The Outcasts was a social and educational organization for women interested in BDSM with other women, founded in San Francisco in 1984. It grew partly from the Society of Janus and the lesbian SM group Samois, and became a visible home for lesbian leather and women-for-women power exchange after Samois’s era. Anthropologist and leather theorist Gayle Rubin was a co-founder. Other members included Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia, and Dossie Easton—a roster at the junction of feminist sex writing, leather education, and queer women’s community.
Events, Safer Sex, and Formal Structure
Through the 1980s and 1990s The Outcasts ran community events that mixed playfulness with scene building: Butch Fashion Shows, the first San Francisco Dyke Daddy contest, many dances, and a night billed as “take the perverts bowling.” They began promoting safer sex in 1985, early in the AIDS-era recalibration of kink culture. By 1986 they had newcomer orientations, officers, bylaws, a logo, and a newsletter titled The Lunatic Fringe. That year they marched with Society of Janus and others in San Francisco Pride’s first leather contingent—claiming lesbian SM for leather’s street visibility, not only private parties.
Dissolution and Successor: The Exiles
The Outcasts disbanded in the mid-1990s. Successor organization The Exiles remains active. In 2012, The Exiles in San Francisco received the Small Club of the Year award in the Pantheon of Leather Awards—formal recognition that the women’s BDSM lineage from Samois through The Outcasts still has institutional life.
Why Lesbian Leather History Remembers Them
The Outcasts matter as infrastructure: education, social nights, safer-sex messaging, Pride leather visibility, and membership that included major voices in feminist BDSM writing. Path after Samois: Samois → The Outcasts → The Exiles—San Francisco continuity for women who want BDSM with other women, not as a minority afterthought in mixed or male-dominated rooms.
