About Tristan
Tristan Taormino® is an award-winning author, columnist, sex educator, speaker, radio host, and feminist pornographer. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with her Bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Wesleyan University in 1993.
She is the author of eight books: 50 Shades of Kink: An Introduction to BDSM, Secrets of Great G-Spot Orgasms and Female Ejaculation, The Big Book of Sex Toys, The Anal Sex Position Guide, Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and two editions of The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is a co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, with Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young. She conceived and edited the groundbreaking collection The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge which features the work of leading kink experts from around the country. She is the editor of 25 anthologies including Stripped Down: Lesbian Sex Stories and Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica. She was the founding editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning series Best Lesbian Erotica. Her books have sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into many languages. She’s written for a multitude of publications from Yale Journal of Law and Feminism to Penthouse, and served as editor of the feminist sex magazine On Our Backs. For nine and a half years, she wrote a bi-weekly column in The Village Voice, which was awarded two Sex-Positive Journalism Awards. She has written an advice column for Hustler’s Taboo Magazine since 1999. She is the producer and host of Sex Out Loud, the top rated show on the VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network.
She runs her own adult film production company, Smart Ass Productions, and has directed and produced 25 adult films, including her multi-award winning debut film based on her book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. Her documentary-style series Chemistry has won several Feminist Porn Awards, and Tristan was the first woman ever to win an AVN Award for Best Gonzo Movie for Chemistry, Volume 1. Her series Rough Sex—which depicts real women’s fantasies of BDSM, dominance/submission, and kink—won the 2011 Feminist Porn Award for Hottest Kink Movie, won two Audience Choice Awards at CineKink Film Festival, was nominated for three AVN Awards, and has been screened at several film festivals. Tristan was an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment for six years, during which time she created and helmed the company’s sex education line Vivid-Ed. She directed several sex ed shorts for The Smitten Kitten. In 2010, she received the Feminist Porn Trailblazer Award, and in 2012 she was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame.
Tristan has taught hundreds of classes (on everything from negotiating relationships to female orgasms) at conferences, community events, and retail stores throughout the world. As a keynote and guest speaker at events, she’s spoken about community building, sexual liberation, and GLBT issues. She has given over 75 lectures and presentations at top colleges and universities all over North America (including Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and NYU) on subjects ranging from erotic empowerment to challenging the social construction of monogamy. Tristan’s work, writing and films are routinely used in college courses to explore the complex issues of relationship and sexual diversity, politics and media.
Tristan has been featured in over 200 publications including O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Entertainment Weekly, Details, New York Magazine, Men’s Health, and Playboy. She has been named to several media lists, including Out Magazine’s 100 Gay Success Stories of the Year and The Advocate’s Best and Brightest Gay & Lesbian People Under 30. She has appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Joy Behar: Say Anything!, HBO’s Real Sex, NBC’s The Other Half, The Howard Stern Show, Loveline, Ricki Lake, E!, CNN, MTV, Oxygen, Fox News, The Discovery Channel, and on over fifty radio shows.
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