NSFW: The St. Louis mom behind sex blog the Beautiful Kind is outing herself

Kendra Holliday is a total slut. Go right ahead and say it — she does. She's not hiding from it anymore.

Jennifer Silverberg

Jennifer Silverberg

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More About

• Kendra Holliday
• Tristan Taormino
• Susan Wright
• Sexuality
• Relationships

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In some ways, she's always been honest about it. She's unflinchingly blogged every detail of her sex life for years — she's a bisexual, polyamorous, joyously partnered divorced mother, living and writing and fucking (and yeah, it's a lot of fucking) in St. Louis. Her blog, www.thebeautifulkind.com, details all of it. It has made her into a celebrity of sorts. It has cost her a job. She's called it her second partner.

But she's been hiding in plain sight, going to great pains to conceal her name, face and identity on the blog — even as she exhorts her readers to "be open and honest."

The blog has become a safe space for sex-positive readers in St. Louis and all over the world to come together. It's created a virtual community, and Holliday and some of her kinky friends want to take that momentum and push the Midwest forward into greater sexual freedom and openness.

And it's hard to do that when you're hiding. So Holliday is coming out.

Kendra Holliday is 38, with long auburn hair. She favors the sort of rich brocade velvet dresses seen at Ye Olde Renaissance Faire. Her shoulders are often dusted in her signature silver body glitter, and a large gold pendant bearing the letter K always hangs from her delicate neck. She's got the lithe glow of a long-time vegetarian..

She grew up outside Creve Coeur, in the house her parents still share with her youngest sibling (a 25-year-old sister), three dogs and two cats. The house has photos of all five kids on the wall, alongside photos of nurse Mom and sailor Dad from the beginning of their 44 years of marriage. There's inviting-looking furniture on a back deck, the smell of recently burned incense, a patriotic welcome mat and Mom's collections — camel figurines and books on genealogy and history.

In a lot of ways, Holliday's early years were fairly conventional — on the surface. She was a smart girl and in her school's gifted program. With all the kids around, things were busy, and money was tight, but her siblings looked up to her then and still do now. She went through a goth phase and a weird-hair phase before getting married at 23.

But chaos, hurt and mental illness are themes in her family's history, just as much as the obvious love that its members share.

Holliday's parents are happy to talk about her childhood, but like many people in her life, they don't want to be identified by name. Incidentally, "Holliday" doesn't give away her parents' surname or her ex-husband's. She chose the name for herself and made it legal after her divorce.

Her parents adore her. They recall entering her into a beauty contest in Texas when she was three and are still genuinely shocked she didn't win. ("Some rich kid won," Dad sneers.)

Mom and Dad met cute — real cute.

"I was in the Navy, and my buddy had this fiancée," he says. "I told him, 'When you're writing your letter, if any of her friends want to write to me, I promise I'll write back.'" Holliday's mother took him up on his offer; after a year and a half of letters, they finally met — and got engaged on the spot. "Six months after we met, we were married."

That was damn near half a century ago, and when Dad leaves the house, Mom gets a big smooch from him.

The pair decided they wanted to have two biological kids and adopt two more. But years went by with no kids, so they adopted two boys first.

Then came Holliday, and four more biological children followed. Then a son died only a few days after he was born.

Mom's mental health went downhill, fast. There were suicide attempts and institutions and deteriorating relationships with the kids. Holliday says her mother attempted suicide at the baby boy's funeral.

Then the trouble with the adopted sons came to light — they were molesting Holliday and her sisters, starting when she was eight or nine.

"I was introduced to sex at a premature age, and not on my terms," she says.

Holliday told her parents about the abuse, but it took two awful years from that time to get the boys out of the house.

Cutting the adopted boys out of the family was traumatic, and, coupled with the baby's death, it was a crushing blow. Holliday's father responded by becoming increasingly caught up in work, even as her mother became more and more unhinged.

Around age sixteen, Holliday lost her virginity and was then institutionalized herself, her first of three stays in a mental hospital.

"A week shy of 16, this creepy 24-year-old I met at a party got my number, and he kept bothering me," she says. "He was manipulative and badgering me. I insisted on a condom. I decided I was pregnant and freaked out. I spent Easter in the mental hospital."

Holliday blames her mother.