The Society of Janus is the second BDSM organization founded in the United States—after New York’s The Eulenspiegel Society—and remains a San Francisco–based BDSM education and support group. Nonprofit and volunteer-run, Janus is devoted to safe, consensual, non-exploitative adult power exchange. It publishes a monthly digital newsletter called Yellow. For leather history, Janus is a pillar of West Coast SM community infrastructure from the mid-1970s onward.
Founding and the Name “Janus”
The Society of Janus was founded in August 1974 by Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen. According to Slater’s Leather Hall of Fame biography, three ideas drove the name. First, the Roman god Janus has two faces, which they read as the duality of SM—dominant and submissive sides. Second, Janus is the god of portals and of beginnings and endings: the beginning of self-acceptance, freedom from guilt, and the eventual end of self-loathing and fear over SM desire. Third, Janus is a god of war—the war against stereotypes aimed at kink practitioners. The name is branding, psychology, and politics in one symbol.
Cardea, Samois, and Lesbian SM History
From 1977 to 1978, a women’s discussion group called Cardea operated inside Janus before discontinuing. A core of lesbian members—including Pat Califia (who identified as a lesbian at the time), Gayle Rubin, and sixteen others—were inspired to found Samois on 13 June 1978 as an exclusively lesbian BDSM group. Samois (1978–1983) is widely cited as the first lesbian BDSM organization in the United States. Janus thus sits at the root of both mixed-gender SM education and the lesbian-feminist leather lineage that followed.
NCSF, Hall of Fame, and Institutional Legacy
Janus was one of the founding coalition partners of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), established in 1997. In 2004 the Society of Janus Hall of Fame was created. Inductees have included Guy Baldwin, Patrick Califia, Dossie Easton, Janet Hardy, Viola Johnson, Midori, Fakir Musafar, Charles Moser, Gayle Rubin, Cynthia Slater, Jim Ward, Mollena Williams-Haas, and Jay Wiseman—educators, writers, body-mod pioneers, and clinicians who shaped North American kink culture.
In 2014, Janus’s 40th Anniversary Dinner, Hall of Fame induction, and play party won “Best Organization Anniversary Event” at the SF Leather Community Awards. In 2017, the San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley honored cofounder Cynthia Slater with a metal bootprint carrying her name and a short statement. In 2018, the Society of Janus itself was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame. Organizational records are housed at the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago.
What Janus Means for Kink Education Culture
For bdsmwild readers, Janus is the San Francisco model of community BDSM: education first, consent culture as mission language, newsletter infrastructure, and a pipeline into national advocacy and archival memory. From Slater and Olsen’s 1974 start through Cardea and Samois, NCSF coalition work, a house Hall of Fame, SOMA street honor for Slater, and Leather Hall of Fame induction in 2018, it is foundational West Coast leather history in organizational form—the second U.S. BDSM organization chronologically, and still one of the names that signals the community takes its own education seriously.
