1990 to 2009: Usenet, Munches and the Community Online

Every previous era in this history is shaped by the difficulty of finding other people. Correspondence columns, mail-order lists, bar geography and personal introductions all existed to solve that problem partially and slowly. The internet solved it completely, in about five years, and almost everything distinctive about the period from 1990 to 2009 follows from that.

Newsgroups and lists

The first venues were text. Usenet newsgroups on bondage and sadomasochism were active by the start of the 1990s, joined by mailing lists, bulletin boards and, later in the decade, Yahoo groups and IRC channels. The format shaped the culture that grew in it. Usenet was archived and searchable, threaded, and open to anyone; arguments happened in public and stayed there.

That produced two effects at once. Information that had been transmitted by demonstration in a small number of cities became text that anyone could read, including a great deal of technical safety material written by people with no way of checking each other’s competence. And authority moved. A club officer in San Francisco with fifteen years of experience and a persuasive stranger with a keyboard now occupied the same platform, and the stranger often won. Older organisations, whose history is set out in the history of BDSM organisations, spent the decade adjusting to that.

Usenet culture also produced the first reference literature the subject had ever had for free. Groups maintained frequently asked questions documents, revised by whoever volunteered and reposted at intervals, and those files became the de facto manuals: definitions, etiquette, safety warnings, reading lists and advice on meeting strangers. Nobody commissioned them and nobody edited them, which is both why they existed and why their quality varied so widely.

The population changed at the same time. The scene that had been documented up to this point was overwhelmingly gay, male and urban. The one that assembled online was younger, more mixed in orientation and gender, and drawn heavily from places with no venues at all, and the leather world found itself one constituency among several rather than the centre of gravity.

The munch

The most consequential invention of the era was social rather than technical. Community accounts trace it to a group of people from the newsgroups who began meeting for burgers in Northern California in the early 1990s, and the name stuck to the format: a munch is a meeting in a public restaurant where nothing happens except conversation.

That sounds trivial and is not. Before the munch, entering the scene meant walking into a venue where activity was underway, which is a large first step and one that filtered heavily by nerve and by gender. A pub table filters almost nobody. Munches spread through the same networks that invented them, and by the end of the 1990s most cities in the English-speaking world had one, listed online with a date and an address. It remains the standard route in.

Two acronyms and an argument

The community had inherited a formula from the organising decades: safe, sane and consensual, drafted in the early 1980s for a New York group that needed a public statement of principles. Through the 1990s it spread far beyond its origin and hardened into something close to a rule, printed on club literature and quoted in workshops.

The reaction arrived in 1999, when Gary Switch proposed risk aware consensual kink on a Eulenspiegel Society list. The objection was that nothing is safe, that sane is a judgment which reproduces exactly the pathologising the community had spent a century escaping, and that a slogan used as a membership test excludes people rather than protecting them. The dispute has continued ever since, and what it is actually about is examined in SSC and RACK. The related conventions of the period, including the traffic-light system described in the history of safewords, spread by the same route: workshop, newsgroup, website, common sense.

Websites, profiles and exposure

Commercial sites appeared from the mid-1990s, first as directories and photo archives, then as personals and profile communities. FetLife, launched in 2008, eventually took most of that traffic and became the scene’s address book. The profile field did something the hanky code had done thirty years earlier by other means: it let people declare interests in advance, precisely, to strangers.

Visibility cut both ways. The same decade brought the community into general view without its consent. Journalists discovered munches. In 2002 a United States weapons inspector’s involvement in a Washington kink organisation became national news, and he kept his post only after his employers were persuaded there was nothing to the story. Court cases and police raids on private parties in the United States and Britain drew press attention, and organisations that had formed to run workshops found themselves briefing reporters and funding legal defences instead.

Legislation followed the visibility. Britain criminalised possession of what it called extreme pornographic images under an act passed in 2008, a measure whose scope alarmed people who had spent the previous fifteen years assuming the internet was where the community was safest. By the close of the decade the scene was larger, younger, easier to enter and far more legible to outsiders than it had ever been, which set up everything that happens in the years after 2010.