The Body Electric School was founded in 1984 in the San Francisco Bay Area by Joseph Kramer with the aim of training professional massage therapists. Before founding the school, Kramer spent ten years as a Jesuit, studying, teaching, and preparing for the Catholic priesthood. Although he was never ordained, he deeply embraced the Jesuit motto: “To be a person for others.” This commitment to service became a foundational principle of the Body Electric School.
The first Body Electric massage trainings were led by four individuals: Joseph Kramer, Claire Arnesen, Ruth Scolnick, and Briahn Kelly-Brennan. Between 1984 and 2004, more than twenty instructors taught in the program, and over a thousand students were certified as massage therapists. Among the many influential teachers of touch in this lineage was Chester Mainard, warmly remembered here by one of his former students. (February 1986 advertisement for the school, its faculty and graduates).
In 1985, as a response to the AIDS crisis, the school expanded its massage certification requirements to include a course called Bodywork for People with Life-Threatening Illnesses, taught by Irene Smith, who first brought massage into hospice work. The school also offered discounted tuition for volunteers who worked in AIDS service organizations, so more people with AIDS would receive touch.
Amid the fear of sex (and death) that gripped gay and bisexual men during the AIDS crisis, Kramer began developing and teaching erotic massage classes in 1986 as a safe and embodied way for men to experience sexual connection. These classes, offered during a sexually transmitted epidemic, were featured in The Advocate, the largest gay magazine in the U.S.
Soon, requests poured in from cities across the country for these erotic workshops. Kramer responded by creating a weekend intensive titled “Healing the Body Erotic,” later renamed “Celebrating the Body Erotic.” Each class featured music deejayed by Matthew Simmons. What was it like to attend the very first Healing the Body Erotic class in Oakland?
The peak experience in Celebrating the Body Erotic (CBE) and other Body Electric workshops was an extended exchange of erotic massage. Half of the participants took on the role of masseurs, providing over an hour of genital stimulation to the other half of the class with thirty distinct caresses, vibrations, tugs, and pleasurable pauses.
Those receiving were guided in a pattern of fast, circular breathing. This paced breathing, combined with the novelty and variety of the touch, supported them in staying focused on their bodily sensations. Breathe along with this 11-minute audio recording.
Rather than drifting into erotic fantasy or falling into self-judgment, participants were invited to savor the experience of sustained sexual arousal. The erotic massage ended with a Big Draw: the receivers contracted their muscles and held their breath for thirty seconds. They then relaxed into fifteen minutes of stillness, often marked by joy, peacefulness, wonder, and clarity. Enjoy Don Shewey’s vivid description in The Village Voice from 1992 about participating in a CBE.
In 1990, Kramer began leading six-day erotic massage retreats at Wildwood, a mountaintop sanctuary. These gatherings, called The Dear Love of Comrades, were so transformative for participants that many wished to share their Body Electric experience with others.
Recognizing the need for erotic healing in queer communities devastated by AIDS, Kramer envisioned a new kind of practitioner rooted in the tradition of the ancient sacred prostitute and the Jesuit commitment “to be a person for others.” In 1991 and 1992, Kramer and a team of gay luminaries led the first two Sacred Intimate trainings for men who wished to be sexual healers, erotic shamans and/or midwives to the dying.
Although most of the massage certification classes were taught by women, there was still a gender imbalance in the school’s offerings, due to the popularity of the male erotic massage classes. To create more events for women, the female faculty began offering women-only classes and even brought in other female teachers. The difficulty was that none of these classes included the erotic massage experience of the male classes… until Cosmic Orgasm Awareness Week.
In 1993, in collaboration with his close friend Annie Sprinkle, Kramer created Cosmic Orgasm Awareness Week for Men and Women. The brochure advertised: “This pansexual training will provide the most comprehensive instruction in erotic massage ever offered by Body Electric.” The training came through on that promise.
These advanced erotic massage strokes for all types of genitals are still taught in Body Electric trainings (and available on video for a fee)
After the Cosmic Orgasm, Kramer passed the school over to Collin Brown.
Brown purchased the School from Kramer in 1992. TBES also developed a certified massage program independent of the erotic curriculum, initially led by Doug Frasier. When Frasier stepped down, Brown invited Chester Mainard and Irene Smith to lead the massage training. For the erotic touch department of the school, Mainard developed anal massage techniques, based on his years of teaching medical anal massage to university students. Workshops that shared his light-hearted approach to learning, developed with Selah Martha, were titled “‘The Land Down Under” and “Tapping the Root.”He also organized the formation of the Wildwood Conservation Foundation to purchase and preserve Wildwood Retreat Center, 210 acres near Guerneville CA, as home to many BE intensives. He continued teaching and consulting for the school until 2019 and resumed teaching in 2023. Brown invited Isa Magdalena, a colleague of Annie Sprinkle’s from Amsterdam, to develop women’s programming for the School, adapting the techniques of the Taoist Erotic Massage and its place in the workshop’s structure. Magdalena and her partner P.K. Kozel became the first women to teach for BE], from 1993 to 1998, along with K Ruby and Vision Dancer.
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