Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States

Kinky People Unite

Stephen K. Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367476816
• eBook ISBN: 9781000346077
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Discrimination Law
• Index: History

Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States: Kinky People Unite chronicles the development of sadomasochistic sexuality and its communities in the United States from the post-war period to the present day.

Having evolved from scattered networks of sadomasochists to a coherent body bound by shared principles of "safe, sane, consensual," activists worked to transform popular perceptions of their community, end its routine harassment by law enforcement and win inclusion in American society. Often paralleling the work of LGBTQ activists, people who engaged in BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism) transformed both their own sexual practices and how outsiders perceived them, successfully changing popular perceptions of them from fascists, murderers, and outlaws to people living an alternative lifestyle. The development of this community highlights the interactions of people of different sexual orientations within a sexual community, the influence of various campaigns for sexual freedom, and the BDSM community's influence on popular perceptions of sexuality and sexual freedom. The text's historical perspective gives depth and texture to a specific dimension of American history of sexuality.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the history of sexuality. Its clear and direct approach offers an important and useful chronology of a movement that has long been neglected.

1
Building BDSM Networks, 1946–69

Bizarre, a new, digest-sized magazine appeared on North American newsstands in 1946. It contained photographs, stories, readers’ letters and illustrations featuring corsets, tight-lacing and women with extraordinarily narrow waists; women wearing long, black leather gloves and thigh-high boots with six-inch heels; women restrained by chains, manacles, rope and assorted bondage devices, including a scold’s bridle, which fit around the head like a cage and gagged the woman; piercing; tattooing; erotic wrestling; and a woman hooked up to a stationary bicycle with a device that whips her rear if she stops pedaling. The cover illustration of the next issue, a scantily clad woman in high heels manacled by her ankles, wrist and neck, promised even more daring contents. Along with effusive prose, it offered illustrations of women in revealing outfits and extreme bondage, and the first episode of Sweet Gwendoline, a cartoon serial. Regularly captured and tied up by Sir Dystic D’arcy and other villains, Gwendoline ended many episodes “struggling madly” against tight, “cruel cords.” But things never went farther. While revealing and often skin-tight, clothing stayed on, and breasts and genitals remained covered. Other than describing the pleasurable sensations imparted by bondage, flagellation and tight corsets, no sexual activity occurred.¹

Bizarre was the first magazine focusing entirely on consensual, erotic sadomasochism. The publisher, John Coutts, used the pseudonym John Willie, as well as several others, and produced most of the contents of the early issues, and almost all the photographs and illustrations in the magazine’s 11-year run.

By the mid-1950s, Bizarre had more than a thousand subscribers, a total circulation of 15,000, and sold on major city newsstands throughout the United States and Canada. Its success encouraged Irving Klaw, Leonard Burtman and others to launch similar publications targeting fetishists and sadomasochists. These publishers benefited from relaxed post-war censorship standards, which facilitated the proliferation of “girlie” magazines during and after the war. Some, such as Robert Harrison’s Whisper and Flirt, featured occasional fetish content, including illustrations by Coutts. While fetish publishers risked obscenity prosecution, they generally found ways to operate within the law while satisfying their customers’ desires—customers they sometimes helped connect with one another.

As historian Martin Meeker notes, the emergence of gay male and lesbian communities in twentieth-century United States resulted from changes in how “individuals could connect to knowledge about homosexuality” and to one another.² The same proved true for sadomasochists. The increasing availability of fetish and BDSM magazines, which by the 1960s included personal advertisements, encouraged people to explore these interests and seek those who shared them. Most BDSM and fetish magazines targeted heterosexuals, but a growing number focused on gay men. Some gay sadomasochists joined the motorcycle clubs or frequented leather bars, and therein found men who shared their interests. Bar patrons, motorcycle club members and the publishers, readers and advertisers of BDSM magazines developed contacts with one another that spread from city to city. While hidden from the public eye, these networks grew in the 1950s and 1960s, provided a foundation for the emergence of public BDSM organizations and a visible BDSM community in the 1970s.

Before Bizarre

Sadomasochism was hardly new in 1946. Fanny Hill (1748), the Lustful Turk (1828) and other nineteenth-century erotic works included scenes of flagellation. The Merry Order of St. Bridget (1857) focused entirely on flagellation. Along with other late-nineteenth-century sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing categorized, defined and named sexual practices. In the fifth edition of Psycopathia Sexualis (1890), he described sexual fetishes linked to various body parts, materials or objects, and coined the terms sadism and masochism, after the Marquis de Sade, famed for his violent sexual and political polemics, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in whose novel Venus in Furs (1870) Severin, a stand-in for Sacher-Masoch, submits to Wanda who wears furs and beats and humiliates him at his request. Krafft-Ebing argued sadism resulted from “an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound, or even destroy others” for sexual pleasure. While Havelock Ellis pointed to sadomasochistic couples who were deeply in love, most sexologists agreed with Krafft-Ebing. More importantly as Michel Foucault notes, they won general acceptance of their categorizations of sexual activities as normal or pathological and placed sadomasochism firmly in the latter category.³

The volume of fetish and flagellation literature increased in the nineteenth century and spread to several general interest magazines. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, in particular, opened its correspondence column to fetishists in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Readers engaged in faux debates over the values of tight-laced corsets, strict discipline and corporal punishment while relating fantasies of these and other BDSM activities. A generation later, The Family Doctor published a similarly flurry of BDSM content, as did Photo Bits. Between 1909 and 1912, Photo Bits “became thoroughly fetishized,” running “a broader and more bizarre spectrum of fetishes than any previous magazine,” which James Joyce noted in his novel Ulysses (1922). It featured regular fetish columns written by “the Amorist” and “Cosmopolite” whose topics included flagellation, female domination, tight-lacing, and satin and rubber fetishism. Both frequently referenced Krafft-Ebing.⁴

After the First World War, London Life, a “cheaply priced, lavishly illustrated magazine” appeared. At first glance, it differed little from similar racy magazines featuring movie studio publicity stills, photographs of art nudes and bathing beauties along with “gossip and fashion columns, racy fiction, and expository essays.” Those with fetish interests, though, noticed London Life, catered to “readers of a limited taste,” disproportionately featuring fetish content. It developed a worldwide following.⁵

London Life added a correspondence column in 1923 and afterward printed not just readers’ letters, but also their stories, illustrations and photographs. Descriptions of “kink” activities filled growing pages, accounting for most of its content by 1939. While much of this involved corsets and tight-lacing, other popular topics included amputees, bondage, cross-dressing, female boxing and wrestling, flagellation, high heels, human ponies, lingerie, long hair, piercing, rubber, spanking, stockings and tattooing. “Advertisers in London Life reached a global market, offering corsets, high heels, personal portraits, birth control, photographs, and racy books.” German bombing damaged London Life’s warehouse and wartime paper shortages reduced its publishing schedule. In October 1941, its editors ended its correspondence column and fetish content disappeared from its pages.⁶

While Americans could purchase London Life at major city newsstands, most books and magazines featuring fetishism and sadomasochism sold under the counter. Nonetheless, publishers of flagellation and fetish literature, such as Gargoyle Press, advertised in pulp magazines. Issues of Snappy Romance contained ads for flagellant literature including The Merry Order of St. Bridget, Tender Bottoms and A Scarlet Pansy. Dorothy Spencer, reputedly a Tucson, Arizona housewife, advertised and sold her “Spencer Spanking Plan,” which encouraged wives to discipline their husbands.⁷

Fetishists and sadomasochists searching for like-minded companions found them through vendors of fetish paraphernalia, carefully disguised personal ads in newspapers and magazines, and—if gay—in a handful of bars or bathhouses, such as New York’s Everard and St. Marks baths, “the safest and most stable gay institutions” of the era.⁸ Others patronized the few big city brothels that offered flagellation and related services. Charles Guyette, later famous as the “G-string King” for outfitting burlesque performers, proved an important point of contact for many American fetishists and sadomasochists.

Guyette sold high-heeled footwear and fetish costumes along with conventional lingerie and showgirl and burlesque costumes. He also sold erotic photographs, both his own work and photos he acquired from European producers. Guyette advertised in London Life, and connected select clients and friends with one another, becoming the center of a growing network of fetishists and sadomasochists. Among them was Greg Day, a New York socialite who hosted elaborate BDSM parties in his home. Convicted in 1935 for mailing “obscene and lewd” fetish photographs, Guyette served a year in prison. On release, he focused on his clothing business, which flourished in the 1940s, earning him his nickname. With the exception of female boxing and wrestling, Guyette stopped selling photographs directly to customers. Instead, he licensed them to fetish publishers who reprinted them.⁹

William Moulton Marston, who created the Wonder Woman comic, purchased fetish clothing from Guyette. Marston once belonged to a small circle of BDSM enthusiasts and later played BDSM games with his partners Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne for whom he purchased Guyette outfits. While fans praised Wonder Woman comics, critics derided them for what seemed an opulence of bondage. Frederick Wertham, in particular, singled out Wonder Woman in his anti-comics crusade, noting bondage, spanking and similar subjects accounted for a quarter of some issues’ page count. Yet, Wonder Woman was not unique. Sadomasochists found much that titillated them in Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and Terry and the Pirates.¹⁰

John Coutts and Bizarre

In 1946, John Coutts, a British merchant sailor, illustrator and photographer, launched the most influential post-war fetish and BDSM magazine, Bizarre. A London Life reader, Coutts moved to Sydney, Australia in the 1930s where he met other fetishists and sadomasochists, among them his future wife, Holly Anna Faram, whom he photographed in bondage and fetish attire. Working with McNaught’s, a spe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Building BDSM Networks, 1946–69
• 2 The First BDSM Groups, the 1970s
• 3 “Somewhere to Go:” BDSM Groups Proliferate, 1980–86
• 4 Creating a National BDSM Organization, 1987–89
• 5 A United, Politically Active BDSM Community, the 1990s
• 6 Success and Fragmentation: The BDSM Community in the New Millennium
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index