Bacchus at ErosBlog has been tirelessly sex blogging for the past 14 years. He gave me my own start in blogging by graciously offering me the opportunity to do guest posts at his blog home. I thus sometimes refer to him as my Blogfather: without his encouragement and help there probably wouldn’t be an Erotic Mad Science.

Following changing business models in the adult industry, Bacchus now has a Patreon:

Bacchus describes the mission he’s trying to fund as follows:

1. Preserving an independent adult internet;
2. Documenting the sources of erotic material; and
3. Digital curation of vintage erotic art.

In my experience (an experience shared by the many readers of ErosBlog) Bacchus is a great documenter, and those of you who follow my own blogs have seen some of the intricately detailed attributions he has worked out for images that I thought were completely orphaned, both here and over at Infernal Wonders. I have always been delighted to be able to feature this work. All this art and writing, everything from hard-boiled pulp and sci-fi art to squicky fetish porn matters. It’s not trash, and it’s not just fap material. It’s culture, part (and not a small part) of the invaluable record of the psychic life of humanity.

Precisely because it is so likely to be dismissed as trash or ephemera, this part of humanity’s cultural wealth is particularly vulnerable to loss. Much of the early output of cinema is lost, because at its outset were not thought not a “serious” art form and so its fast-decaying film stock was not thought worthy of preservation until it was too late. I have many old pulp magazines that I handle only with trepidation, because as “trash” they were printed on cheap, acidic paper, leaving them now fragile yellowing husks of their former two-fisted selves. The very first television series starring an Asian-American woman (the incomparable Anna May Wong, at that), as well as the first to star an African-American woman (the also incomparable Hazel Scott) were lost because hey, it was only television, the were only women of color, and their shows were only on the Dumont Network.

The vintage adult material that Bacchus seeks to catalog and preserve faces its own threats. Not from decaying celluose nitrate film stock or acidic paper; in theory bits are forever. In practice sites are taken down in pornocalypses, censors go to work, search engines hide or fail to properly index “porn,” and people on social networks, whether out of laziness or contempt for creators, reblog images and other material without proper attribution to their sources. The work of people like Bacchus to repair this damage is an act of maintaining cultural memory.

And it’s something I think is worth supporting, and have supported, by contributing at Bacchus’s Patreon. You should to. You’ll be doing your part to keep humanity’s great and weird erotic heritage alive and available for the future.