Viola Johnson, Infrastructure in the Leather Archive

Viola Johnson, also known as V. M. Johnson, was born in 1950. She is a leatherwoman, an activist, and an author. For readers tracing Black leatherwomen, lesbian SM organizing, and the work of community memory, she is infrastructure, past the name on a résumé. From the early 1970s, when she entered BDSM and leather, her work and her collecting have helped later people keep the history of SM, fetish, and the Old Guard.

Johnson’s own account includes a personal myth. She has said that at seventeen a vampire gave her some of his blood to drink, and that she became a vampire. The story does not replace the documented leather record. It sits beside the work, as part of how she tells who she is. In 1988 she became an honorary member of the Tulsa Uniform Leather Seekers Association (T.U.L.S.A.), and after that she held several roles the community actually runs on.

Ceremony and private life in the same record

Her public life crosses leather ceremony and private power exchange. She has judged many leather contests, including Ms. World Leather. She sits on the board of governors of the Leather Hall of Fame, has served on the board of directors of the Leather Archives & Museum, and is a member of the Lesbian Sex Mafia. She is married to Jill Carter. Title judging, museum governance, a lesbian SM group, and a partner inside the community stack public ritual and private life on the same person.

The diary-form books she published treat slave identity as something lived day to day, not a costume put on for the weekend. That view, carried through board work and through building an archive, has shaped how the community talks about being a slave.

The Carter/Johnson Library & Collection

Community memory often disappears in basements and in estate clean-outs. In 2005 Johnson founded The Carter/Johnson Library & Collection against that kind of loss. The holdings run to thousands of items: books, magazines, posters, artworks, club and event pins, newspapers, event programs, and stray print that documents the erotic history of leather, fetish, and S/M.

Researchers and people who teach inside the scene treat the Carter/Johnson Library and the Leather Archives & Museum as parts of the same ecosystem, a named place you can actually go. In 2018 the collection received Nonprofit Organization of the Year as part of the Pantheon of Leather Awards, which put a formal mark on the preservation work.

Awards and institutional recognition

The awards cover regional service, lifetime achievement, recognition as a couple, a first from Black leather media, Master/slave heritage, and museum-founder level honors.

In 1995 she received the National Leather Association Jan Lyon Award for regional or local work, the NLA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Pantheon of Leather Lifetime Achievement Award. She was the first person to take both the NLA and Pantheon lifetime awards in the same year. In 1998 she shared Pantheon of Leather Couple of the Year with Jill Carter and Queen Cougar. In 2000 she was Pantheon of Leather Woman of the Year.

In 2005 she received the SouthEast LeatherFest Jack Stice Memorial Community Service Award, the Master/slave Conference slave Heart Award, and the Pantheon of Leather Forebear Award, tied with David S. Kloss. In 2007 Black Beat gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award, the first lifetime award that publication had given.

In 2012 she received the Master/slave Conference Guy Baldwin Master/slave Heritage Award, and she was the first woman to receive the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Leather Leadership Award. She was also inducted into the Society of Janus Hall of Fame; the year is not recorded. In 2021 the Leather Archives & Museum gave her the Chuck Renslow & Tony DeBlase Founders’ Award. Taken together, the honors fix her place as a slave, an organizer, and a collector.