The Lesbian Sex Mafia, LSM, is a New York City information and support network for lesbian and bisexual women whose erotic lives include BDSM, fetish, costume play, and other practices tagged “politically incorrect.” Jo Arnone and Dorothy Allison founded it in 1981. The point was blunt: women should organize around their desire with the same seriousness they brought to sexual defense. The word Mafia was a wink, chosen in the same spirit of humor as the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorism Society. Taboo desire was something to claim in public.
LSM came out of the hottest years of the feminist sex wars. Lesbian communities were split. One side was anti-porn and anti-SM. The other refused to treat power exchange, bondage, or fetish as an automatic betrayal of feminism. LSM stood on the sex-positive side and wanted rooms, language, and a safety culture for women who liked control, pain, costume, and kink. In 1982 the group helped organize a “Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex” at the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, one of the best-known flashpoints in U.S. feminist argument over porn, SM, and lesbian desire. German filmmaker Monika Treut later made LSM the subject of her documentary Bondage, the first of four films in the Female Misbehaviour series. The group already mattered outside New York.
Recognition followed. In 1993, Pride Night, produced jointly by LSM, The Eulenspiegel Society, Excelsior MC, GMS/MA, and NLA: Metro New York, won Large Event of the Year at the Pantheon of Leather Awards. Jo Arnone’s later honors track the same work: the National Leather Association International’s Jan Lyon Award for Regional or Local Work in 1996, a Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, and the Mr. Marcus Hernandez Lifetime Achievement Award for a woman in 2010.
Membership is open to women 18 and older, including intersex and transgender women, and to transgender men who were assigned female at birth. An applicant fills out a form, becomes an LSM Pledge, and has to attend an LSM Orientation/Safety Procedure Meeting before fuller participation. Consent, risk, and house rules come before play. That is ordinary leather pedagogy. For readers following how women built BDSM institutions, LSM sits with Dorothy Allison, Patrick Califia, and V. M. Johnson: lesbian and queer women making durable fetish and SM organizations when those desires were treated as invisible or as scandal.
