Pat Bond and TES: The Screw Ad That Started a U.S. BDSM Organization

Pat Bond was born Walter Allen Campbell on 24 May 1926 and died on 13 February 2021, at 94. He was an American BDSM pioneer and a music teacher in New York. With Fran Nowve he co-founded The Eulenspiegel Society, TES, widely treated as the first BDSM organization in the United States.

In December 1970, at 44, Bond ran a classified ad in Screw. He asked other masochists whether they were happy, whether the desire could be cured by psychiatry, and whether a livable life was possible without that cure. Women’s liberation, Black liberation, and gay liberation were already underway. He asked whether masochists should put something together too. The same ad ran in the East Village Other. The first person to answer was Fran Nowve, known in the scene as Terry Kolb. That exchange is what turned a lonely ad into a community structure.

In 1971 Bond and Nowve founded TES in New York City. It started as an informal support group for masochists. Sadists joined the same year. Nowve named the society. The point was practical: people psychiatry had pathologized could meet, teach each other, and treat a satisfactory life as possible without first being “cured.” That pattern became a template for SM organizing in the United States.

In 1992 National Leather Association International gave Bond the Steve Maidhof Award for national or international work. In 2015 Bond and Nowve entered the Leather Hall of Fame together. TES is still an active New York institution. The line runs from the 1970 ad, to the 1971 founding with Kolb/Nowve, to sadists joining in that first year, to the 1992 award and the 2015 hall of fame.