wound in his knee and the other an infection in his toes — so severe as to necessitate metatarsal (toe) amputation. Jay was in hospital recovering and appeared to be rallying, recently visited, before being found by a nurse unresponsive without a pulse. Although CPR was performed, tragically the doctors were unable to bring him back, and he passed away, age 77.
It's not overstating it to say that kinky community and education would look very different today without Jay Wiseman. In the early 1990s, Wiseman was partners with Janet Green, the founder of Greenery Press. Using the pseudonym Catherine A. Liszt, Green co-authored (with Dossie Easton) and published The Ethical Slut, which remains a beloved resource on polyamorous relationships.
In 1992, Wiseman published SM 101: A Realistic Introduction through Greenery Press. It was one of the first books to treat kink as a normal, non-pathological practice that adults could do for their pleasure. More importantly, it told readers how they could engage in such practices safely.
The difference between the sexual culture of 1992 and today is written right there in the title of Jay Wiseman's book: The term BDSM hadn't yet become an accepted catch-all for the range of practices that fall under the kinky umbrella. The first recorded use of it is from a 1991 USENET post. But in 1991, the internet was still as obscure and niche as BDSM itself. For most people who weren't actually going to leather bars or dungeons, "S&M" or "sadomasochism" said everything they needed to know. As the internet spread and became ubiquitous, so did "BDSM."
SM 101's emphasis on safe kink said a lot about Jay Wiseman and how he was known in kink communities. After the news made its way through social media yesterday, former sex worker and educator Maggie Mayhem posted on Bluesky, "He was a safety nut but that book was a primer on being safe while playing with danger."
That reputation as a "safety nut" also made Jay Wiseman controversial among some kinksters, especially those into breath play. Wiseman thought that the risk of lethal cardiac arrest made any form of erotic asphyxiation too dangerous for safe play. In his essay "The Medical Realities of Breath Control Play," he wrote:
As a person with years of medical training, education, and experience, I know of no way whatsoever that either suffocation or strangulation can be done in a way that does not intrinsically put the recipient at risk of cardiac arrest.
Those words were originally published in 1995, but Wiseman never backed down from them. He acted as an expert witness in court cases about safety and risk in BDSM, often those involving breath play. Many people, including fellow educators, found his stance to be far too rigid.
But that resistance never diminished Jay Wiseman's activism or enthusiasm in the BDSM community. He continued to write and teach, with over a dozen books and countless essays to his name. If he disagreed (sometimes fiercely) with his colleagues, friends, and community members, that's a part of his legacy and who he was. Educator Lee Harrington remembered some of those disagreements fondly on Facebook, shortly after the news started to leak out:
Jay Wiseman will be sorely missed. I have fond memories of our lunches and laughter, mixed in with hard memories and times we didn’t see eye to eye. That’s how things go over 25 years of knowing someone. I will definitely be thinking of him fondly tonight, and am grateful to all that he added both to our communities and beyond.
That might be the best kind of epitaph a sex educator can get after over 35 years of teaching, learning, and living through as many cultural changes as he did. Since Jay Wiseman's first book, we've gone from passing BDSM manuals and smut under the counter to seeing it in major films and bestselling novels; we've gone from deeply coding queerness in media to shows like Heartstopper being an international hit.
There are still so many people who want to turn us back to the bad old times, when kink was a sickness and gender was strictly binary. But without kink elders like Jay Wiseman, we wouldn't have made it as far as we have.
Our condolences and love to his wife Corrie, his children, and all who knew and loved Jay Wiseman.
