About

Let me guess what your first interview question is: "Can you tell us a little about yourself?"

That I can do.

I’m Sam. I usually go by “sK.” But I’m also “perfectly O.K. with being known as the toilet sign guy.“

I make lots of things.

Most of them can be plopped into three main buckets:1. I make art (like comedy shows, designs, shirts, and even poems);2. I make tools (like books, edugraphics, and curricula); 3. I make resources (for sex educators, and justice activists, and facilitators, and more). To do all of that, I make way-too-many websites (that I code and design myself).

I also bounce around the world and talk to people.

Sometimes that’s middle schoolers in Alabama. Other times it’s professors in Eastern Europe, activists in S.E. Asia, or Katie Couric on a bench in Manhattan.

I’ve been named a “People we Love” by YES! Magazine, and “2017 Austin Changemaker.” But take that with a grain of salt: I’ve also been named “Sin with Colored Pencils” by someone from the National Organization for Marriage, and a contributor to the “macabre self-suicide of civilization” by someone named “Propaganda Guard.”

Everything I make, and everything I do, even though it all might seem disconnected, is bound together by the same goal, and my vision for the world: to live on an Earth where all of its inhabitants are healthy, understood, educated, and safe. (h.u.e.s., get it?)

To get there, a lot will have to change: we’ll have to change a lot of the ways we view and treat ourselves, change the ways we view and treat others, and change the ways we view and treat the Earth itself.

I’m here to do do everything I can to make things that, in whatever small but significant ways, inch myself and those within my reach toward that change.

So, really, that’s what I’m here to do.

That is what I create.

Change.

The other thing that connects all of my work is that it’s uncopyrighted, open source, offered in the spirit of the gift economy, and/or totally freely available.

This applies to everything I make, from my books to curricula to edugraphics to t-shirts to comedy shows.

I don’t operate from a place of scarcity, and I certainly don’t manufacture scarcity. But instead create from a belief in abundance. I don’t know how else one can do social justice, in both walk and talk.

So it wouldn’t make sense to do Patreon, or patronage, in the way it seems everyone else is doing it: offering exclusive stuff, or moar stuff, for their patrons. That would be antithetical to everything I do: promoting access above all as a cornerstone of social justice.

And that’s why I’m not doing that.

Instead, for 2019 I’m engaging in a new experiment, that’s actually a really old one. Doing patronage more like how Shakespeare did it, and less like how most of Patreon does. I’m not seeing patrons as super-consumers of what I do, but as my employers. My bosses.

Being my patron means you’re behind my work, employing me to do it, providing me with direction and support, commiserating with me when things are falling apart, and sharing in the credit for the good we do together.

If this all sounds like an experiment you want to get behind, you sound like the type of person I’d like to work for. Sign up.Let’s make some change together.

Your future employee,

<3 sK