The Lesbian Sex Mafia (LSM) is a New York City information and support network for lesbian and bisexual women who are into BDSM, fetish, costume play, and other “politically incorrect” erotic practices. Founded in 1981 by Jo Arnone and Dorothy Allison, it has spent decades insisting that women should organize around desire with the same seriousness they organize around sexual defense. The name itself was chosen with a wink—“in the same spirit of humor as the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorism Society”—signaling how openly the group treats taboo desire as something worth claiming in public.
Why LSM Matters in Feminist Sex History
LSM was never only a social club. It emerged in the heat of the feminist sex wars, when many lesbian communities were split between anti-porn, anti-SM politics and women who refused to treat power exchange, bondage, or fetish as automatic betrayal of feminism. LSM’s early stance—“to organize for [women’s] sexual desire as strongly as we have tried to organize for our sexual defense”—put it firmly on the sex-positive side of that fight. Members wanted rooms, language, and safety culture for women who liked control, pain, costume, and kink.
Speakouts, Film, and Public Visibility
In 1982 the group helped organize a “Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex” at the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, one of the most famous flashpoints of U.S. feminist debate over porn, SM, and lesbian desire. German filmmaker Monika Treut later made LSM a subject of her documentary Bondage, the first of four films in the Female Misbehaviour series—showing the group already mattered beyond New York.
Community recognition followed. In 1993, Pride Night jointly produced by LSM, The Eulenspiegel Society, Excelsior MC, GMS/MA, and NLA: Metro New York took the Large Event of the Year award at the Pantheon of Leather Awards. Cofounder Jo Arnone later collected multiple national honors: the National Leather Association International’s Jan Lyon Award for Regional or Local Work (1996), a Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award (2005), and the Mr. Marcus Hernandez Lifetime Achievement Award for a woman (2010).
Who Can Join
Membership is open to women 18 and older, including intersex and transgender women, and to transgender men who were assigned female at birth. Applicants fill out a form and become an LSM Pledge, then must attend an LSM Orientation/Safety Procedure Meeting before fuller participation—classic leather-community pedagogy of consent, risk talk, and house rules before play.
For readers tracking women’s BDSM organizing, LSM sits alongside figures such as Dorothy Allison, Patrick Califia, and V. M. Johnson, and beside the broader history of feminist sex wars. It shows how lesbian and queer women built durable fetish and SM institutions when those desires were treated as invisible or scandalous.
