This past week our beloved Dorothy Freed passed away in Northern California at eighty years old. Dorothy was (in her own words) a lover, a champion for animal rights, and a writer. She was also a mother, wife, feminist, and artist.

Above all, as a writer, Dorothy was a memoirist and drew inspiration from lived experiences. She wrote many short stories but also proudly completed two memoirs later in life, one self-published at 73. A manuscript that Dorothy set aside for nearly thirty years titled ‘Perfect Strangers, A Memoir Of The Swinging 70s’. Aside from the pseudonym Dorothy Freed, she was also well-published under her legal name.

Up until she passed, Dorothy had been living at home, with family and her dear dog, Biscuit. In recent weeks she had been continuing to work on writing projects, mostly related to her second memoir: ‘Life After Promiscuity, A BDSM Love Story’ a series of vignettes about erotic life with her husband, her Sir, of 35 years who died in 2022.

Dorothy Freed had been a member of the Erotic Reading and Writing Circle (ERC) at the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco started by Carol Queen for many years. Attending the circle was an important and supportive element that helped her be successful as a writer of kink and BDSM. Dorothy’s work has been praised highly by fellow erotic writers and colleagues such as Carol Queen, for her unabashed honesty, attention to detail, and eroticism.

Dorothy persevered through significant vision impairment and other health challenges to publish her second memoir, Life After Promiscuity, A BDSM Love Story. Life After Promiscuity has been well received and is available on Amazon.com. This year Dorothy had a short story called ‘Foot Face’ published in The Big Book of Quickies, an anthology edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

Recently Dorothy was interviewed by the Society of Janus in San Francisco. Society of Janus is an organization that began in 1974 to support those in the kink and BDSM lifestyles and we look forward to publishing that interview.