About

Laura Antoniou has been writing queer, kinky, loud-mouthed erotica and related mischief since the 1980s, when she launched her career editing the gaming/media magazine Gateways and churning out very gay safer-sex smut during the AIDS era. She went on to edit the groundbreaking Leatherwomen and Some Women anthologies, giving voice to kinky women of all kinds. Somewhere along the line she also wrote more gay male erotica as “Christopher Morgan,” including the cult novel Musclebound, because why have one identity when you can juggle several?

She is best known for the Marketplace series — a sprawling, decades-old set of BDSM novels famous for their pansexual, multinational, gender-diverse cast and for centering one of fiction’s earliest trans male protagonists in an ongoing erotic narrative. The series includes The Marketplace, The Slave, The Trainer, The Academy, The Reunion, and The Inheritor, along with two fan-fiction volumes titled No Safewords I and II. Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Japanese, and Hebrew, and routinely pops up in academic discussions of erotic fiction, gender politics, and queer narrative history.

Outside the Marketplace universe, she is the author of the Rainbow Award–winning murder mystery The Killer Wore Leather, a gleefully chaotic spoof of the BDSM contest circuit, as well as Silk Threads, an erotic fantasy co-written with her co-conspirators Cecilia Tan and Midori. Her short stories appear in dozens of anthologies across genres — magical realism, pomosexual theory, lesbian erotica, transgender erotica, fairy tales, Westerns, whatever anthology dared open its inbox. Twice, she won the National Leather Association’s John Preston Short Fiction Award for “That’s Harsh” and “The Man With the Phoenix Tattoo.”

A prolific essayist and long-time cultural critic, Antoniou has been published or cited in works ranging from Pomosexuals to The Ultimate Guide to Kink to Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey, where she famously contributed “Fifty Shades of Crap.” Her nonfiction is taught in college courses on sexuality, feminism, and queer history; her words have appeared everywhere from the SandMUtopia Guardian to scholarly anthologies dissecting porn, identity, and power.

On stage and behind a lectern, she is a veteran presenter, having ranted, lectured, enlightened, and occasionally traumatized at more than 150 events worldwide since the 1980s. Her classes span kink dynamics, relationship management, power exchange, Jewish sexuality, leather culture, and Nerdvana-level fandom: “Get Your Freak On With Your Geek On,” “Kinky, Schminky,” and other combinations no career counselor ever predicted. She has spoken at Harvard, NYU, Rutgers, Columbia, Stony Brook, the University of Washington, and just about every major leather, kink, and alt-sex conference worth complaining about.

She is the recipient of the NLA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award, the Jack McGeorge Excellence in Education Award, the NLA Pauline Réage Novel Award, multiple Rainbow Book Awards, and even the notorious “Worst Camper” award from Dark Odyssey Fusion. She intends to keep accumulating distinctions of varying dignity for quite some time.

With her wife, Karen Taylor, she co-authored the ritually correct Leather Passover Seder Avadim Chayanu (“Once We Were Slaves”), which continues to circulate widely every spring among the faithful, the curious, and the extremely confused.

These days, Laura continues to write, teach, and resurrect out-of-print work while cheerfully refusing to behave. Her archives, bibliographies, rants, speeches, and Marketplace lore can be found at lantoniou.com, and you can track her shenanigans — or block her, your choice — at

Facebook: laura.antoniou
Twitter/X: @LAntoniou
Fetlife: LAntoniou
Patreon: patreon.com/Kvetch
E-mail: LAntoniou@leatherkvetch.com