In your column this week: "While I recognize that poly (or D/s) can be central to someone's sexual identity, I've never viewed it as a sexual orientation and I didn't think this was a controversial point of view."

D/s is, in fact, my orientation. From as early an age as I can remember—roughly age six—I felt exclusively drawn to dominant celebrities, fictional characters, and people in my real life: super-heroes and super-villains, teachers, jail wardens, priests, slave-owners from days of yore, and anyone I met that exuded that ineffable dominant "vibe." Gender is and was irrelevant.

I didn't have a name for this "condition" but it was as real, innate, unwavering and unavoidable as it appears most people's monosexuality or bisexuality is. When I discovered in my early adulthood that it was a "thing" with a name and there was a community for it, it became an identity for me. But it was my orientation long before that.