Born in Pittsburgh in 1948, david stein grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where he started tying himself up at age 5. He graduated high school three years early and went off to study philosophy at NYU in 1965 and later at Northwestern University, which awarded him a Master’s degree — little did they know! When the academic job market collapsed in the early 1970s, he fell into publishing and in 1977 landed back in New York City, where he got a job as a magazine editor and came out in the s/m-leather scene. He’s lived in New York ever since except for a year in San Francisco to produce Ask the Man Who Owns Him and Boots, Bondage, and Beatings.
In 1980 david co-founded Gay Male S/M Activists (GMSMA), once the world’s largest gay s/m organization, and served it in many capacities, from president to newsletter editor and program chairman, for the next 11 years. It was for the GMSMA statement of purpose, back in 1983, that david coined “safe, sane, and consensual s/m,” now a ubiquitous catch phrase he has mixed feelings about. Retired from GMSMA, in 1999 he co-founded New York City’s gay chapter of Masters And slaves Together (MAsT), from which he is also now retired.
For six years he wrote the “Bond+Aid” safety column for Bound & Gagged magazine, and in 1996 he guest-edited issue #14 of International Leatherman magazine, devoted entirely to real-world gay Masters and slaves. In 2002 his epic Master/slave novel, Carried Away: An S/M Romance was published by Daedalus. Over the years, his BDSM fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Drummer, DungeonMaster, International Leatherman, Mach, Power Play, and other periodicals as well as the anthologies Leatherfolk edited by Mark Thompson (Alyson), SM Classics edited by Susan Wright (Masquerade), Horsemen: Leathersex Short Fiction edited by Joseph W. Bean (Leyland), Men on the Edge edited by Christopher Pierce (StarBooks), and the “novelology” The Academy: Tales of the Marketplace by Laura Antoniou (Mystic Rose). Some of his writing is available online at his website, as is a fuller biographical essay.
david has presented at numerous leather and s/m events, including the Master/slave Conference in Atlanta in 1999 and several times at the Master/slave Conference in DC. In 2006 he was the keynote speaker at the South Plains Leatherfest in Dallas.
Having been involved in three Master/slave partnerships of various lengths, slave david is currently unowned.