Society of Janus: San Francisco BDSM Education Since 1974

The Society of Janus was founded in August 1974 by Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen. It is the second BDSM organization in the United States, after New York’s The Eulenspiegel Society. It is a San Francisco nonprofit, run by volunteers, built around safe, consensual, non-exploitative power exchange between adults. From the mid-1970s on it has been part of the basic infrastructure of West Coast SM. It still puts out a monthly digital newsletter called Yellow, and it still does education and support.

The name comes from the Roman god Janus, who has two faces. Slater’s Leather Hall of Fame biography gives three readings. The two faces are the two sides of SM, dominant and submissive. Janus is also the god of doorways and of beginnings and endings: the start of accepting yourself, and the end of self-loathing and fear about SM desire. Janus is a god of war as well, here the fight against stereotypes aimed at kink practitioners. The name is a sign, a piece of psychology, and a position at the same time.

Cardea and Samois

Janus was a home for mixed-gender SM education, and it also sits at the start of the lesbian-feminist leather line that came after. From 1977 to 1978 a women’s discussion group called Cardea met inside Janus. Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian at the time, Gayle Rubin, and other lesbian members went on from that group to found Samois on 13 June 1978. Samois was a BDSM group open only to lesbians. It ran from 1978 to 1983 and is widely treated as the first lesbian BDSM organization in the United States.

NCSF, a hall of fame, and the archive

Janus was one of the founding coalition partners of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), set up in 1997. In 2004 it created the Society of Janus Hall of Fame for people who had done serious work in the community. Inductees include Guy Baldwin, Dossie Easton, Janet Hardy, Midori, Fakir Musafar, and the clinician Charles Moser, among others: educators, writers, body-mod pioneers, and scholars.

In 2014 the Society of Janus 40th-anniversary dinner, Hall of Fame induction, and play party won Best Organization Anniversary Event at the SF Leather Community Awards. In 2017 the South of Market Leather History Alley in San Francisco put up a metal bootprint for cofounder Cynthia Slater, with her name and a short statement. In 2018 the Society of Janus itself was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame. Its records are at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago.