1970 to 1989: Organising, the Sex Wars and the AIDS Years

The 1970s open with almost nothing in the way of institutions and close with a functioning civil society: membership groups, magazines, an annual contest, published anthologies and a set of arguments conducted in public. That is a fast twenty years. It is also the period when the community began producing its own documents, which is why the historical record improves so sharply from here on.

Groups with constitutions

The Eulenspiegel Society was founded in New York in 1971 by an activist writing under the name Pat Bond. It began as a support group and it began political, taking its vocabulary from the liberation movements around it, on the argument that people whose desires were classed as illness deserved the same defence as anyone else so classified. The Society of Janus followed in San Francisco in 1974, founded by Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen and named after the two-faced god, with a stronger emphasis on teaching. Gay Male S/M Activists formed in New York in 1981.

What these groups supplied was continuity. A bar can close and a private circle dissolves when its host moves. An organisation with officers, dues and a meeting schedule survives its founders, and it can be written to by a stranger. The longer account of what that machinery made possible is in the history of BDSM organisations.

Print built out at the same time. Larry Townsend’s Leatherman’s Handbook appeared in 1972 and did something no previous book had attempted, describing practice as practice, for practitioners. Drummer began publishing in Los Angeles in 1975 and moved to San Francisco two years later, after a police raid on one of its own fundraisers.

Samois and the sex wars

Samois formed in San Francisco in 1978, a group of lesbian feminists who practised sadomasochism and declined to accept that the two halves of that description were in conflict. Its founders included the anthropologist Gayle Rubin and the writer Patrick Califia. It produced two collections, a pamphlet in 1979 and the anthology Coming to Power in 1981, and it dissolved in 1983.

The reaction was severe, and it came from within feminism. Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media had formed in San Francisco in 1976 and Women Against Pornography in New York in 1979, and their analysis treated eroticised power as inseparable from male dominance. Samois was, on that reading, a group of women reproducing their own subordination and calling it liberation. Samois replied that a politics which overruled women’s accounts of their own desires had reinvented the thing it opposed.

The confrontation came to a head at Barnard College in April 1982, at a conference on the politics of sexuality. Protesters distributed leaflets naming individual participants; the college confiscated the conference booklet. Rubin’s contribution, published in 1984 as Thinking Sex, argued that sexuality needed to be analysed in its own right rather than as a subdivision of gender, and set out a model of respectable and disreputable sex that has been in use ever since. The conflict was never settled. It was absorbed.

Contests and a public face

The first International Mr Leather was held in Chicago in 1979, developed by Chuck Renslow out of a contest at his own bar. Within a decade it was the leather world’s annual congress, with vendors, clubs, delegates and a weekend’s worth of associated business. Title contests are easy to mock and were mocked at the time, but they did specific work: they produced spokespeople, they raised money, and they gave a dispersed population a fixed date and place.

It was at IML in 1989 that Tony DeBlase unveiled the design described in the history of the leather flag, a symbol arriving at exactly the point the community most needed one.

The epidemic

The first reports of the illness later named AIDS were published in the United States in June 1981. What followed cut through gay leather culture with particular severity, because the culture was concentrated in the cities where the epidemic hit first and hardest.

The response reshaped the institutions. Groups founded to run parties and workshops became providers of health education, often ahead of public authorities: the peer-written safer sex literature that appeared from 1983 onwards came out of these communities, not out of clinics. Venues came under legal pressure, and San Francisco moved to close bathhouses in 1984. Fundraising became a permanent feature of the contest circuit. Cynthia Slater, who had founded Janus and had worked on some of the earliest safer sex outreach in San Francisco, died in 1989.

The ethical vocabulary of the period comes out of the same pressure. The formula examined in SSC and RACK was drafted for an organisation that needed to state, in public and in writing, what it did and did not stand for. That requirement was new, and it was not academic. In England, meanwhile, a police investigation opened in 1987 that would take a group of men through the courts for the next ten years, and the decade closed with the community more organised, more visible, more bereaved and considerably more exposed than it had been when the decade began.