David Steinberg

David Steinberg was born in New York City on July 14, 1944. He attended Oberlin College (Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics, 1965) and did graduate work in political science at Princeton University from 1965 to 1966, before dropping out of school to do full-time political work during the heyday of the civil rights movement. From 1966 to 1969 he was director of Civil Rights and Community Action Programming at the U.S. National Student Association -- a federation of student governments from colleges and universities around the country, coordinating efforts to involve college students in the civil rights movement. In 1969, he moved with his wife, Susan, to San Francisco where he co-founded The Learning Place, San Francisco's first alternative junior high school. He moved to Santa Cruz, California, in 1972, with his wife and one-year-old son, Dylan. In 2006 he moved back to San Francisco where he has lived ever since. He began writing about sexual issues in 1985, when "Roots of Pornography," a non-judgmental analysis of why pornography is so widespread among American men, was published in a local paper. The article was well-received and reprinted in a number of trade books and textbooks. Before long, he was leading workshops on "Eroticism, Pornography, and Sexual Fantasy" at conferences of feminist men, workshops that helped these men reconcile their sexual feelings and fantasies with their feminist politics. In 1992, he began writing Comes Naturally, a monthly column on sex and gender issues, for Spectator magazine, and wrote over 150 columns for that magazine over 15 years. His writing on sex and gender has been published in such journals as The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Playboy, Boston Phoenix, Los Angeles Weekly, SF Weekly, Sexuality and Culture, The Sun, Libido, Cupido, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Transgender Tapestry, Clean Sheets, Scarlet Letters, and The Realist. He is co-creator and producer of Celebration of Eros, a multimedia erotic theatre presentation, Associate Editor of Sexuality and Culture magazine, and U.S. photo representative for Cupido magazine (Norway/Denmark). In 1999 he began taking fine art sexual photographs of couples in long-term, loving relationships, trying to capture on film the aspects of sex that interested him the most -- intimacy, vulnerability, personal connection, love, affection, passion, joy. Since then he has photographed over 160 couples of all ages, body types, ethnicities, sexual preferences, and sexual orientations. He is particularly interested in documenting the publicly neglected sexual lives of people with disabilities. In 2010, he was named Erotic Photographer of the Year by the Leydig Trust (London). In 2012, he was named Master of Erotic Art by the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival.