Sex & Psychedelics: 5 Questions for magazine founder Sura Hertzberg
Hertzberg discusses her vision for her magazine and how it came together.
Sura Hertzberg grew up in 1990s Portland, Oregon, where psychedelic mushrooms grew freely in the forests and many people enthusiastically picked and ate them. By the time she reached high school, she too had tried those mushrooms, as well as LSD. Those experiences were sometimes uncomfortable, or even scary and confusing, but Hertzberg credits these drugs with co-creating her consciousness at that young age.
Hertzberg went on to study art, dance performance, and psychology as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She moved to New York and then Berlin, where she worked as a performing artist creating pieces about sex and love, and working as a sex, love, and intimacy coach. When COVID hit, she went back to school to become a mental health professional. In 2022, she started a magazine and named it for two taboo topics she wanted to focus on: Sex & Psychedelics. The magazine is currently working on their third issue, which will debut at Psychedelic Science 2025 in Denver. The Microdose spoke with Hertzberg about her vision for the magazine and how it came together.
What led you to start the magazine?
People shy away from sex, and people shy away from talking about psychedelics. I remember specifically getting messaging when I was younger about how you shouldn’t have sex on drugs — that it may be the best sex of your life and ruin the rest of your sex life. We hope this magazine offers support to folks who want to explore the intersection of these things but don't know where to start, or who have explored it and want to either learn more, share about it, or connect with others.
Community outreach, education, and connection have always been at the forefront of this project. Coming from a dance and performance background, where the art is so ephemeral, I really liked the idea of creating a physical thing I could hand to you, that you could take with you and show to your friends. The magazine is a tangible physical artifact - a collector's item.
Who is your target audience?
Our audience is pretty varied — they’re mostly gender diverse adults who tend to be working in helping or healing professions, or in roles related to sexuality. People often tell us that they really wanted to tell their story but didn't know who to share it with, and now they have a platform for it. But then there are also folks who are coming to these topics for the first time — they were a little intimidated but curious, and didn’t previously have an access point to explore it.
How did you put together the first couple issues?
Once I started talking about this project with my community in San Francisco, it started coming together. Someone I’d worked with before recommended our designer, Little Shiva. Emily Savage volunteered to help, and she’s now our editorial director — we were all flying by the seat of our pants but the first issue came together in time to premiere at the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver.
After that first issue, it was clear we needed a bigger team to keep working on this. Olivia Clear, who is a mental health professional as well as an artist, joined the project as our creative and artistic director. Then James Belle Guest, an Oregon licensed psilocybin facilitator, came on as our vision strategist.
So far we are self-funded, though we have received small contributions here and there. And at this moment, we're dedicating our time and our blood, sweat and tears to the project because we believe in it and we love it. Now that we’re working on the third issue, we’ve been exploring opportunities around including advertisements. This third issue’s theme is eco-sexuality, so we're also going to offer a digital copy of the magazine so people can engage with a different format — we’re also community partners for Psychedelic Science 2025, so we’ll have our magazines there as well as a launch party. The dream is to have an angel investor who believes in us.
How do you pick themes for issues?
I started the project with some idea of what the initial themes might be. The first issue was a sort of retrospective, looking at what had been happening in the intersection of sex and psychedelics so far. Ultimately the feeling of that first issue was very journalistic looking: clean, organized, and professional. So when it came time to decide on the second theme, we were like, “Let's make a sexy one.” Let's do a dark theme, one that feels more visceral — so we decided on shadow-tending. As Mary Sanders puts it in the issue: “The shadow represents the parts of ourselves that hold our traumas, shame and struggles; they might be parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of, so we hide or bury these parts because they are so painful to face. They can be big and visible or more subtle and sneaky. When we tend to a garden, we assess the needs of the land and sometimes pull weeds, adjust the water or shade that the plants need, or we might set up some type of boundaries to keep out pests or even recruit helpers for bigger seasonal projects. Tending to the shadow is no different.”Since psychedelics have had a resurgence, there have been stories of psychedelic abuse, sexual abuse and misconduct — that damage has been done. Many of us are wary of touch; some are not taught how to use touch well, or are scared of sexual things coming up during sessions and try to back off of those topics — and for good reason, because that can be very risky. So we are trying to foster more on-the-nose conversations about this: straightforwardly addressing them instead of trying to skirt around them.
There are incredibly beautiful ways that we can work with sexual energy and themes, but it takes accountability, and for the community to openly converse about it, and to discuss the risks and the potential.
How do you think about consent - especially sexual consent - while on psychedelics?
There are a lot of amazing writers who've written about this, including Caffyn Jesse, Juliana Goldstone, Annie Sprinkle, and Beth Stephens. There are a few themes that emerge from this body of work. In very broad strokes, you want to think about the journey in three phases: preparation, the trip, and integration. Consent can play into all three phrases. In preparation, you can negotiate with the folks that you are going to be connecting with about what substance and dosage you’ll be taking, and set an upper bound agreement about what activities you’d be comfortable with. During the trip there can be no upward negotiation of those limits; you're in a compromised state, but you can take your foot off the gas and downgrade what you’re comfortable with. And those conversations can lead to check-ins after the trip to check in about how things went. Communication is key.
This also ties into why we chose to have shadow-tending as the second issue’s themes; we can learn so much from the BDSM (bondage, domination/submission, sadism, and masochism) and kink realms. They've been discussing consent, boundaries, aftercare, and negotiation for a long time.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
