Cynthia Slater’s life was short and packed. Born August 7, 1945, she died of AIDS complications on October 26, 1989. She was a professional dominatrix, an American sex educator, and an AIDS activist. As co-founder of the Society of Janus, she made room for women inside a BDSM and leather culture run by men. She was openly bisexual, and that life sat in the leather scene of her time. It was one of the ways she linked groups that did not automatically share a room.
In August 1974, Slater and Larry Olsen founded the Society of Janus in San Francisco. It was the second BDSM organization in the United States, after New York’s Eulenspiegel Society, and it grew into one of the base institutions of American kink. Slater gave the name three layers. Janus is the two-faced god, which matched the way one person in BDSM can hold both a dominant side and a submissive side. As god of doorways, Janus stood for the start of self-acceptance: dropping the guilt, and eventually stopping the self-loathing that came with wanting SM. As a god of war, Janus named the fight against the stereotypes aimed at kink practitioners.
From the late 1970s into the 1980s, she pushed women into San Francisco’s male gay leather scene. The Catacombs, the best-known fisting club of that era, ran from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1982 to 1984 at a second address. It had been a space for gay men. Slater persuaded management to let lesbians in. Around that work she hosted Society of Janus safety demonstrations. People who were there say she was the one who named those beginner consent and technique classes “SM 101.” Scene educators still use the phrase for classes aimed at newcomers.
When AIDS moved through the community, she became a main voice for safer-sex education that actually understood kink. In 1981 she and David Lourea ran safer-sex workshops in San Francisco bathhouses and BDSM clubs. She was HIV-positive. In 1985 she organized the first Women’s HIV/AIDS Information Switchboard, and she helped build and spread safer-sex tools and habits that worked for kink. Robert Mapplethorpe photographed her in 1980, a portrait of a working dominatrix who was also publicly bisexual.
The honors came after the work, and some of them after her death. In 1989 the National Leather Association International gave her the Jan Lyon Award for regional or local work. In 2003 she received the Forebear Award at the Pantheon of Leather Awards. In 2007, when NLA International started its excellence-in-writing awards, the prize for nonfiction SM, fetish, and leather writing was named the Cynthia Slater Award. She was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2014. In 2017 a metal bootprint in San Francisco’s South of Market Leather History Alley was set with her name and a short statement. She was also inducted into the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. Her name is on the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
