ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, American BDSM activists and writers built on the informal networks of the 1950s and 1960s to found the world’s first publicly advertised BDSM organizations, including The Eulenspiegel Society (TES) in New York, Society of Janus and Samois in San Francisco and the Chicago Hellfire Club. They published new magazines and books aimed at sadomasochists. Larry Townsend’s Leatherman’s Handbook (1972) educated thousands of gay men and pointed them to leather bars where they met men who shared their interests. Leather bars proliferated and sex clubs devoted to BDSM activities, such as New York’s Mineshaft and San Francisco’s Catacombs, opened. Echoing contemporaneous calls for “gay liberation,” BDSM activists promoted “SM liberation.” The BDSM community grew steadily in these years, thanks to these new institutions, a growing educational and normative literature that aimed to both educate and titillate, and increasing attention from mainstream media whose portrayals of BDSM comingled erotic fascination and alarm.
