BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism is a 1995 American documentary directed by Michelle Handelman. It records the lesbian BDSM and leather subculture in mid-1990s San Francisco—leatherdykes on camera, not as a freak-show insert in someone else’s movie. The film later became a weapon in the American Family Association’s campaign to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, because distributor Women Make Movies had taken NEA money. For kink and queer-history viewers it is both a teaching tape of a specific leatherdyke scene and a case study in how Christian-right clip reels get SM footage into congressional hearings. The full title matters: leather, dykes, and sadomasochism named in one breath, at a moment when lesbian SM was still treated as a scandal inside and outside queer politics.
What the camera actually follows
The film stays with a group of self-identified leatherdykes active in San Francisco’s BDSM world in the mid-1990s. It walks through S&M practices and terminology, then follows its subjects to the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, the San Francisco International Ms. Leather pageant, and the New York City Pride March. That mix—vocab lesson plus street politics plus a title contest—is the point: these women are not only scene-internal; they are showing up in national queer public space in leather.
Handelman, Califia, Coil on the soundtrack
Handelman moved to San Francisco in 1986. Pat Califia and J.C. Collins introduced her to the city’s lesbian leather subculture; both appear as subjects. She already practiced S&M but did not know the leather world as a culture, and she wanted a film that would work as historical document and teaching tool—something that would record the subculture and make outsiders take it seriously. The soundtrack uses Frightwig, Typhoon, Coil, Fred Giannelli, and Chris and Cosey. Women Make Movies handled the first wave of distribution.
Festival life, AFA protest, and the wrong sex scenes
The film premiered June 10, 1995 at the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival and went on to more than 50 festivals in 11 countries. After release the American Family Association used it in their push to kill NEA funding, because Women Make Movies was an NEA grantee. For 1997 congressional hearings on the NEA, the AFA cut a reel of lesbian sex scenes from Women Make Movies titles. The reel included footage they attributed to BloodSisters plus work by Barbara Hammer and Cheryl Dunye. Two facts undercut the smear. Women Make Movies had NEA money; the making of BloodSisters itself did not. And the sex scenes the AFA pinned on Handelman’s film were from Georgia B. Wright’s short Stellium in Capricorn, merely laid under interviews that actually belong to BloodSisters.
Women Make Movies responded by dropping the film from distribution. Water Bearer Films picked it up, then Reframe Collection, a Tribeca Film Institute subsidiary. In 2020, for the 25th anniversary, it screened at Outfest, NewFest, and BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. A restored version was slated for Kino Lorber release on July 29, 2021.
Reception
In 1998 the film won the Bravo Award at the Manchester Underground Film Festival. Critics were largely with it. Jane Ursula Harris in BOMB called it a "brave, complex, and unflinching look at a much-maligned subculture." Steve Seid in the Pacific Film Archive Calendar wrote that the often humorous film "broadens the discussion about private expressions of eroticism, political implications and all." The San Francisco International Film Festival noted that by following these women and cutting between personal lives and political activity, the film draws viewers deeper into a misunderstood community and offers a more intelligent, less sensational view of their lives. Jennie Kermode at Eye for Film said there is not enough here for the movie itself to serve as a newcomer’s guide to BDSM, but that what it really delivers is hidden history—material likely to interest viewers whether or not they share the subjects’ sexuality. For BDSMWild readers, BloodSisters is the mid-nineties leatherdyke record: Califia and Collins on camera, International Ms. Leather and the 1993 March on Washington in the cut, Coil on the track, and an AFA clip reel that tried to turn it into NEA porn until the distributor flinched and later restorers brought it back. The 2020 festival circuit—Outfest, NewFest, BFI Flare—and the planned Kino Lorber restoration on July 29, 2021, are the afterlife the AFA did not get to write. Handelman wanted a historical document and a teaching tool; Harris, Seid, the San Francisco festival, and Kermode all, in different words, said she got the hidden history even if the film is not a how-to. For leatherdykes and anyone tracing 1990s queer SM on film, BloodSisters is still the San Francisco record: a mid-decade scene, a title pageant, a march, a pride parade, an industrial-adjacent soundtrack, and a culture-war theft of someone else’s sex scenes taped under the wrong name.
