The Dildorks · Billy Lore, Kate Sloan

When Your Shrink is Kinky

April 8, 2026·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Calvin describes selling raffle tickets at a leather contest in a chest harness, crushing a stranger's head between his thighs for fifty dollars — then realizing clients were in the bar.

1. The Dildorks hosts a conversation between Billy Lohr and Calvin Hauer on what it means to be an openly kinky sex-positive therapist in Minneapolis. 2. Billy Lohr is a sex educator and porn maker who identifies as a kinkster; Calvin Hauer is a marriage and family therapist (MFT) in his mid-thirties who has worked in sexuality his entire adult life, including prior work in sex education where he and Billy first met. 3. The episode's core question is how a therapist who participates in the same kink community he serves draws the professional and personal lines that make that possible. 4. Calvin traces the tension to graduate school twelve years ago, where intro MFT training imposed hyper-specific physical rules — feet planted, hands at sides, calibrated eye contact, no gum, no water — alongside an all-or-nothing ethical framework that treated complex decisions as binary. 5. He describes the "wall of shame" exercise in grad school: reviewing the licensing board's list of therapists who had lost their licenses, with the cardinal rule being never to have sex with clients. 6. Early in his career, Calvin was connected to a local kink-aware professionals group that adapted ethics frameworks from rural small-community therapists — where a therapist might encounter a client at the only grocery store — and applied them to kink community overlap. 7. His most formative guidance came from a mentor who told him the reason she charges her private-pay rates is so she can afford to travel out of state to play, because participating locally creates unavoidable client-overlap risk. 8. Calvin explains that he does not participate in public play at local kink events; he will work the door or run support, but will not play, to preserve both his clients' comfort and his own ability to maintain headspace. 9. He uses what he calls "vampire rules" at community events: clients are permitted to approach and acknowledge him, but he cannot approach or acknowledge them first, because someone with him might infer the client relationship. 10. The leather shop and latex shop are located across the street and next door to his office respectively, and the Smitten Kitten sex shop is around the corner; community members regularly refer clients to him, creating a constant overlap between his professional and personal reputation. 11. Calvin defines erotic transference — clients developing erotic feelings toward their therapist — as an inevitable part of doing sex therapy, and distinguishes it from counter-transference (the therapist's feelings toward the client). 12. His response to erotic transference is to name it, normalize it, and make an explicit promise that neither party will act on those feelings, framing the boundary as protective of the therapeutic work rather than as a rejection. 13. Calvin and Billy discuss the book "Unequal by Design," an anthology edited by Sabrina Pop and Raven Caldera, in which kink-aware professionals argue that effective therapy with kinky clients requires therapists to clear their own preconceptions rather than learn extensive kink-specific knowledge. 14. Calvin endorses this view under the frame of "cultural competency" — therapists don't need to share a client's specific fetishes to work with the relational dynamics, but do need to examine whether their own discomfort is distorting their clinical judgment. 15. He references Stephanie Gorlich's book "The Leather Couch" as the most useful resource he knows on differentiating kink from abuse, arguing that grad school conflates power dynamics with oppression and fails to address consensual power exchange. 16. Calvin describes a geopolitical dimension: in a more conservative cultural moment, more of his clients want to locate where their kink "started from," and he is skeptical that finding an origin story serves the client rather than pathologizing the kink. 17. Billy articulates a fear she has carried into prior therapy: that a complex, identity-level relationship to kink will be reduced to a symptom of something else, and that processing the "root cause" might inadvertently strip away something core — using her own deep connection to leather as an example. 18. The tone throughout is conversational and direct, with both hosts sharing personal disclosures, exchanging specialized vocabulary fluently, and punctuating clinical points with humor. 19. Listeners who will get the most from this episode are kinky or queer people considering therapy, or therapists who work with or want to work with kink-adjacent clients. 20. Listeners who prefer a more structured clinical lecture format, or who are not interested in frank discussion of BDSM and kink community life, are unlikely to find value here.

As heard by us

Kink-aware therapy gets treated as a practical question about power, abuse, and client care.

Billy Lohr frames the episode around a sex educator, porn maker, and kinkster, while Calvin Hauer comes across as a sex-positive therapist in Minneapolis who works openly with sexuality and kink.

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Why you'd press play

Youll hear a conversation about kink, therapy, and queer kinky clients.

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