The sexual rights activist Tuppy Owens, who has died aged 80, an elegant, imposing figure with a frank, no-nonsense attitude, played an important part in the shifting of attitudes towards sexuality that began in the 1960s and 70s.
In 1972 she launched The Sex Maniac’s Diary, an annual directory which, in a pre-internet era, covered the minutiae of sexual activity across the world in granular detail. Owens carried out assiduous research with the aim of being the best compendium of sex services, including different international standards and mores – “like a yachtsman’s diary but about sex”.
In later years, mindful of the risks of Aids, the diary was rebranded in 1987 as The Safer Sex Maniac’s Diary and Owens continued to publish it from her bohemian basement flat in Mayfair, central London, until 1995.
Alongside this, Owens’s charity work gathered pace. She became interested in the sexual rights of disabled people, and with a visually impaired colleague, Nigel Verbeek, in 1979 started the Outsiders Club, a social and campaigning group for socially and physically disadvantaged people.
Owens believed that disabled people were infantilised and their intimate lives denied, and asserting their sexual rights became her abiding interest. Outsiders Club offshoots include the Sex and Disability Helpline, SHADA (Sexual Health and Disability Alliance) and the TLC Trust, through which disabled people can find responsible sexual service providers.
Steve, a long-time member of Outsiders, remembered Owens’s “sense of fun, mischief and frankness”, while Emma Buckett, who co-wrote Owens’ biography, said: “Most people want to help me by curing me or changing me to fit ‘normal’ society. Tuppy accepted me as I am.”
In the 80s Owens trained at St George’s hospital medical school, in London, as a sex therapist, gaining a diploma in human sexuality from the University of London and, later, an honorary doctorate from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
She led conferences such as Disability: Sex, Relationships and Pleasure at the Royal Society of Medicine in 2009. But her interest in sex was more as activist than academic.
She presided over hedonistic events, including the Sex Maniacs Ball – which became the Night of the Senses – and the Erotic Awards, which evolved into the Sexual Freedom Awards, with golden-winged phallus trophies for those offering pioneering sexual services. Many of the events raised funds for Outsiders and pushed sexual boundaries. Owens was, said a friend, “very good at getting people to give their time and effort”, and to select candidates for the awards, she went on “field trips to stripper bars, fetish clubs and all points of the London sex-positive scene,” her secretary Anna María Staiano recalled.
Owens also advocated for sex workers and strippers, and as one supporter put it, “our right to follow our own forms of consensual adult expression”. She felt sexual pleasure should not be circumscribed by religion, state or social shame, and was militant on this matter. She lobbied against local councils that disallowed sex events and for the decriminalisation of sex workers.
Keen to be an enabler rather than a guru, she said she hoped to speak “plainly about sex and disability in a way that people feel they are really being listened to ... I enjoy helping people feel better about themselves and enjoy their bodies.” Her brother, Jonathan, described her “unerring drive to have a good time, and her principled and open-minded desire to support and encourage less able people to have the best time too”.
She was born Rosalind Owens, in Cambridge, the second of five children of Peter Owens, a photographer, and his wife, Mary (nee Hall), and was nicknamed Tuppy - short for tuppeny-ha’penny - by her family.
After leaving the Perse school, Cambridge, she studied zoology at the University of Exeter, then in the late 60s joined the staff of the Natural Environment Research Council. She did not enjoy the work, and took better paid work in pornography, with her breakthrough book being Sexual Harmony (1969) for Highbury Press. Her films as an adult model included Lasse Braun’s Sensations (1975).
In 1995, Owens met her future husband, Antony Niall, while campaigning, and they moved to a croft in northern Scotland. She founded the Sexual Health and Disability Alliance, stewarded the Sexual Freedom Coalition and published Supporting Disabled People with their Sexual Lives (2014), as happy in the countryside as in central London.
In 2015 Owens received awards for her work from Unesco and from Directory of Social Change.
Last November, a joint 80th birthday and launch party for her autobiography, The Sex Lady on the Hill, was held at Heaven nightclub in London. Owens had been diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2019, and her illness was apparent, but she presided from a throne as guests paid moving homage to a grande dame and pioneer of sexual freedom.
Owens is survived by Antony, whom she married in 2014, and her four brothers, Christopher, Tim, Jeremy and Jonathan.
• Tuppy (Rosalind Mary) Owens, sexual rights campaigner, born 12 November 1944; died 28 February 2025
