Over the last month, I had the honor of attending a series of free kink events at my local contemporary art museum. And in this time of suppression and censorship, the previous sentence feels like a dream. And so did the events, put on by Kink Out, which had brought the Carter-Johnson Library to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art for a month long pop-up to be touched, fondled, and ogled at. The library, whose slogan is “never again landfill, never again flames” describes itself on its website as:
[A] collection includ[ing] thousands of leather, fetish, S/m, kink and alternate sexuality books, magazines, posters, art, newspapers, ephemera and memorabilia dating back to the 1700’s. The Carter/Johnson Library is designed to put people in touch with their history by allowing them to hold it, read it, smell it and know it.
The library took up a vast, open room at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, a large concrete space in Little Tokyo with a wall open to the outside. That is to say, this was no back room or hidden alley. It was shameless. It was art. The walls were plastered with arrangements of posters advertising gay bars like the Cornhole, many Folsom Street Fairs of yore, movies like Sheree Rose’s Sick, and myriad Tom Of Finland art exhibitions. The shelves, scattered around a circular black platform that served as the stage and the arrangement of chairs, couches, bean bags and floor cushions that would house the audience for each talk, contained books about kink through the years, histories of sexology, doctorate theses printed and bound by hand. The North Figueroa Bookshop had a booth at the edge selling a reading list of kink-related tomes which you can find here.
But the library is more than a traveling archive and group of 10 international annexes, it represents the life and love of Viola “Mama Vi” Johnson and Jill Carter, Black women who have devoted decades to the preservation and defense of these cultural artifacts so we the present generation of Leather people may know where we came from. And this work is more urgent now than ever. Often, as they have gone in search of materials to persevere, they have found themselves in bidding wars on eBay against right wingers who want to burn them. But beyond spite for the Right, which is as good and admirable a reason as any, as Carter confirmed at the event’s closing ceremony, these two women’s decades-spanning D/s dynamic is at the core of what they do. Mama Vi is often referred to as the “Mother Of All Submissives.” Carter told her to “go out and serve the community in my name,” as part of her service to their dynamic, and Mama Vi has done this in spades.
Kink Out’s series of interviews as well as performances and workshops really underscored the question of who carries the baton of our history. In wider society, we learn early that history is written by the victors, the white men, the oppressors. Here in the kink world, we’re queering this paradigm. The bearers of our history are women of color, trans people, and sex workers. They were centered in this series, and witnessing their stories let me finally relax my shoulders. The people who are traditionally excluded not only in mainstream discussions of sex but even in other kink and queer spaces were here in a place of honor. And they spoke for all of us with precision and brilliance.
The two conversations I witnessed both centered current and former pro-Dominatrices. The first was a deep and thoughtful interview conducted by sex/kink writer and podcaster Tina Horn with Sheree Rose (b. 1941), performance artist, BDSM activist, Jewish grandmother, and founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Janus. Her journey into BDSM began after her divorce from her first husband. Freshly navigating life as a single mother, her soon-to-be life partner and lifestyle slave Bob Flanagan, an Irish-catholic poet living with cystic fibrosis, approached her and began negotiation to become her live-in servant, doing all her housework and anything else she might need, using masochism and service partially as a means of processing his illness. Thus began her lifelong devotion to using the tools of BDSM to interrogate power, partnership, and greif.
After Bob passed away in 1996, Rose became the masochist in her performance art, using the pain to process Bob’s death by doing performances like “Corpse Pose,” where attendees to the show were invited to pour hot wax on her naked body as she laid in a coffin. In other similar performances she lay on a bed of nails. She did “Corpse Pose” about thirty times all over the world, saying each time she “could channel Bob being dead… he was dead and buried but [she] was still alive and could channel that energy. Getting rid of the fear of death is part of it too.” She went on to say that “the acceptance of everything is one of the great things about S&M.”
This is where I got choked up, sitting on my little cushion in the front row, ostensibly kneeling at the feet of history. So far in my years in the kink community I’ve used these BDSM tools to confront childhood trauma, to interrogate power and gender for myself, and to realize a love that suits me and makes me feel seen. I hadn’t considered that all the things in the future that I’m intimidated by — motherhood, grief, death — may be processed by the same means. Rose sat on the stage and claimed her position as the crone, one who spins tales of the past and reminds younger people about death. This is why we need our elders, for wisdom about how to traverse the unknown roads ahead, and do so with courage and play at the center of our lives.
The discussion concluded with Rose’s latest work, “Holy Fuck,” a collection of images in slideshow format of a penis Rose has “been torturing for the last six years.” What followed was six minutes and dozens of iPhone photos of the same cock and balls contorted into a variety of painful shapes assisted by leather and metal, and even a blocky wooden rosary painted in loud primary colors. In one of the photos, I swear the cock sported a vein in the shape of a cross, jutting forward just beneath the familiar nest of graying pubic hair that had been framing our field of vision for minutes now. The slideshow was set to gongs and cymbals at first, then the soundtrack shifted into the sounds of a knife being sharpened. The final images were accompanied by silence.
Once the video concluded, Rose explained she’d like to see the photos as installation art in some kind of enclosed space viewers could enter one or two at a time and be surrounded by the images (I immediately pictured the Booth Johnathan scene from Girls, but with abused penises). Her hope was that the images would overcome you and you would divorce the penis from the Phallus — “this symbol of violence.” Thus stripped, the penis could just be a penis. Ceci est une cock.
The second Kink Out interview I was able to attend was at the closing ceremony, an intimate discussion between Empress Wu, representing the millennial generation, Jill Carter, representing the boomer generation, and Chanelle Gallant moderating and representing Gen X. All three women are activists, especially around sex work decriminalization and racial justice. The conversation focused on how kink has shifted through the generations and in relationship with social media and the digital age. Carter pointed out in her time, the community was a real community where people knew each other, whereas now with the advent of the Internet, anyone can pose as a Dominant after a quick Google search of terms. Empress Wu elaborated that while the community is less cohered now, archives are how we and sex workers specifically stay safe — blacklists as archives, inter-network communication as archives. But the direct adversary of this safety net, Empress Wu went on to say, is the gentrification of sex workers off of social media platforms. As sex workers are “objectified out of digital spaces,” these living archives are under threat.
Gallant then asked about the danger of the wrong people telling your story, to which Empress Wu responded using the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings as an example:
[The shooting] got summed up into larger conversations within Asian and diasporic communities as being a racial hate crime. But it largely ignored a lot of the elements of class, immigration status, whether or not they were sex workers, gender and movement.
And I think that all of those got swallowed up in the larger conversation within the Asian diaspora, which, for the most part, called for more policing, which ended up creating much more dangerous conditions for the very people in the very populations that were in danger in the first place. And so I think that this thing can happen, which is we, us, as sex work populations need to be telling our stories, because if people don't pay attention to our stories, it can happen to them next.
Jill Carter dovetailed off of this, citing a wound at the center of the creation of the Carter Johnson Library:
90 years ago, May 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld had five floors of sexology that was lost. It was burned. These were the first books that were burned when Hitler took power. And [the library] contained research about the trans community. He was the first who really got out there, creating those operations, telling people about — first of all, we as a variation are natural.
He didn't look at it as abnormal, and they burned it to the ground. That was the first. Information that was lost and we will never, ever [have it] it again.
Later in the discussion, she circled back to the book burning, and became choked up. She took a second to let the tears fall, then continued:
I see this happening all again. Right now, nationalism, people coming together as nationalists, the economy being effed up.
I cry because of hatred.
I cry because he was a homosexual. He was a Jew.
They didn't let the immigrants in. Is that not what we're going through today?
Sex workers, queer and trans people, and kinky people are often the canaries in the proverbial coal mine of fascism. From 2021 to 2023 we have seen an unprecedented rise in banned books, many due to their representations of queerness, gender, and sexuality. From 2021 to 2022 1,648 unique titles were banned in the United States. These bans, obviously, overlap heavily in places that have pursued violent anti-trans legislation and are nowhere near treating sex workers as human beings deserving of labor rights. This is the state we’re in, and we have to look at it honestly.
But the conversation wasn’t only about pain. Importantly, it transitioned to pleasure and humor. At one point Carter’s tone became wry, playful:
Remember Bill Clinton? We took him to court, right? He was getting his dick sucked off… Smoking a cigar… We didn’t have a deficit!
She shrugged after the declaration and the place went wild with laughter.
Carter continued:
Look at that. Don’t forget that… As a pro-Domme, I had a judge, I had cops. I had high level people that I was dealing with. They were stressed out. They came to me to be dominated. So that they could go back and administer justice fairly. So when we free that energy, no matter how you do it, whether it's an exchange, whether you surrender it — it's a mission. We are creating positive energy.
Many of you, you know what I'm talking about. When you're in that moment… it is about achieving it at a different level. Different ways that we are really going out there. We soar. So we can take that energy, that power, and do positive things.
If there’s one theme I came away with from the whole series and the archive itself, it’s that play is what sets us apart and sets us free. The magazines, from California Scene for gay men in the seventies, to the 1920’s rags filled with girls in swim costumes, were cheeky, winky, bold, fun. The way marginalized people enter kink is not exclusively through trauma, it’s to find a place to celebrate and to enjoy life. Sheree Rose characterized the community this way, saying of her time working in an enema clinic, “it was really fun. It wasn’t serious, and ‘oh my god this is something dark.’ It was fun, and we had a great time doing it.”
I think as younger kinksters we can get really caught up in validating our right to do kink through providing receipts about how serious it can be to our vanilla counterparts. We love to beat the drum of how kink can address trauma, how it teaches consent, how it holds all manner of experiences in a risk aware way. These are things I’m personally very proud of. But if there’s one thing to take from our elders, it’s the right to say “this is fun, I’m not hurting anybody, end of story.” That’s a privilege we have that they fought for. And the further we bog ourselves down in the questions the vanilla world poses to us, the foggier our enjoyment becomes. The negotiation with these questions can become the voice of shame within us. What if we don’t need reasons? What if we just want to get our proverbial dicks sucked while smoking a cigar? And perhaps let that pleasure and play replenish us to go out and kick some doors down in the name of activism.
So a special thank you to Kink Out, The Carter-Johnson Library, and all the panelists who claimed that space and spoke for who we have been, and who we might be going forward. This sub was very grateful to listen, and hopefully obey.
Wonderful post. I’ve been thinking a lot about how kink buttresses my spirituality and how it’s maybe not important where it comes from or which trauma installed those buttons
I love everything about this post! What a cool privilege to be able to attend such an event 😍