Our History

The conversations were wide-ranging: dating, relationships, sexually transmitted infection prevention, condom use, reproductive justice, kink, and parenting. Sessions used plain language and drew on lived experience. Blind people could ask questions about the lives we wanted to lead, including pleasure, intimacy, boundaries, and the effects of ableism.

Bobbi Pompey first took part as a participant and then began co-teaching with Laura. Bobbi’s positive philosophy of blindness and Laura’s sex-positive approach strengthened one another. Jim Barbour also joined, bringing his commitment to blind people’s agency and lived expertise. Relationships formed through this work later helped sustain the grassroots network.

The LightHouse Sexual Health Services Program ended in 2018. The questions, skills, and connections people had developed continued beyond the program. Its ending helped make clear why the work needed community relationships and a structure that could survive changes within a single institution.

Those questions helped shape a lasting commitment: blind people should participate in choosing the questions, creating materials, teaching, and making decisions. Accessible formatting matters, and so does the philosophy beneath the information.

Beginning in 2017, people who would become part of BSAN guest lectured and joined panels in San Francisco State University’s Program in Visual Impairments. The program prepares teachers of students with visual impairments and orientation and mobility specialists. These sessions brought blind people’s experiences into the education of future professionals.

Topics included ableism in education and dating, consent and bodily autonomy, blind-positive sexuality education, and trauma-informed practice. Consent was discussed as a responsibility professionals model in everyday interactions, including asking before touching, explaining an activity, and respecting someone’s refusal.

Faculty collaborators named in BSAN’s history include Kathy Abrahamson, Lee Staub, Yue-Ting “Ting” Siu, Adam Graves, and Bobbi Pompey. Their involvement helped connect community knowledge with professional preparation.

Franchesca “Franky” Spektor, Annalise Kamegawa, and Hailey Windsor partnered with Laura and Jim on Gena, an open-source design initiative. Support came through the CITRIS Invention Lab’s Making Together program and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.

The project explored layered, modular, textured anatomy models. Early work included wood, 3D-printed parts, and silicone prototypes. The aim was to make models that people could handle, take apart, and use to understand connections between internal and external anatomy, with attention to inclusive representations and affordable production.

Blind adults joined hands-on sessions in Laura’s home and other Bay Area spaces. They tested textures, shapes, and how pieces fitted together. The models also became teaching tools within the sessions, opening conversations about anatomy, reproductive health, pleasure, and consent.

Community participation shaped the work from the beginning. The collaboration reinforced the importance of blind people as co-creators and decision-makers. It also raised a practical question: when a student project ends, how will the people who helped create the tools continue to access and develop them?

These gatherings connected the tactile model work with teaching, advocacy, and local organizing. People discussed how ableism and silence about sexuality appeared in blindness services, classrooms, and community spaces. They considered what it would take to make consent part of an institution’s everyday culture.

Some participants also brought lessons from Navigating Consent, a Bay Area program facilitated by educators including Dossie Easton and Willowkat. Conversations about power, accountability, and support for survivors informed the group’s approach. The pandemic interrupted the in-person training pathway, while those ideas continued to influence the work.

The group embraced the name Blind Positive Sex Ed. It named the connection people were making between a positive philosophy of blindness, affirming sexuality education, consent, and justice.

Clubhouse became an important place to gather. People joined from across the United States and internationally to discuss experiences and questions that often had little space elsewhere. Topics included consent in blind communities, dating and ableism, pleasure and disability, reproductive justice, and talking with children about sex as a blind parent.

The conversations expanded the work through participants’ own knowledge and experience. People could contribute a question, a practical skill, a disagreement, a story, or a professional perspective. Education and community connection developed together.

The work also reached people through conference presentations, podcasts, interviews, and guest teaching. The history records appearances in Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired, California Transcribers and Educators of the Blind and Visually Impaired, and National Federation of the Blind spaces.

Janay Anthony championed distributive leadership: sharing responsibility and decision-making across people. This became an important part of BSAN’s planning. It linked the group’s values to practical questions about who makes decisions, whose work is recognized, and how a volunteer network can respect people’s capacity.

Anneliese Knop joined the leadership, bringing her perspective as a blind mental health professional, writer, and advocate. Her contributions helped connect mental health and trauma-informed approaches with the network’s work on sexuality, consent, and organizational planning.

Laura and Anneliese worked with Jacqueline Steiger to develop an accessible discussion guide based on A. V. Flox’s Disrupting the Bystander: When #MeToo Happens Among Friends. Pilot conversations explored how blind communities could respond to harassment and harm, support survivors, and strengthen accountability.

The history records that availability of the book interrupted this project. The work nevertheless added to a larger question running through BSAN’s history: how do conversations about consent become shared expectations and practices within communities?

The change from Blind Positive Sex Ed to BSAN developed during the 2023 to 2024 period. The new name made room for the broader connections among education, community organizing, research, professional practice, and policy. This growing history welcomes help with the dates and details of that transition.

The group also worked to clarify its mission, values, and approach to shared leadership. The goal was to keep blind people’s voices and decisions central as the work took new forms.

The materials identified future directions including a community-led needs assessment, further work on the bystander discussion guide, wider access to tactile models, facilitator training, and partnerships. These were directions for development, shaped by the people and capacity available.

The planning connected five areas of sexual health promotion: developing personal skills, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, building healthy public policy, and reorienting sexual health services. Together, they link access to information with the conditions that let people use it.

The history recognizes Leslie Turner Dickson, Elizabeth Greenblatt, Danielle Montour, Marco Salsiccia, Cory Walker, George Stern, Eva Favreau, Sara and Steven Erb, Robert Jaquiss, Cricket Bidleman, Matt Hackert, Robin Mandell, and Conner Scott Gardner. It also acknowledges Cindy Bennett, Janay Anthony, and Gareth Storm, alongside the LightHouse and university collaborators named above.

A list cannot capture every contribution. Participants who came to one workshop, offered a correction, tested a prototype, or spoke honestly in a difficult conversation also influenced what the network became. Missing names and contributions are part of what this living history needs to recover.