Since Alison Boden took the reins of Free Speech Coalition (FSC) in early 2022, the organization has undergone a resurgence. Defending its members, sex workers, the adult industry and even society in general from threats to freedom of expression, FSC can now consistently be found on the front lines, battling with renewed zeal.
After the uncertainty of the COVID era, Boden swept in like the proverbial crossfire hurricane and shook things up. Leveraging her two decades of experience working in virtually every aspect of the industry — as a programmer, educator, pleasure products entrepreneur, editorial director, studio head and CEO — she quickly assessed what issues FSC was facing, internally and externally, then rolled up her sleeves and got to work.
In addition to being a canny leader who never loses her cool, Boden’s commitment to battling the forces of repression and control goes way back. A self-described longtime “sex nerd,” Boden served as a peer sexual health educator in high school and volunteered with Planned Parenthood in college.
“Helping educate people about sex was something I really enjoyed doing from a very young age,” she explains.
While earning her bachelor’s in sociology with a concentration in women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Boden started her first pleasure products business in 2003 with a friend she met at Planned Parenthood.
When they opened, she says, Pittsburgh’s adult stores were pretty typical for the era.
“They were mostly near the freeways — there was nothing like a Good Vibrations,” she recalls. “We really felt Pittsburgh would benefit from an inclusive, friendly boutique.”
Boden and her partner built a local home party and ecommerce business, which led to an opportunity to work full-time at Adult Empire when she graduated in 2004. Then known as Adult DVD Empire, the diversified company allowed Boden to learn about the adult business from a variety of angles.
“I managed what we called at the time ‘novelties,’” she says. “Pleasure products were a very significant part of their offerings and the first couple of years, I was fully devoted to that part of the business.
“I went to GameLink next,” she continues. “It was somewhat similar to what I was doing at Adult Empire, helping with novelty retail, but most of my job was being the editorial director. They had a section of their website called ‘The Naked Truth,’ and we did interviews with performers, reviews, even industry news a little bit. It was a fun job.”
Boden went on to streaming site VideoBox, where she was in charge of its blog as well.
“Commerce sites having an editorial section or a blog was usually kind of an SEO play,” she explains. “But at VideoBox it was actually really interesting because that website had a very vocal and conversational commenting community. I started understanding how the fans thought. As the marketing manager, it seemed like a good idea for retention to do content blogs. So I worked on interviewing stars and highlighting content that users might be interested in, but that could not be easily found among the thousands upon thousands of DVDs and scenes on the website.”
After her Video Box stint, Boden took up freelance work for a couple of years, coding and doing project management. For these gigs, she relied on a skill set that set her apart from many staffers on the business side of adult.
“I’m self-taught as a coder,” she reveals. “I’ve been doing programming since I was a kid. And then when I was doing contract work and freelancing, I took a few PHP classes just to get up to speed on that, and did a bunch of contract web design work.”
Around 2010, Boden was feeling ready for a change. That’s when she heard that acclaimed Kink.com founder and mastermind Peter Acworth was looking for an email marketing manager for his storied, San Francisco Armory-based BDSM content operation. Boden’s coding background gave her the edge.
“Email marketing and design take more coding than you think, because of the limited HTML and CSS you can do,” she notes. “I applied for the job because I thought it was a really interesting company. I was really excited by their mission.”
At Kink, Boden quickly progressed from marketing to software engineering, and after six years was promoted to run the tech department. Not long after that, Acworth decided to take a few years off to focus on his real estate business, and appointed Boden as CEO of Kink in March 2018.
It was in that capacity that Boden became even more of an industry “super insider.” Her impressive career trajectory, demonstrated commitment to adult, accumulated experience and wisdom earned her the respect of her peers — and a spot on the board of FSC.
“Before I ran for the board, I honestly didn’t know a ton about FSC,” she confides. “I had a vague idea that they were the organization that was fighting for our rights and I knew about the 2257 case and the Prop 60 campaign. But when two board members decided not to run for reelection, then-Director Eric Leue encouraged me to run.
“So I did — and I won,” she says. “I was on the board starting in January 2019. I had never been on a nonprofit board before, so it took me a little bit of time to learn.”
Awakening the Activist Within
At the time, FSC’s priorities were improving internal operations and addressing changes in the industry, notably the accelerating shift toward creator-produced content.
“We were also hoping to expand our reach to other countries and do a better job representing pleasure products companies,” Boden says. “I was personally very interested in performer rights and safety, so I joined the program committee for FSC INSPIRE, the support program for industry newcomers.”
Intended to inform, share resources, raise awareness and guide new adult performers, INSPIRE was an ideal initiative for Boden, recalling her high school and college advocacy work.
“Activism has been my orientation the entire time,” she says. “I was a very committed activist in college on sexual rights, choice and labor issues. I was never somebody who thought that the adult industry had egregious labor practices, but there are definitely places everybody can improve.”
At the same time, running Kink until 2021 gave Boden insight into how companies could improve working conditions and protocols.
“It was a really interesting time,” she reflects, in a bit of an understatement.
“By 2020, performers were finally having their voices heard in a way that they hadn’t before. A lot of what FSC handled that year was the response to COVID. The whole organization had to shift focus to directly supporting people who were having trouble financially, to trying to create safety protocols for production — and at the same time, have some long overdue discussions in the wake of #MeToo and George Floyd’s murder.”
By 2021, however, it seemed to Boden that much of the momentum around those projects had been lost. She felt that the organization’s progress was stalling out.
“So my becoming executive director in January 2022 was really good timing,” she says. “I was very fortunate.”
For Boden, leading FSC was the culmination of her wide-ranging career, weaving together her deep knowledge of industry nitty-gritty and her diplomatic rapport with the many diverse personalities that make up the colorful adult biz — while simultaneously bringing her back to her roots.
“After college, when you’re focused on making ends meet, your political activism can fall by the wayside,” she says. “Being tapped as executive director was a great opportunity to go back to my natural inclination toward activism and improving things for our industry. I had an organization with an amazing staff, members who are committed, and since I was already a board member, I was familiar with what the job entailed. Everybody around me was very supportive.”
Always the seasoned project manager, Boden immediately took the temperature of the room to figure out the optimal next moves.
“I wanted to assess where the organization was, what people thought of it and what issues we needed to be tackling,” she says. “Plus, it turned out that we had a six-figure budget hole!”
In tackling fundraising and membership, Boden realized that with some of FSC’s previous anti-censorship battles receding into history, many within the industry did not fully understand what FSC did.
“We needed to educate in order to fix that,” Boden reflects. “Coming from a business background, I focused on the product. What are our FSC members actually getting for their membership? What tangible value are we creating for people, so that it’s worth the cost?”
This sent Boden on a fact-finding mission.
“I talked to all of the members that I could, and a bunch of people who were not members but were interested,” she says. “I wanted to figure out what the issues were, and where they thought FSC could do better.”
It quickly became obvious to her that there were two simultaneous crises unfolding at the same time. One was state-level age verification mandates, which represented a shift in tactics by religious conservative anti-porn crusaders out to cripple the industry. The first such law went into effect in Louisiana two weeks before she started the job. The other big issue was rampant banking discrimination.
“I knew we had to take on both,” she states, with characteristic resolve.
Making the Industry’s Voice Heard
One of the hallmarks of Boden’s tenure leading FSC has been a noticeable strengthening of the organization’s lobbying efforts. This, she says, was not so much a departure as simply a matter of refocusing.
“FSC has worked with lobbyists on and off over the years,” Boden explains. “When I was on the board, we had been working with a California-based lobbying group on labor bills. But in talking with the board in early 2022, the decision was made — especially in light of the introduction in Congress of potentially dangerous bills like KOSA and EARN IT — that we needed to get involved on the federal level.”
Fortunately for FSC and its constituency, help arrived exactly when it was needed. In the summer and fall of 2022, reports surfaced of widespread closures by Wells Fargo of bank accounts belonging to sex workers and adult businesses. FS Vector, a Washington firm specializing in financial services and issues, contacted Boden.
“They heard about it and felt pretty angry and wanted to help the industry, so Pierre Whatley reached out and offered their lobbying services pro bono,” Boden reveals.
The firm’s involvement eased the process of accessing lawmakers in the nation’s capital. This led to a series of December 2022 meetings.
“We started directly lobbying congressional offices, testifying at hearings, meeting with policymakers and staff,” she explains.
For Boden, the experience drove home just how much of a difference professional lobbyists can make for organizations and activists.
“Otherwise, you’re on your own trying desperately to figure out who to talk to and then trying to get them to agree to a meeting with you, which is not terribly effective,” she says.
In the meetings, Boden recalls, her interlocutors would often ask, “How bad is the problem? Can you prove it?” In response, Boden’s trusted partner at FSC, Director of Public Affairs Mike Stabile — teaming up with SexWorkCEO’s MelRose Michaels — surveyed over 600 industry members, and in March 2023, FSC released a report titled “Financial Discrimination and the Adult Industry.” The document laid out in black and white (and red) the extent to which account closures, payment problems, and loan and insurance denials were affecting law-abiding citizens working in all areas of the adult industry.
“It put the numbers on paper — and they are shocking,” says Boden. “I can now go into an office and say, ‘Look: almost two thirds of the people in our industry have been victims of bank account closures, losing financial services, providers rejecting their business. And these are the human costs of that.”
Turning to the old-fashioned activist go-to of mobilizing your base, Boden and FSC also urged industry members to contact elected officials, and helped them make their opinions heard on various pieces of legislation.
“Eventually, we started bringing our members to D.C. and Sacramento to really illustrate what the impacts of these policies are on all the people involved in industry.”
In May 2023, Boden and Stabile led industry stakeholders on a crucial trip to Washington to address financial and banking discrimination. Among their contingent were Cathy Beardsley from Segpay — which sponsored the outing — Spankchain’s Allie Eve Knox, APAG’s Alana Evans, BIPOC Collective’s Sinnamon Love, Spectrum Boutique’s Zoe Ligon, Pavilion Financial Planning’s Jessica Goedtel, Filthy Communications’ Fivestar and MintStars’ Jessica Van Mier.
Boden also realized, however, that the stigma attached to the adult business often makes it tactically counterproductive for the industry to be the sole advocate on any given issue.
“We don’t have as much goodwill in the halls of Congress as a lot of other groups who believe the same things we do,” Boden notes wryly.
Therefore, with Stabile spearheading outreach, FSC began working with allies from across the ideological spectrum. Those have included the ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Chamber of Progress, TechFreedom, NetChoice, Woodhull Foundation and others.
“Within that coalition, we’ve been able to mobilize against age verification bills or weigh in on financial discrimination topics,” Boden says.
A related project very close to Boden’s heart is the creation of a credit union that would serve adult businesses and legal sex workers without the specter of life-disrupting discriminatory shenanigans. Boden unveiled the plan in January at the Los Angeles XBIZ conference, where she is a regular panelist and also the organizer of an entire “FSC Day” of sessions.
“By September or October, we will have submitted the application for phase one of the chartering project,” she explains. “We need to show regulators in writing that we are serious, that there is a need for it in the community — and that we are able to fulfill that need.”
Another example of Boden’s efficient leadership is strategic litigation to invalidate unconstitutional state-level age verification laws, in coordination with much larger organizations that share FSC’s concern for free speech.
Boden has also taken the group’s free speech advocacy international, helping get FSC Europe off the ground while devoting some of her precious time to making the adult industry’s voice and positions heard outside of the U.S.
“FSC Europe has faced a lot of bureaucratic challenges getting off the ground,” she says. “Also, it’s really, really hard to start an organization while you have a day job. But they’re gaining momentum. In the meantime, FSC has done its best to engage with regulators where they are interested in doing so.”
At the time of our interview, Boden had just returned from a summer 2024 event in London with Ofcom, the U.K. regulator tasked with implementing the British Online Safety Act’s age verification mandate. She says the regulators wanted to “get feedback and try to learn from the industry about what the pain points are.”
The constant travel Boden’s work entails can sometimes be draining.
“We are a very tiny organization,” she notes. “There’s only six of us, so our capacity for engagement outside the U.S. is a little bit limited, but wherever there are opportunities for FSC to represent the industry, with regulators in any country, we try to take that opportunity.”
Another major initiative dear to Boden’s heart is FSC’s launch of the Sexual Wellness Professional Alliance (SWPA) last year, creating an organization entirely focused on the needs and issues of the pleasure products industry, a stated goal of previous leadership that had not been prioritized until she became Executive Director.
Boden credits her hardworking FSC colleagues for the group’s ability to punch above its weight.
“I may be the face of the organization right now, but I would not be able to do what I’m doing without every single one of my staff,” she emphasizes. “We have a really incredible, smart, capable, dedicated staff of six who could probably double their salaries overnight by going elsewhere, but they do this job because they really care about this industry and our rights.
“From Mike Stabile, who has been my partner on policy and legislation, to Meghan, our incredible membership director, to Lotus Lain, who represents FSC with coalition organizations and really allows us to maintain connections with the performing community, to Opal, who is our program coordinator and largely responsible for our social media and messaging,” she enthuses. “And, of course, Julie, that extremely wonderful person handling the invoices and making sure that we’ve received your checks, who can get you set up or get any question answered. It’s a lean team but a really, really devoted team.”
Facing the Foes
Though an extremely familiar presence at trade shows worldwide and around industry folks, Boden is fairly private about her personal life. She recently married her partner of over 10 years, whom she met when both of them worked at Kink.
“I don’t have kids, so all the work travel I am doing is possible for me,” she says. “I would have loved to do that much more in my 20s. Right now, in my 40s, it can be a challenge.”
She reminisces about a near-death experience she had two decades ago, the very first time she actually lobbied Congress.
“Back in 2004, I was doing pro-choice campaigning and I drove down to D.C. to lobby with a group that was called Choice USA. We had a bunch of meetings and when I was driving home, there was this giant storm and the rental car I was driving started hydroplaning. I just missed the soft grass landing and hit the metal divider. The car spun, hit another car, spun some more, but made it all the way to the other side of the bridge. All the while, I kept thinking, ‘We are going to die.’”
She laughs while recounting the harrowing incident, which fortunately for the entire adult industry did not scare her off from in-person activism.
“It’s definitely worth going to where the debates are happening, because really getting to talk to people in person and make a personal connection makes a lot of difference,” she says. “Whether it’s driving up to Sacramento and sitting down face to face with a legislator, or something like this past week, when I presented a panel at a conference called TrustCon, which is primarily for moderators of big platforms.”
Where else, she asks, would one have the opportunity to bring along other stakeholders and “put a real face and humanity on who we are, what we do and all of the things we’re doing for customers and creators and employees in the adult industry?”
“It’s really meaningful,” she adds.
Yet even after over two decades of professional life and well into her third year of steering the fortunes of the adult industry trade organization during a time of extreme political turbulence, Boden’s job is rarely easy. Though armed with facts, determination and her unmistakable aura of cool competence, she still finds that she must brace herself before charging into battle.
“Let me tell you something,” she confides. “When I first testified before the California Assembly’s Privacy Committee this year, I wasn’t expecting to have any issues. I talk at XBIZ all the time, I speak in public a lot — it’s not that scary. But you know what? I was shaking. It’s kind of intimidating to have a bunch of legislators around you in a horseshoe, looking down at you and suddenly, you’re right there, you’re the only one representing the porn industry in a room full of religious activists from Exodus Cry and similar people. It could be a hostile room. The nerves definitely come into play.”
Boden had arrived at the halls of state power by herself, the token adult biz rep, tasked with facing Republican politicians often critical of all sexual expression, Democratic politicians who are regularly swayed into supporting anti-porn legislation in the name of “bipartisanship,” and pro-censorship advocates flown in by powerful national religious conservative lobbies with deep pockets.
“I had no idea what the process was,” she confesses. “They don’t talk to you. California can be a nightmare to deal with when it comes to politics. I showed up there not knowing when I would be called, I didn’t know what the procedure was for saying what I came to say. I was there on my own.
“So I’m sitting there at the committee hearing for a couple of hours watching all their other activities happen, and then our bill comes up,” she recalls. “The authors are there, the age verification lobby people are there, Exodus Cry, the California Family Council — a hate group — and they all have their say and then they call, ‘Okay, and in opposition?’ And it’s just me.”
Though Boden describes her own thoughts after testifying as “Wow, that was terrible,” watching the video record of that hearing reveals only a calm, collected pro standing up for what she knows is right.
In her testimony, Boden praised the bill sponsor’s “commitment to protecting young people and willingness to engage in productive conversations about the bill,” but stressed that “in addition to the very solid arguments that it will not survive judicial review, it’s completely impractical for Californians to verify their age multiple times on individual websites rather than doing it once on their device.”
Boden also told the hostile audience that in the months since age verification laws have taken effect in other states, a lot has been learned about how they work in practice.
“One very important thing we’ve learned is that the methods available to verify one’s age online are so cumbersome and invasive that consumers refuse to undergo the process,” she explained, citing better data than the pro-censorship lobbyists to illustrate that age verification laws make users “hit the back button and find a site that doesn’t comply with the law.”
“So while traffic to legitimate sites that implemented age verification has dropped substantially, we’ve looked at where it’s going instead,” Boden told the lawmakers. “We need to protect children online, not send adults to dangerous websites with illegal content.”
While that version of the bill passed the committee, the bill was later amended to address some of FSC’s concerns by including enabling device-level filtering as an option for compliance by adult sites.
‘We’re Gonna Beat ’em!’
At the 2023 Trans Erotica Awards (TEAs), just one year into her tenure at FSC, Boden was presented with the Industry Professional Award, for being “someone who represents the industry well and is a strong ally to the trans community.”
Her colleagues Stabile and Lain introduced her, honoring her as “someone who has made meaningful change for the industry, someone who has fought for the industry in legal battles, in legislative battles, someone who has taken on all of the things that we face as an industry right now: countless laws, countless attacks, anti-porn religious zealots. This is someone who’s leading our industry right now and trying to fight back.”
Boden told the TEAs audience at the gala, “I have devoted my entire life to this industry. This is my 20th year — and I hate to say it, but it’s the worst year I’ve seen in my time in terms of attacks on this industry and the human beings in it. Everyone in this room, every one of us, is under attack right now, and Free Speech Coalition has your back. And we need your strength. Join us — we’re gonna beat ’em!”
A year later, Boden concludes our interview by expressing the same gratitude for the path her life has taken.
“I feel really lucky to be doing this,” she says. “I’ve devoted my entire life to this industry — it’s very important to me. I love my job and it’s amazing to be able to do something that could make a difference in all our lives.”
