Samois: Five Years That Started an Argument Feminism Never Finished

Samois existed for four years and eleven months. That is shorter than the argument it started, shorter than most of its members’ academic careers, and considerably shorter than the shelf life of the book it produced. It is one of the clearest cases in this history of a small organisation mattering out of all proportion to its size, and the reason is that it was the first group to say a particular sentence out loud.

Founded

The group was founded in San Francisco in June 1978, and the archive that holds its records gives the month as well as the year. It grew out of a women’s group inside the Society of Janus, the education organisation founded in the city in August 1974 by Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen, whose place in the wider institutional picture is described in the history of BDSM organisations. The sources differ on when that women’s group formed, giving dates across the middle and late 1970s.

Two of the founders are securely documented: the anthropologist Gayle Rubin and the writer Patrick Califia, who published as Pat Califia at the time. Accounts of the first meeting describe roughly seventeen women in a private flat. The full founding group has never been published, and this page will not invent one.

The sentence they were formed to say was that a woman could be a lesbian, a feminist and a sadomasochist without any of the three cancelling the others. In 1978 that was not a modest claim.

The other side of the street

The anti-pornography movement in the same city had a two-year head start. Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media was organised out of a San Francisco conference in 1976 and formally launched at the beginning of 1977. It had a few dozen members at first and grew to over a thousand, and it held the first national feminist conference on pornography in November 1978, followed by a march through the city’s red-light district.

Samois and that organisation were never one body and never split. They were opposed from the moment Samois existed. Rubin’s own retrospective account records that Samois wrote repeatedly asking to meet and discuss the position on sadomasochism, and was consistently refused.

The clash came in April 1980. Flyers appeared announcing a fundraising forum on sadomasochism in the lesbian community, organised by an organisation that had declined to talk to the group whose subject it was. Samois answered with a leaflet titled This Forum Is a Lie about S/M, a play on the anti-pornography slogan that pornography was a lie about women, arguing three things: that a false picture of sadomasochistic sexuality had been promoted, that panellists had publicly equated it with self-destruction, male supremacy and mental illness, and that consensual practice between women was not anti-feminist. Every speaker at the forum condemned it anyway. Several of those talks were revised into articles and published in 1982 in an anthology against sadomasochism issued by a San Francisco feminist press.

Two publications

What Color Is Your Handkerchief? A Lesbian S/M Sexuality Reader came out in 1979: photocopied, staple-bound, about forty-five pages, reprinted repeatedly because the demand was there and the production cost nothing. Its title borrows the gay male handkerchief signalling convention of the same decade, which is a joke about a gay male practice being annexed by a group of women, and also a statement that they intended to annex it.

Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M followed in 1981. Samois published it itself. It carries no ISBN and no named editor, only the line that it was edited by members of the group. It contains Rubin’s essay The Leather Menace, and it is the book that carried the argument out of California and into every women’s studies reading list in the English-speaking world. It was picked up by a commercial press afterwards, and a revised third edition appeared in 1987.

The publishing history matters more than it looks. A xeroxed pamphlet reaches the fifty people who already agree. A trade paperback reaches a stranger in a town with no scene at all, and that is what changed.

Named at Barnard, absent from it

The conference held at Barnard College in New York on 24 April 1982, examined in the feminist sex wars, is the event most often described as the moment Samois and the anti-pornography movement collided. The description is wrong in a specific and instructive way.

Nobody from Samois was on the planning group. The organisers had met in New York every two weeks for eight months, which a San Francisco group could not have done. The protest leaflet handed out at the gates nevertheless named Samois, named Rubin because of her association with it, and named Califia, who was in the audience and had no role in the programme. A caller told the college that the conference had been dominated by a Californian lesbian group that supported sadomasochism. Samois was a rhetorical presence at Barnard, not an actual one, and by 1982 it had become useful to its opponents as a shorthand rather than as an organisation.

Disbanded

Samois disbanded in May 1983. The archival record gives the month and no reason, and the two published explanations, volunteer exhaustion and internal conflict, come from different sets of witnesses.

A successor group formed in San Francisco the following year and ran until the second half of the 1990s, with a membership that overlapped substantially with the old one. A second anthology, edited by Califia with a co-editor, appeared in 1996 as a deliberate sequel to Coming to Power.

What Samois left is not an institution. It is a position that had never been stated in print before and cannot be unstated now, and a five-year run in the era essay for 1970 to 1989 that is quoted more often than most organisations manage in fifty. The full timeline puts it in sequence.