The beginning of the sociological study of BDSM: A personal reflection

My research into BDSM as a sociologist has been marked throughout by accident, coincidence, and fortuitous circumstances. In the 1970s, studying human sexuality was very stigmatizing, so that there were not as many researchers doing work in the field of sexuality as there are today. This was especially true for those of us who researched “deviant” sexuality. In fact, I was labeled negatively at my own institution because of my research. I was told horror stories by graduate students who wanted to work in gay studies and could not get faculty to serve on their dissertation committees. A gay colleague in the natural sciences told me that he had discussed the possibility of doing a postdoc in sociology at a nearby university with the chair of that department. The chair was very cordial until the subject of a research project in homosexuality was brought up. At that point, my friend was abruptly cut off and the chair ended the conversation.

I would guess that there were probably only a few dozen of us who specialized in studying sexuality, and most of us knew one another as the circle was small. I had friends at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. I got to know people at the annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, which was founded in 1957, and was the major organization for researchers. It published The Journal of Sex Research, which along with the Archives of Sexual Behavior (founded in 1971), was the main outlet for published works in the field. I also met researchers from The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, which was founded in San Francisco in 1976, as a for-profit doctoral granting institution, closing in 2018.

In the mid-1970s, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation on the development of identity among gay men, a few of my respondents told me about their BDSM fantasies and experiences. This was a topic I had not previously thought about, and it stirred my curiosity. I discussed this with my friend and colleague, Gerhard (“Gerry”) Falk, and during winter break of 1976–1977, we went to the local library to see what had been written on BDSM. What we found at that time was only psychoanalytic literature on “sadomasochism,” primarily the work of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and a few others. I knew from talking with my dissertation respondents that this behavior was not simply explainable as “pathology,” but that it was a subcultural sociological phenomenon. As sociologists, Gerry and I had many questions we wanted to answer, but we had one major problem: how do we find people who might be willing to talk to us? In those days, there was no internet with websites and chatrooms devoted to BDSM practitioners. There were, however, “adult” bookstores, which sold what were called “contact magazines.” These contained coded ads from people who were interested in meeting others for BDSM activities. For a nominal fee, the publishers would forward letters to the advertisers. Gerry and I both placed and answered ads in some of these magazines, presenting ourselves as sociologists who were interested in learning more about BDSM. We did get a few responses, including some people who were willing to talk to us on the telephone, although most of our correspondence went unanswered. Advertisers, of course, were looking for sexual partners and our queries were probably seen as unwanted intrusions. This, however, was our first point of contact with the BDSM world.

Back in that time, our local paper carried a personals section, in which one could find coded swinging and BDSM advertisements. Incredibly, the local Pennysaver had a notice for those interested in joining a Janus/Eulenspiegel Society club. The Eulenspiegel Society, now known as TES, was founded in New York City in 1971. Named after a character in German folklore, it was the first organization devoted to BDSM. The Society of Janus, the second such organization, was established in San Francisco in 1974.

A few months into our research I ran into a former student. We caught up on what we had been doing since we last saw each other, and I told him about our research. He introduced me to a former professional dominatrix, who agreed to talk to me. We set up a luncheon date and spent about 3 hours talking. She was curious about me and why I was interested in studying BDSM. Was I an undercover police officer, or maybe someone with a personal interest in dominance and submission? I reassured her as best as I could that I was neither, and that my interest was purely academic, and she appeared to be satisfied. In fact, we became good friends, and she told me how BDSM contacts were made in the commercial world. Ads for establishments specializing in female domination were placed in a section in the back pages of the Village Voice. “Juliette” and I made calls to these numbers, she as a potential employee, and I, under her tutelage, as a prospective client.

It is funny how things fall into place. At the 1977 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, I met Park Elliott Dietz, who was a forensic psychiatrist. Park and I discussed our mutual interests in non-normative sexualities. Several months later, Park called me. He was a guest editor for a special issue on Crime and Sexuality of The Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, and he asked if I had a paper I could submit for the journal. Luckily, I had been working on a paper, in which I attempted to develop a sociological framework for the study of BDSM. I adapted social psychologist Erving Goffman’s (1974) ideas of frame analysis, to structure my interview data and content analysis of contact magazines. (According to Goffman, frames are central components of the culture of a group through which its members interpret the world. Frames, which are structured by the language of the group, define and categorize for their members situations, setting, scenes, identities, roles, and relationships.) This was the first article I published on BDSM, and to my knowledge, one of the earliest papers on that subject written by a sociologist (Weinberg, 1978).

While I had not yet visited public or semi-public BDSM spaces that changed at the 1978 meetings of the American Sociological’ Association in San Francisco, where I met members of the Sociologists' Gay Caucus, it was with these newfound friends that I made my first visit to the gay male leathersex bars. Since that time I have visited leathersex bars in San Diego and Los Angeles as well as in San Francisco and heterosexual BDSM establishments like “Paddles” in New York City. The interaction in gay and heterosexual settings that I observed differed in a number of ways. These are, of course, somewhat unsystematic impressions, rather than structured observations and were true in the 1970s and ‘80s. (Many of the public and semi-public sexual venues were shut down by the late 1980s because of the AIDS crisis.) First, people in the heterosexual settings appeared to be previously acquainted, even in the clubs. In the leathersex establishments, anonymity seems to have been the norm. Second, the rules for acceptable behavior were made clear in the former settings, and for the most part, adhered to by participants. These norms were not so immediately apparent in the gay male leather bars, and as a sociologist I had to do some work to figure out what they were. For example, how does one indicate sexual interest or noninterest? How does movement and location within the setting signal one’s preferences? Third, in the heterosexual venues the primary activity is the expression of dominance/submission, while in the leathersex scenes, conventional gay sexual behavior, with a few exceptions appears to be the main reason for attendance. In San Francisco, while I did see some fisting and participation in urine-related activities, I did not observe sexual behavior in the bars in either San Diego or Los Angeles. In the 1970s, the leathersex bars in San Francisco were open to anyone who wished to enter, and liquor was served. By the early 1980s, they no longer had liquor licenses and were private clubs, in which the sexual activity was even more prominent.

My experiences in these settings pointed out two interrelated things. First, the practice of BDSM is heavily symbolic, including the language people use, the costumes they wear, and for Leathermen, how erotic interests are advertised by the positioning of key chains and different colored handkerchiefs. Second, for some practitioners, BDSM is not so much about pain, as early writers assumed, but about the symbolic meaning of pain: the eroticization of dominance and submission. This is not true for all, however, as BDSM includes those with a wide variety of motivations, interests, and behaviors.

Following my explorations of gay leather bars in San Francisco, a former graduate student introduced me to another student, who after discussing our research interests, loaned me a paper on leathersex, an ethnography that had been written by G. W. Levi Kamel, an undergraduate student at Arizona State, and later published in Deviant Behavior (Kamel, 1980).

Now, here is another example of how chance has played a role in my BDSM research: I then took a postdoc at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), where I shared an office with two doctoral students. On my arrival, I noticed a package on the desk of one of the students addressed to G. W. Levi Kamel, the same student who had written the leathersex paper. About the same time, Levi saw a copy of the Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law article I had published on my shelf and realized that he knew who I was. We bonded immediately and decided to see if we could find a scholarly outlet for our mutual research interests. We talked about collaborating on a project, and we did some field work in the leathersex bars in San Diego and Los Angeles. Although I was focused at that time on my postdoctoral research, I maintained my interest in BDSM, publishing my second article in Deviant Behavior (Weinberg and Falk, 1980).

At the end of my postdoc in 1981, I returned to my college in Buffalo, New York, to find that our new dean was Vern Bullough, whose paper I had previously accepted for a session I had organized for the 1978 meetings of the American Sociological Association. This was a stroke of luck because Vern took me under his wing. His presence as a well-recognized international scholar in sexuality and his support of my work, gave me new respectability. Almost overnight, thanks to Vern, my reputation was transformed from “pervert” to respectable “scholar.” He encouraged my research in sexuality, and in fact we later collaborated on a research project (Bullough and Weinberg, 1988; Weinberg and Bullough, 1988). My relationship with Vern highlights the importance of mentor relationships, especially in the field of sexuality. I have tried to pay my debt to Vern forward, serving as a consultant, collaborator, and mentor to graduate students from all over the world who have emailed me for support in their research.

After I returned to Buffalo, Levi and I had kept in touch. We continued to talk about working together on a project and decided to do an edited book. I also discussed our project with Vern, who was very supportive and encouraged us to work on this project. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was the series editor of New Concepts in Sexuality for Prometheus Books, a small local publisher and that he had already decided to accept our book.

A major problem we encountered in our project was that there was almost no sociological material available on BDSM. We therefore included a section with the works of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis as “classic statements.” We also discovered a paper written by anthropologist Paul H. Gebhard (1969), which included three pages on sadomasochism, laying down a cultural framework for analysis. Another paper we included was written by a German medical doctor, Andreas Spengler (1977), and previously published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. It was a survey of men who belonged to a BDSM club and provided some helpful information. It did not, however, have a theoretical sociological foundation. More importantly, the paper, while well done, made some assumptions about the subculture that we accepted but later found to be untrue. One of these, for example, was Spengler’s view that there were no women, other than prostitutes, involved in that community. He thought that this was true because the only women he saw were prostitutes hired by club members. Shortly after our book was published (Weinberg and Kamel, 1983), I began getting phone calls and letters from women who had read it and were active participants in the BDSM world. Given our acceptance of Spengler’s ideas about women in the subculture, this was a surprise that caused us to reevaluate our assumptions.

We also included some autobiographical chapters and material from popular magazines and newspapers. Much of the volume was new material that we produced. The book was not without its flaws, however. One criticism we received was that it inconsistently mixed popular articles with dry academic discussions. Yet, as the first edited book on BDSM from a sociological perspective, it garnered a wide audience beyond academe. Interest in the topic was strong enough that a second edition was published (Weinberg, 1995), and the rights to that edition were bought by a Spanish company (Weinberg, 2008).

After the book was published, I was invited to speak about BDSM to a San Diego organization of professionals working in sexuality. Through a contact I had made during my postdoc at UCSD, I was introduced to “Mistress Antoinette,” who published two magazines, Kinky Contacts, which as the name suggests, was a contact magazine, and Reflections, which promoted her philosophy. As I recall, she also produced and sold costumes for BDSM practitioners. I contacted Mistress Antoinette and asked her to participate in the presentation. I split the honorarium with her, which led to an invitation to attend my first BDSM party at her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

One of the things I noticed about the party was that it was very carefully structured, and as Moser (1998) has noted, norms concerning acceptable behavior were present and enforced by the hostess. Antoinette had built in at least an hour for informal socializing. During that time, I was surprised to learn that a number of the participants had read the book and knew who I was. The informal chatting was followed by a cocktail party, a potluck dinner, and then the main reason for the get together: BDSM. Antoinette had previously organized a series of envelopes, each of which contained different instructions varied by BDSM role (dominant or submissive), sex (male or female), and the location in the house where the action would take place. Throughout the evening the envelopes were employed to vary the combination of participants chosen and the apparatus they were to use. My role as observer was easily accepted, since that role is built into some private and semi-public sexual settings.

Since the 1990s, I have been less active in field research and more focused on theory building (Bezreh et al., 2012), assessing the development in the field and making findings accessible to a wider audience (Weinberg, 1994, 2000a, 2000b, 2006). Serving as a referee for a number of sexuality journals has enabled me to keep abreast of current research.

From the time I first began researching BDSM, there has been a virtual explosion in studying the topic, not just in the United States, but also internationally. I have been in contact with researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, and elsewhere. Not only sociologists, but also psychologists, anthropologists, sociobiologists, and physicians have become interested in this behavior. Research has been both quantitative and qualitative, published in journals, monographs, and edited volumes. Much of the work in the area focuses on the development of theoretical explanations, examining the role of gender, personality characteristics, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and religion and the role of dominance and submission in mate choice. Researchers have explored many aspects of BDSM including the development of identity, variations within the subculture, and the relationship between them and the social institutions of the larger society. One area that needs more study is the place of BDSM in private, intimate relationships. Much research has been confined to more easily accessed public or semi-public settings. Scholarly interest is strong and continuing in the area, and I look forward to reviewing new insights into BDSM.