Samois was a lesbian feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983. It was the first lesbian BDSM group in the United States. The name comes from Samois-sur-Seine, the fictional estate of Anne-Marie, the lesbian dominatrix in Pauline Réage’s erotic novel Story of O, who pierces and brands O. Co-founders included writer Pat Califia (then identifying as a lesbian), anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and sixteen others. For anyone tracing how leatherdyke politics, sex-positive feminism, and public SM practice collided in the late 1970s, Samois is ground zero—not a footnote to gay male leather, but its own institutional start.
From Cardea to an Exclusively Lesbian SM Group
Samois grew out of Cardea, a women’s discussion group inside the mixed-gender BDSM organization the Society of Janus. Cardea ran from 1977 to 1978 and then dissolved, but a core of lesbian members—including Califia and Rubin—used that experience to found Samois on June 13, 1978 as an exclusively lesbian BDSM group. The move was deliberate: women who wanted SM community without having their erotic practice constantly mediated by mixed-gender structures built a room of their own. Discussion, play, political argument, and publishing all sat inside that room.
Conflict with Anti-Pornography Feminism
Samois was strongly rebuked and sometimes picketed by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), an early anti-pornography feminist organization. Like later anti-porn feminists, WAVPM opposed sadomasochism as ritualized violence against women. Samois members insisted their SM was compatible with feminism and argued that the sexuality WAVPM promoted was conservative and puritanical. They confronted WAVPM openly. Those exchanges became some of the earliest battles of what later were called the feminist sex wars, and Samois ranked among the first organized advocates of what became known as sex-positive feminism. The fight was not abstract theory alone; it was about whether leatherdykes could claim feminist identity while topping, bottoming, collaring, and writing about it in public.
Coming to Power and the Anthology Wars
The book Coming to Power, edited by Samois members and published in 1981, became a founding text of the lesbian BDSM movement—essays and graphics that treated SM as lived erotic politics rather than pathology. In the 1982 anthology Against Sadomasochism, philosopher Judith Butler (credited as “Judy Butler”) criticized Samois in the essay “Lesbian S&M: The Politics of Dis-Illusion.” Several other essays in that volume also attacked the group. The two books still stand as paired primary sources: one building a leatherdyke library, the other trying to write SM out of feminism. For contemporary readers of consent culture and feminist kink history, that duel remains mandatory context.
Split, The Outcasts, and The Exiles
Samois dissolved in 1983 amid personal infighting. In 1984 Rubin helped form another organization, The Outcasts, which lasted until 1997 before splitting over internal conflict as well. A breakaway group, The Exiles, still exists and continues in the tradition of Samois and The Outcasts. In 2012 The Exiles in San Francisco received the Small Club of the Year award in the Pantheon of Leather Awards—evidence that the organizational lineage survived the original group’s short official life.
Later Memory, Awards, and Hall of Fame
In 1996 Califia and Robin Sweeney published The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, which included historical material on The Outcasts and other lesbian BDSM groups such as the Lesbian Sex Mafia and Briar Rose. In 2007 the National Leather Association International launched awards for excellence in SM/fetish/leather writing; categories include the Samois award for anthology—naming the short-lived group as a permanent literary standard. In 2019 Samois was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame. Further reading still points to Gayle Rubin’s 2004 Leather Times essay “Samois,” the group’s own 1979 pamphlet What Color Is Your Handkerchief: A Lesbian S/M Sexuality Reader, and later editions of Coming to Power (including the 1987 Alyson revised third edition). Official continuity lives on at The Exiles; community memory essays such as Drake Cameron’s “Cardea ~ Samois ~ Outcasts ~ Exiles” (TheExiles.org, 2002) and period coverage like Fran Moira’s 1982 off our backs report on the Lesbian Sex Mafia speakout map the same Bay Area–New York network of leatherdyke politics. For adult BDSM readers, Samois proves that lesbian SM did not wait politely for permission: it organized, published, picketed and got picketed, fractured, reconstituted, and left a name still stamped on awards and hall-of-fame walls.
