The BackDrop Club

The BackDrop Club is an organization for people who are interested in various aspect of BDSM. It was founded over forty years ago by Robin Roberts. The club has had multiple venues, all in the San Francisco Bay Area.

BackDrop has been the primal pool which has given birth to nearly a dozen BDSM clubs in California, and many of the 'Houses of Domination' in both Northern and Southern California.

Many articles and stories have been written about BackDrop, including Fetish Times, Saturday Evening Swinger, both the Berkeley Barb and The Spectator, Fling and Macho magazines. The Club has been highlighted in productions 'Reel Sex' by HBO, several films by Alex deRenzy, the 1980 KQED special on BDSM titled One Foot Out of the Closet, and over a dozen other films and TV programs.

BackDrop published Common Bonds magazine and Party Lines newsletters, and is currently heading up the The SM-201 Project

Robin Roberts

Robin was born in Norfolk, Virginia on 18 August, 1941, the oldest of four children. During his adult years, he has held two separate but parallel careers: one in the Electronics Industry, the other in the field of BDSM.

He is a voracious reader, and enjoys writing as well. As an author, he has written fiction and nonfiction (both erotic and vanilla), as well as training and troubleshooting manuals for the Electronics Industry.

He is a Private Pilot, and enjoys flying mulitple types of aircraft. (He has actually landed a PBY Catalina on Clear Lake, California!)

Involvement in the BDSM Community

"He is considered to be 'the father of Het BDSM' in the Bay Area", says Jay Wiseman, author of SM-101.

He is one of the prime movers in the BDSM community. In the past 40 years, he has trained over 1000 professional Mistresses.

Robin maintains a 12,000 volume / 4,000 video tape library for people desiring to do research on "topics sexual". Eric Kroll has used the library for research on several of his books published through Taschen Press, including his books on Eric Stanton and Bill Ward.

He has been working as a commercial bondage photographer since the late 1950's, having worked with many companies including; Movie News owned by Irving Klaw, Harmony Publications and others. He is well known for his bondage photos printed on the covers of Detective Magazines.

He is currently writing an eBook on BDSM which is scheduled to be released in fourth quarter, 2006.

Working in Electronics

After eight years in Navy (serving aboard the Wilson, the Duncan and the Chicago), he worked at Ryan Aeronautical helping design the digital doppler radar aboard the Apollo Lunar Lander, which allowed man to land on the moon. He moved to Gulf General Atomics installing TRIGA nuclear reactors, and designing shaped charge explosives to launch rockets and to model nuclear tests.

As a Professional Photographer, his photos have been used in many product brochures and catalogs.

After moving to Northern California, he worked at Durrum Instruments building, installing and maintaining Amino-Acid Analyzers. As a direct result of these liquid chromotography analyzers, a test for PKU in newborns was developed. The analyzer was also used to test blood and urine medical samples for many diseases including diabetes and mapping protein structures.

In the late 60's, Robin was the Operation Officer and Training Officer for San Jose Search and Rescue, credited with designing four-wheel drive jeep ambulances still in use today.

He worked at Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the very first Retail Computer Store chains in the US. (He still owns a a copy of Ashton-Tate DB-2 serial #102.) Working at Byte, he designed the Sigma Seven computer system (see a connection in the name?) used by NASA at Moffett field to simulate Space Shuttle cockpit eletronics.

He started Sigma Systems in 1974 and has worked as an Electronics Consultant for many companies including Hasbro, Covad, Mustang Software and NetForce. He maintained one of the first private owned MP/M multi-user computer systems in the US. He was very well known for designing/laying out multi-layer PC boards well before the advent of PC-Cad software.

He is the inventor of the "Dial-Log 1", a call detail recorder which was one of the first commercial applications of 'automatic number indentification' or as it is known today, 'Caller ID'. He has worked as an Expert Witness in Patent Infringement cases involving telecommunications.

At MicroProse, he was Build Master and SCM on the Falcon 4.0 project, and designed software to serialize individual ISO images on the fly just prior to writing.

Robin holds BSEE, Masters in Physics degrees, and a Ph.D in Business Administration, and is a Fellow of 'North American Academy of Arts and Sciences', and is listed in 'Who's Who' registery.

(Just for fun: The license plate on his Lincoln Towncar is WbMstr1 and his Merc Wagon is BldMstr: again with that "Master" thing!)

References

History of the BackDrop Club

Robin's Resume