The Leather Menace: Samois’ Conflicts

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Since Samois made lesbian-feminist politics central to its analysis and advocacy of SM, there were many in the broader women’s movement who took issue with that agenda.


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While Samois had ongoing conflict with Women Against Violence and Pornography and the Media, they also encountered resistance from bookstores, feminist publications and the San Francisco Women’s Building. In each case, non-SM feminists questioned and often condemned lesbian sado-masochism as a problematic sexual desire rooted, inextricably, in violent patriarchal values.1


Yet, Samois faced internal conflict as well. From the beginning, the group grappled with issues of membership around inclusion/exclusion and privacy. They also struggled with the development of community practices, particularly with regard to appropriate sexual activity and the presence of drugs and alcohol. Like most groups, they also faced leadership and volunteer burnout. It is not clear which, or which combination, of these issues, or something else not reported in group records, played a leading role in the group’s somewhat mysterious and fairly abrupt dissolution in the latter part of 1982.2




Keywords: Samois, lesbian-feminist, SM, sado-masochism, conflict, internal, external

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