About Loraine Hutchins
Author/activist Loraine Hutchins, Ph.D. is a sexuality educator who inspires people to integrate the spiritual and the erotic in their everyday lives. She works with a variety of movement, breathwork, guided visualization and informational techniques - in group and individual settings. Her practice is supportive of and open to all people. She specializes in working with women, people over 40, fat people, those living with disabilities, and LGBTI - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people. She is polyamory and BDSM-friendly; supportive of all kinds of loving, consensual relationships and family groups.
Since the 1970s Dr. Hutchins has been leading workshops and publishing educational materials on sexuality-related issues. She is a 4th-generation Washingtonian with deep roots in social justice movements locally and nationally. In the 70s she helped develop some of the first community-based programs supportive of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.
With Lani Ka'ahumanu she co-edited Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, the book that catalyzed the U.S. bisexual movement. Bi Any Other Name is an anthology that contains 76 different voices of bisexual people from all walks of life. It inspired many other bi books and was named one of the 100 most influential LGBT books of the last century. It is often called "the basic bisexual coming out book" or "the Bi Bible." Bi Any Other Name is still in print over a decade later, an essential and beloved reference text in many college classrooms, homes and libraries.
Loraine co-founded AMBi, the Alliance of Multi-Cultural Bisexuals in Washington, DC, and BiNet USA - the first national network of bisexual individuals and groups in the U.S. She has contributed to many other anthologies on sexuality-related topics (see Selected Publications list). She has keynoted at Pride Days -- on college campuses, in big cities and small towns, and addressed audiences as varied as national sex researchers, queer linguists, bisexual wiccans, and people who practice polyamory - loving more than one, openly and honestly. In the early 1990s she co-starred, along with ten other women, in Betty Dodson's first video, Selfloving: Portrait of a Women's Sexuality Seminar. Loraine is famous for saying on that video, "I'm here for all the big and bigger women, who deserve to love ourselves just the way we are." The film was eventually shown on HBO, but in a censored version.
Her 2001 doctoral dissertation, Erotic Rites: A Cultural Analysis of Contemporary U.S. Sacred Sexuality Traditions and Trends is available through the TOOLS & RECIPES section of this site. Excerpts from it have been published in Loving More the national publication of the polyamory movement and are also available in Selected Writings.
Dr. Hutchins currently serves on the advisory board of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Relationships and the advisory board of the Washington, DC Rainbow History Archives). She also serves as an editorial advisor for the new national journal, Spirituality & Sexuality.
Praise for Loraine Hutchins' Work:
I picture all the sexually misunderstood women (and men) of the millennia of human history gathering around you in praise and thanksgiving. You're contributing to one of the most important streams of evolutionary consciousness, the one that insists that DIVERSITY is the life blood of the human endeavor as it creates and unfolds the world before our very eyes.
Sally Miller Gearhart, founder, Women's Studies Dept. SFSU
Erotic Rites is the "travelogue" I wish I had discovered ten years ago. Loraine has visited celebrated sacred sex communities across the U.S. and partaken of their exuberant wisdom. She describes her visits with these erotic pioneers and her participation in their sex rituals. She then does what no one else has done - analyzes the erotic dynamics from a social justice perspective. I found especially important her writing on the archetype of the sacred prostitute and how this is being manifest in myriad ways today. Hutchins' book gives me a holy erection.
Joseph Kramer, Ph.D., founder of The Body Electric and The New School of Erotic Touch
Loraine. Sit down. You have got to publish somewhere beyond academia where people will read it! This sings. Your voice has found its center. Mazel Tov!
Deb Kolodny, Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith
Loraine documents the connections between sexuality, healing, and spirituality. She grounds her work in rigorous field research and contemporary scholarship. She focuses her lens on individuals and groups of people who are an integral part of U.S. culture, but whose existence and traditions have been obscured or denied or disparaged. Her interdisciplinary approach to promote understanding and reconciliation in a profoundly contested area of contemporary culture.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, lesbian poet and essayist, and faculty, Union Institute and University
Consider the categories lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer, and the increasing visibility of self-labeled bisexuals in the queer rights movement. Some people regard bisexuals as less threatening to the status quo than lesbians or gays ... they see bisexuality as relatively non-threatening to the status quo. But Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu write of the revolutionary, disruptive possibilities of bisexuality …
Charlene
Muehlenhard, "Categories and Sexuality;"
1997 Presidential address to the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality,
The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 37, No. 2, May 2000
Dr. Hutchins' dissertation is fabulous … a wonderfully rich reference, particularly of the pop culture of sacred sex. I'm using it as a guide in my own research.
Gina Ogden, Women Who Love Sex
