Terence Sellers’s papers sit in the Downtown Collection at New York University’s Fales Library. In the scene she was Mistress Angel Stern. Born in 1952, she was a writer and a professional dominatrix. She died of leukemia on 25 January 2016. The papers are a formal signal: her SM writing and her practice are filed as city art history, not left as underground rumor or a private taste.
Two kinds of schooling sit under the work. She studied classical studies at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and did not finish the degree. In 1986 she took a BA in forensic psychology at John Jay College in New York City. The classical reading and the case-study habit of forensic psychology line up with what her writing keeps returning to: crime, confession, moral theater, and self-punishment. The dominance in the books reads as staged psychological scenes, not as flesh on its own.
In 1973 Sellers moved to New York, meaning to work in writing and dance, and went straight into the Downtown network. She formed close friendships and collaborations with writers and artists including Anya Phillips, Kathy Acker, Duncan Smith, Victor Bockris, and Carl Apfelschnitt. In the same period she worked with the photographer Jimmy De Sana on 32 photographs called “The Dungeon Series.” The pictures were meant to illustrate The Correct Sadist, then still unpublished. After they were done, De Sana and William S. Burroughs used them in their book Submission. That set of images put Sellers where professional SM aesthetics and Downtown photo-literary experiment meet, in pictures and in text.
As a professional dominatrix she worked with adults who had agreed to it. She was in the early New York BDSM economy. Through the 1980s that market paid well: artists turned creative capital into income by staging and facilitating transgressive sexual fantasies for wealthy clients. By the mid-1990s there were more service providers and the market crowded. Her writing appeared widely in BOMB Magazine, X Magazine, Vacation, and other journals. Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and the French surrealists sit behind it. It is not a lifestyle manual. It is decadent prose with the texture of case studies.
Her best-known book, The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern, is built from short case studies of sexual dominance, submission, bondage, and fetish. The German edition, Der korrekte Sadismus, came first, from iKoo-Buchverlag in Berlin in 1981. Sellers self-published the English version in 1983 under Vitriol Publications. In 1985 Barney Rosset at Grove Press contracted the book. That is one path SM literature took from the underground to Grove. Editions also appeared in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. She also published The Obsession and Dungeon Evidence: The Correct Sadist II. Excerpts from the manuscripts The Degenerate, Most Ill of All, and One Decadent Life circulated in magazines in several languages.
The work crossed literature and performance. She took part in the Times Square Show in 1980 and read in the United States, Europe, and Canada. Her friendship with the industrial-music figure Genesis P-Orridge is recorded in P-Orridge’s memoir Nonbinary, which ties the dominatrix-writer network to industrial music and queer performance. Besides the Fales Library holding, researchers use the Jimmy De Sana Papers and the Sylvère Lotringer / Semiotext(e) materials to rebuild her circle. An official website survives as an Internet Archive capture.
