Samois: The Lesbian Feminist BDSM Group That Started a Room

From 1978 to 1983, Samois was a lesbian feminist BDSM organization in San Francisco. 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 Story of O. Anne-Marie pierces and brands O. The cofounders included the writer Pat Califia, who then identified as a lesbian, the anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and sixteen others. The people in the room were adult lesbians. Anyone tracing how leatherdyke politics, sex-positive feminism, and public SM practice met in the late 1970s will treat Samois as a start, not as a footnote to gay male leather.

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. Core members, including Califia and Rubin, used that experience to found Samois on 13 June 1978. The move was deliberate. Women in SM who did not want their erotic practice constantly mediated by mixed-gender structures built a room of their own. Discussion, play, political argument, and publishing all happened in that room.

Samois quickly became an opponent of Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), an early anti-pornography feminist group. WAVPM treated sadomasochism as ritualized violence against women and sometimes picketed Samois. Members of Samois insisted their SM was compatible with feminism and argued that the sexuality WAVPM promoted was conservative and puritanical. Those fights were among the earliest battles of what later got called the feminist sex wars, and they put Samois among the first organized advocates of sex-positive feminism. Leatherdykes were asking whether they could top, bottom, wear collars, write about it in public, and still call themselves feminists.

In 1981 Samois members edited and published Coming to Power, a founding text that set essays and graphics together and treated SM as erotic politics people actually lived, not as pathology. Against that, the 1982 anthology Against Sadomasochism included the philosopher Judith Butler, credited as Judy Butler, in the essay “Lesbian S&M: The Politics of Dis-Illusion,” plus several other pieces attacking Samois. The two books are a pair of primary sources. One was building a leatherdyke library. The other was trying to write SM out of feminism.

Samois dissolved in 1983 amid personal infighting. In 1984 Rubin helped form another group, The Outcasts, which lasted until 1997 and then split over internal conflict as well. A breakaway, The Exiles, still exists and continues the line of Samois and The Outcasts. In 2012 The Exiles in San Francisco received the Small Club of the Year award at the Pantheon of Leather Awards.

The name stuck through books and awards. In 1996 Califia and Robin Sweeney published The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, with historical material on The Outcasts and on other lesbian BDSM groups, including the Lesbian Sex Mafia and Briar Rose. In 2007 the National Leather Association International created an anthology award named for Samois, which made the short-lived group a standing literary standard. In 2019 Samois entered the Leather Hall of Fame. Further reading still runs through Gayle Rubin’s 2004 essay in Leather Times, the group’s own 1979 pamphlet What Color Is Your Handkerchief: A Lesbian S/M Sexuality Reader, and later editions of Coming to Power. Organizational continuity lives at The Exiles. Community memory, including writing by Drake Cameron and Fran Moira’s 1982 report, draws the same network of leatherdyke politics from the Bay Area to New York.