Kink Censorship History: How This Material Got Sold Before the Internet

By Juno Park · Community and identity writer · Published 12 September 2026

Anyone reading about kink today does it on a phone, for free, in about four seconds. That is roughly thirty years old. For the century before it, everything about this subject reached people through channels that somebody could close, and a surprising amount of how the scene behaves now was shaped by the shape of those channels rather than by anything anyone believed.

This is a short account of the plumbing: who could stop this material from reaching a reader, at each stage, and what the people producing it did about it.

The mails were the first choke point

In the United States the founding fact is the Comstock Act, passed in March 1873 under the title “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use”. It made it a federal offence to send obscene matter through the post, and it swept in a great deal besides, including information about contraception. Anthony Comstock, who had campaigned for it, was appointed a special agent of the Post Office and given the authority to inspect the mails.

That matters because mail order was how this material actually moved. A shop can be avoided, a magazine can be printed in another state, but almost every specialist publication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reached its reader through the post. Putting the decision in the hands of a federal agency with inspection powers meant one office, rather than a jury in the buyer’s home town, effectively set the national limit.

The effects ran right through the postwar period. The largest mail-order fetish photography business in the United States, run by Irving Klaw in New York, was closed by federal obscenity prosecution in the early 1960s, and much of the archive was destroyed rather than surviving into any collection.

The legal test kept moving

What “obscene” meant was not stable, and knowing how it moved explains a lot of otherwise baffling publishing decisions.

The old common law standard, from the nineteenth century case R v Hicklin, asked whether an isolated passage might deprave someone susceptible to it, with no allowance for merit. Britain replaced it with the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which judged an article as a whole and, crucially, added a defence of public good where publication served science, literature, art or learning, with expert evidence admissible on the point.

In the United States the Supreme Court reworked the test twice in sixteen years. Roth v. United States in 1957 held that obscenity sits outside First Amendment protection and set an “average person, applying contemporary community standards” test. Miller v. California in 1973 refined it into the three part standard still in use, and moved the bar from material “utterly without redeeming social value” to material lacking “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”.

Miller looks like a liberalisation on paper and worked as the opposite for small publishers. Community standards are local, so the same publication could be perfectly legal in one city and prosecutable in the next, and a small press cannot litigate in fifty places. The risk landed on the shop, not the printer.

A private agreement that outperformed a statute

The clearest case of a gate that was not a law is the Comics Code. In 1954 a psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, published Seduction of the Innocent, arguing that comics caused juvenile delinquency, and a Senate subcommittee held hearings on comic books over two days in April and again that June. No legislation followed. The strong impression that legislation was coming was enough.

The publishers regulated themselves first, forming the Comics Magazine Association of America and adopting the Comics Code in October 1954. It had no legal force at all. It worked because wholesalers would not handle a comic book without the seal printed on the cover, so a voluntary code became a distribution gate, and its effect on what an adult could buy off a rack was more complete than any statute of the period achieved. The comics trade keeps the fullest account of that decade, down to what the Code ruled out in practice and how the seal came to control the racks. The pattern recurs everywhere in this history: the binding constraint is almost never the law, it is whoever owns the narrow point in the supply chain.

The Code did not get repealed. It got abandoned, publisher by publisher, with Marvel dropping it in 2001 and the last two holdouts stopping in 2011.

The workaround was always a different shop

The response to a closed channel is a different channel, and the late 1960s produced the clearest example. Underground comix sold through head shops rather than newsstands. Because the Code lived in the newsstand supply chain and not in law, a publication that never entered that chain was simply outside it.

That worked until the risk moved to the retailer. After Miller in 1973 obscenity became a local question, prosecutions of shops became practical, and the same year the specialist comic trade began ordering direct from publishers on non-returnable terms, a change usually credited to the dealer Phil Seuling. Non-returnable orders put the financial risk on the shop and, in exchange, freed the shop to stock things no wholesaler would rack. Then paraphernalia laws through the second half of the 1970s closed a large share of the head shops themselves, and the distribution simply evaporated. Anyone tracing this properly will want a channel-by-channel breakdown of who held the valve at each stage, because the answer changes every twenty years and the content changes with it.

Plain wrappers, small print runs and the mailing list

Kink publishing outside comics ran on the same logic with less capital. Print runs were short, often a few hundred. Distribution was subscription, by post, in plain wrapping, which is where the idiom comes from. Contact magazines carried box numbers rather than addresses. Clubs corresponded through a secretary who kept the list.

The mailing list was the whole business and also the whole exposure. It was the only route to the reader, and it was the first thing seized in a prosecution, which is why so many of these operations kept deliberately bad records and why the archives from the period are so thin. Photocopied zines in the 1970s and 1980s worked the same way at even smaller scale, passed hand to hand at events and mailed to people who had written in.

Two habits the scene still has come straight out of this. The pseudonym is one, and the practice of vetting somebody before telling them anything is the other. Both were operational security before they were etiquette, and the symbols and flags that developed alongside them were signalling systems for people who could not simply say what they meant.

Then it moved online, and so did the gate

Bulletin boards, Usenet groups and mailing lists removed the printer, the wholesaler and the post office from the chain in about a decade. The first legislative response in the United States, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, was largely undone the following year when the Supreme Court struck down its anti-indecency provisions in Reno v. ACLU as unconstitutionally broad.

What replaced the old gates was not a law either. App stores review before publication, payment processors decide which businesses can take money, hosts and ad networks apply their own terms, and none of them publishes criteria or explains a refusal. It is the Comics Code arrangement without the document, which is a genuine loss: a written list can be quoted back at somebody.

The practical residue for a reader now is that the record is patchy. Much of the twentieth century canon exists because a few people mailed it to each other and somebody kept a box in an attic, and that is worth knowing when you pick up one of the older standard texts and find it strangely coy in places, or when the longer history skips decades. The gaps are not absence of activity. They are absence of anything that survived the channel.