Guest Column: Get Ready to Fight for Your Right to Erotica

By Cecilia Tan

“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

These are the literal words in Project 2025, the ultra-conservative blueprint for America that the Trump administration admitted they have been planning to use all along.

There are so many things I’d rather be writing about right now. There are dozens of fights for our rights we’ll need to have in the coming year, but I’ll stay in my lane for the moment and concentrate on the Project 2025 Porn Ban. Yes, it’s real. As Newsweek reports, it’s “a key agenda item in Project 2025.” 

You might think in the wake of 50 Shades that BDSM is just accepted everywhere, and with the success of Sarah J. Maas’s ACOTAR and fantasy/romantasy books with a lot of “spice” in them, that whether something has sex in it is no big deal now. But this is not the case. It’s already more difficult to sell and publish erotic writing than any other genre, because it’s already against the ToS to promote erotic writing on Facebook or Google Ads. B&N just did a purge of erotic ebooks. Amazon regularly figures out what the hot erotic trend is and then suppresses it in search (as they did with bigfoot erotica, dinosaur porn, stepbrothers, and so on).

They won’t just shut down sites like PornHub. They want to scrub sex-related content from all American life, which means pressure on Amazon and Patreon and Barnes & Noble to sanitize themselves. These efforts will only intensify. 

But if you think wellllll maybe we can live without some smut, remember, for Project 2025 folks, “banning porn” doesn’t just mean going after the explicit “X-rated” material. It also means anything with queer or trans content, because to them, any representation of queerness is obscene.

But those of us who do write explicitly erotic material (as usual) will be the first to go. They’ve said in plain words that people like me belong in jail for what we write.

I was originally planning to ask for support of my Patreon this month, anyway, with a goal of launching The Vanished Chronicles, an erotic paranormal romance serial that my readers have been waiting for. But suddenly that $2 or $5 a month people could pledge means a whole lot more. It might soon become my only writing income, if my other books get blocked from sale online.

And I know I'm not the only writer in this situation. Here are a few other smutty, kinky queer creators on Patreon who could use support:

• Lauren P. Burka - Lauren was Circlet Press’s second author (after me) and has just started serializing a very kinky gay fantasy that is a sequel to her book Wishbone. Lauren mostly stays off social media for mental health reasons, so doesn’t have a lot of ways to spread the word about it. Names of My Beloved is steamy hot with lots of corporal punishment and dominance and submission dynamics, beautifully written. https://www.patreon.com/LaurenPBurka

• Sinclair Sexsmith - Sinclair not only publishes crazy-hot D/s, there are classes on both writing and on BDSM and D/s relationship topics. Yes Sir. https://www.patreon.com/c/mrsexsmith/ 

• TammyJo Eckhart - Another longtime Circlet author and one who writes a fair amount from the dominant female perspective. https://www.patreon.com/tammyjoeckhart

• Midori - if you didn’t know Midori has a patreon, now you do. She is VERY active, with everything from online “office hours” chats, to BDSM-related classes by herself and guests, and much more. https://www.patreon.com/planetmidori

• Laura Antoniou - Laura has not been active recently while revamping all her self-publishing efforts, but I’m expecting to see more soon! Look for her new website and webstore, and some new editions of the Marketplace books will be coming as well. https://www.patreon.com/kvetch 

  
  

Of course, if you’re unable to support with money right now, it always always always helps and is appreciated when you tell people about our books, review them on sites like Amazon and StoryGraph, and post about them in your social media. Truly. And please let me know about other 18+ erotica writers on Patreon so I can keep talking about them. Spreading the word for each other is erotic creators’ only real means of discovery, since we’re blocked from ads and search, and suppressed by social media algorithms. 

If the crackdown really comes hard, of course, Patreon could cave, too, and even where I host my own website could change their ToS. If the Project 2025 guys really make good on the imprisonment threat… well, I guess I would be looking at moving not just my web server but myself to another country. 

Part of me says I’m overreacting, but people underreacting to just how bad Trump and P2025 will be is how we got to this place. I know I'm not the only writer feeling extremely demoralized and finding it hard to write anything right now. The grief is real. 

Please contribute to support an erotica writer in your life, or just send them some words of encouragement that erotic writing is important to you and that you don’t want to lose access to it! We have a fight ahead of us and we will need all the encouragement we can get.