#samois

*tapping the cover* pls read

What Color Is Your Handkerchief: a lesbian S/M reader didn't start it all - Samois was the second women-only group in America to explore BDSM - but it prefigures most of what followed, including Coming to Power. It's been been out of print longer than I've been alive, and I never thought I'd see it beyond photos of individual pages, much less complete in PDF format - but here you go!

The most shocking part, to me at least, is how explicitly feminist it is. SAMOIS, they declare with enough force to italicize the typewriter, HAS A UNIQUE RESPONSIBILITY TO DEVELOP A LESBIAN-FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE ON S/M, and the monthly meetings were mostly dedicated to acting on what was then a radical feminist slogan: analyzing desires. There's almost no sense that this was at odds with other tendencies of radical feminism (much less the ones we know today), and an urgent willingness to break the law — both lesbianism and kink were criminalized, and a lot of the sex education they did was illegal — that we all need to develop again, because the narrow gains of gay rights are being undone in front of our eyes.

Underneath that there's also

The first hints that leatherdykes would go on to become a generally trans-friendly lesbian subculture, born of SAMOIS's self-understanding as a double sexual minority

A glossary so old it's partly obsolete

How to pronounce Samois, and no consensus on whether to capitalize it

The much-reblogged hanky code (available on a wallet-sized card for 25¢), which introduced at least two colors and is the oldest list I've seen that includes the newly-defined purple

Lots of anecdotal reminders that the early leatherdykes had close ties to gay men, which was a talking point against them in separatist circles

Gayle Rubin's (eventually recanted) nuclear take that was still featuring in discourses a decade later, and occasionally used against everything she ever touched to this day

You know the horrible fiction series that poisoned BDSM for heterosexuals? No, not Fifty Shades, the series before that? A well-deserved takedown of that shit

Places to shop for leather in the Bay; some of which are still operating forty years later, and others are crafts stores because they had to make their own toys

Samois, la barque rouge [Samois, the red boat], 1917

Pedestrian bridge in Samois, Gâtinais region of France

Banks of the Seine river in Samois, Gâtinais region of France

River scene in Samois-sur-Seine, Gâtinais region of France