The Outcasts was founded in San Francisco in 1984. It was a social and educational organization for women who wanted to do BDSM with other women. It did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of the Society of Janus and out of the lesbian SM group Samois. After Samois’s active years, The Outcasts became a visible base for lesbian leather and for power exchange between women. The anthropologist and leather theorist Gayle Rubin was a co-founder. Other members included Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia, and Dossie Easton. That roster sits where feminist sex writing, leather education, and queer women’s community cross.
Through the 1980s and 1990s The Outcasts mixed play with scene-building. They ran Butch Fashion Shows, the first San Francisco Dyke Daddy contest, and many dances. One night was billed “take the perverts bowling.” In the AIDS years they started promoting safer sex in 1985, early in the recalibration of kink culture. By 1986 the group had newcomer orientations, officers, bylaws, a logo, and a newsletter called The Lunatic Fringe. That same year they marched with the Society of Janus and others in the first leather contingent at San Francisco Pride, taking lesbian SM out of private parties and into leather’s street visibility.
The Outcasts disbanded in the mid-1990s. The successor organization, The Exiles, is still active. In 2012 The Exiles in San Francisco won Small Club of the Year at the Pantheon of Leather Awards. The award is a formal acknowledgment that the women’s BDSM line from Samois through The Outcasts to The Exiles still has an institutional life. In lesbian leather history The Outcasts count as infrastructure: education, social nights, safer-sex information, and a leather presence at Pride, with members who were major voices in feminist BDSM writing. Samois, then The Outcasts, then The Exiles is a continuous San Francisco path for women who want BDSM with other women, not a patch added later inside a mixed room or a male-dominated one.
