Pillar · The whole chronology

The history of BDSM, in seven periods

The whole history of BDSM in order, from long before the word existed to the present, set out as a timeline. Each dated entry below is a documented event. Periods whose essay is still being written appear anyway, because leaving them out would misrepresent the shape of the chronology.

1. to 1800

   Before the word

   Flagellation, courtly submission, and the libertine writers, long before anyone said BDSM.

   Essay in preparation

2. 1800 to 1899

   The names become words

   BDSM in the 1800s was not invented, it was named. Two novelists' surnames, Sade and Sacher-Masoch, were turned into diagnostic categories by the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, while London's flagellation press gave the same practices a commercial life and a national nickname.

   Read the era essay
   • 1814The Marquis de Sade dies at Charenton, the asylum outside Paris where he had been held since 1803. His books remain suppressed in France and circulate privately for decades.
   • 1870Leopold von Sacher-Masoch publishes Venus in Furs as part of his unfinished cycle The Legacy of Cain.
   • 1877Henry Spencer Ashbee, writing as Pisanus Fraxi, issues Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the first systematic bibliography of English erotica, treating flagellation as a category of its own.
   • 1879The Pearl begins monthly publication in London. It runs eighteen issues, with flagellation material throughout, before being shut down at the end of 1880.
   • 1886Richard von Krafft-Ebing publishes Psychopathia Sexualis and files sadism and masochism as clinical terms.
   • 1892Albert von Schrenck-Notzing proposes algolagnia as a rival term, and Charles Gilbert Chaddock's English translation of Krafft-Ebing carries sadism and masochism into English-language medicine.
   • 1890sFlagellation titles keep moving through London's underground presses, and le vice anglais settles into a national reputation that outlasted the evidence for it.

3. 1900 to 1945

   Clinics and coteries

   Between 1900 and 1945 the medical frame changed hands, moving from forensic psychiatry to psychoanalysis, and a commercial visual culture appeared alongside it: photographs, illustrated magazines and mail-order correspondence. The period also contains the largest documentary hole in this history, because the Nazi destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's institute in 1933 took decades of research material with it.

   Read the era essay
   • 1903Havelock Ellis publishes Love and Pain as part of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, arguing that these desires sit on a continuum with ordinary courtship rather than forming a separate pathology.
   • 1905Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality treats sadism and masochism as two aspects of one impulse. The pairing becomes orthodoxy and is the reason the compound word exists.
   • 1919Magnus Hirschfeld opens the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin: clinic, archive, library and museum in one building, and the first institution of its kind anywhere.
   • 1920sThe British weekly London Life turns its correspondence pages over to readers writing about corsetry, boots, rubber and restraint, creating a mail-based network of strangers with a shared interest.
   • 1930sCharles Guyette sells fetish costume and photography by mail from New York and is prosecuted for obscenity. He becomes the first American to run the trade at any scale.
   • 1933Nazi students ransack the Institut on 6 May. Its library is burned in Berlin on 10 May. Hirschfeld, abroad at the time, never returns to Germany and dies in Nice in 1935.

4. 1946 to 1969

   Leather and the postwar scene

   The postwar decades are when this history acquires physical places. A mail-order economy in photographs and magazines grew fast and was then prosecuted, while gay motorcycle clubs and the bars around them produced the first durable spaces where people met in person. What later writers called Old Guard leather culture formed in those rooms, though the label itself was invented long afterwards.

   Read the era essay
   • 1946John Willie publishes the first issues of Bizarre in New York. The magazine runs intermittently for twenty-six issues and ends in 1959.
   • 1947A motorcycle rally at Hollister, California, produces the news coverage and the widely reproduced photograph that fix the outlaw-biker image in American culture. The photograph has long been described as staged.
   • 1954The Satyrs Motorcycle Club is founded in Los Angeles, generally recorded as the first gay motorcycle club in the United States and still operating decades later.
   • 1955The Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency, chaired by Estes Kefauver, holds hearings on pornography. Irving Klaw is called and declines to answer, invoking the Fifth Amendment.
   • 1958Chuck Renslow opens the Gold Coast in Chicago, usually described as the first leather bar in the United States.
   • 1964Life magazine publishes Homosexuality in America, opening with a photograph taken inside the Tool Box, a San Francisco leather bar. It is the first time most Americans see the culture at all.

5. 1970 to 1989

   Organising

   Between 1970 and 1989 the scene stopped being a network of bars and correspondents and became a set of institutions with names, constitutions and public positions. Formal groups appeared in New York and San Francisco, a contest circuit gave the leather world a public face, and the feminist sex wars forced the first sustained argument about whether any of it could be defended. The AIDS epidemic then rewrote every part of it.

   Read the era essay
   • 1971The Eulenspiegel Society is founded in New York, the first standing organisation in the United States for people who practise sadomasochism, framed at the outset in the language of liberation politics.
   • 1974Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen found the Society of Janus in San Francisco, adding structured education and public meetings to a scene that had run on introductions.
   • 1978Samois forms in San Francisco as a lesbian feminist group, and immediately becomes the focus of the argument inside feminism about sadomasochism.
   • 1979The first International Mr Leather contest is held in Chicago, growing out of a bar competition and becoming the leather world's annual gathering.
   • 1981Gay Male S/M Activists is founded in New York. In June the same year, the first cases of what will be named AIDS are reported in the United States.
   • 1982The Barnard Conference on sexuality is held in New York under protest. Gayle Rubin's paper from it, Thinking Sex, is published two years later and becomes the field's most cited essay.
   • 1989Tony DeBlase unveils the leather pride flag at International Mr Leather. Cynthia Slater dies of AIDS the same year.

6. 1990 to 2009

   The community goes online

   The internet solved the oldest problem in this history, which was finding other people. Usenet groups and mailing lists in the early 1990s put a scene that had depended on bars, personal introductions and city geography within reach of anyone with a modem, and the munch, a public meeting in an ordinary restaurant, gave newcomers a low-stakes way to arrive. The ethical vocabulary of the community was standardised and then immediately contested in the same period.

   Read the era essay
   • 1990Usenet groups on bondage and sadomasochism are established and active by the start of the decade, giving the subculture its first searchable, archived, worldwide conversation.
   • 1992Community accounts date the first regular munch to a Northern California gathering of people who knew each other from the newsgroups. The name comes from the burger meal it was built around.
   • 1994DSM-IV requires that a paraphilia cause clinically significant distress or impairment before it can be diagnosed in several categories, the first substantial narrowing of the clinical framework.
   • 1997The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is founded in the United States to lobby, track incidents of discrimination and provide legal referrals.
   • 1999Gary Switch proposes risk aware consensual kink on a Eulenspiegel Society mailing list, offering the first serious rival to safe, sane and consensual.
   • 2002The film Secretary is released, one of the first mainstream features to treat a dominant and submissive relationship as a subject rather than a warning.
   • 2008FetLife launches, and within a few years becomes the default profile network for the English-speaking scene, absorbing functions that had belonged to clubs and local groups.

7. 2010 to now

   Depathologised and mainstream

   DSM-5 splits paraphilia from disorder, kink hits bestseller lists, and consent culture is rewritten.

   Essay in preparation