American writer, academic and activist Gayle Rubin was BOTD in 1949. Born in South Carolina to a middle-class Jewish family, she was educated in racially-segregated public schools, before moving to Ann Arbor to study at the University of Michigan. While a student, she joined early feminist consciousness-raising groups, wrote articles on feminism for the college newspaper, and founded a campus branch of Radicalesbians, a lesbian feminist lobby group. Graduating in social anthropology, she rose to wider public attention with her 1975 article The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, a critical analysis of the “sex/gender system” in patriarchal cultures, in which women only become gendered when they are simultaneously identified as commodities for men. Arguing for women to adopt a genderless identity and a polymorphous sexuality. Rubin’s essay became a central text in the radical feminist movement. In 1978, Rubin moved to San Francisco to study gay male leather and BDSM cultures, which became the subject of her doctoral thesis. Later that year, she co-founded the lesbian BDSM group Samois with Pat Califia, and became an archivist and trustee for the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. She is best known for her 1984 essay Thinking Sex, a critique of Western society’s categorisation of sex acts as good/natural versus bad/unnatural and the stigma associated with sex acts existing outside the “charmed circle” of monogamous, religiously-sanctioned heterosexual intercourse. Identifying as a “sex-positive” feminist, Rubin argued for more tolerance of same-sex acts, polygamous relationships, BDSM practices and transactional sex. Thinking Sex became one of the most widely-quoted and controversial publications of 1980s academia, and was widely criticised for Rubin’s endorsement of “man-boy lovers”, which was read as promoting pedophilia. Now considered a foundational text in gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, Rubin revisited her ideas in the 2011 essay Blood Under the Bridge: Reflections on “Thinking Sex“, clarifying that her comments on sex and children had been made in a different social context, and had been misconstrued by right-wing commentators and anti-pornography advocates. In 2012, she published Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, a collection of her academic writing cultural criticism. Rubin is a professor of anthropology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. In 2000, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Leather Association, in recognition of her contribution to leather and BDSM culture. Her current relationship status is unknown.