When he put this compendium of testimonials from SM practitioners together back in 1992, Thompson probably had no idea he was rounding up what would become the usual suspects whenever “constructive” representatives of the leather community were sought. Since this book was first published, contributors Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, Guy Baldwin, John Preston, Joseph Bean and, for that matter, Thompson himself, have become constituents of a thriving leather-community press that supports several imprints and a number of serious publications. In the process, they have come to represent that community in the wider debate over sexual politics in the culture overall.
For all the familiarity of the names, faces and opinions that predominate in this collection, the ideas expressed retain much of their freshness and bite. In an era when sexual desire has become confused and attenuated background noise to the clamor of the marketplace, it’s bracing to encounter such passion for the personal expressed in such direct emotional language. Particularly valuable are the recollections of such ur-leatherfolk as Thom Magister (describing his initiation into the very much underground bar scene of the ‘50s) and Jack Fritscher (on pioneering artist Chuck Arnett) in reconstructing the hidden history of the SM demimonde before Stonewall. That a subculture so savagely suppressed could give rise to the rigorous ideals of safe, sane, consensual SM play now generally acknowledged by practitioners of all orientations is nothing if not inspirational. Leatherfolk, in addition to its historical value, offers a refreshing tonic to the cynicism and ennui that prevail in the intellectual discourse of those who consider themselves “normal.” IL

Publisher: Alyson
Paperback: 328 pages

“This handy guide is an essential item for the leather dyke who wants to be well-informed about how to play safe and stay healthy… learn why you need latex gloves as much as you need tit clamps. Read about the tricks lady wrestlers do with dental dams. Sized discreetly to fit inconspicuously in breast pocket, dungeon toy drawer, or the box your enema bag came in!”

Publisher: Lace
Paperback: 76 pages
Illustrated

“It is difficult for Western minds to comprehend a practice that involved such physical pain and deformity, yet men demanded it and women acquiesced. This book examines footbinding’s origins in myth and history, why the Chinese allowed it to flourish, and the varied efforts by missionaries and liberal reformers to abolish it. Interviews living, footbound women who relate their experiences. Translations from Chinese erotic literature extol the beauty and sexual attraction of the ‘Golden Lotus’—a euphemism for the tiny foot—and reveal the peculiar fascination that bound feet and the ‘willow walk’ held for Chinese men.” Was the particular charm of the lotus-foot its usefulness as a simultaneous anal probe and perineum tickler?

Publisher: Prometheus
Hardback: 352 pages
Illustrated

“Dr. John Money [John Hopkins University, director of the Psychohormonal Research Unit] is internationally known for his clinical and research work in the new and growing science of developmental sexology… Money has coined the term ‘lovemap’ to describe the mental template expressed in every individual’s sexuoerotic fantasies and practice. According to Dr. Money, lovemap pathology has its genesis early in life, but manifests itself in full after puberty. The author gives us a close examination of paraphilia, a lovemap that in response to the neglect, suppression or traumatization of its normophilic formation has developed with distortions, and is legally referred to as perversion.” Includes a glossary of paraphilias from autagonistophilia (“in which sexuerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to, and dependent upon, being observed or being on stage or on camera”) to zoophilia (“in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to, and dependent upon, engaging in cross-species sexual activities, that is, with an animal”), lovemaps grouped by type (sacrifice and expiation, marauding and predation, fetishes and talismans, etc.), unusual lovemap case histories, and information on treatment.

Publisher: Prometheus
Paperback: 331 pages

Short stories with the theme of (mostly) lesbian SM. Subjects range from the family that is a little more disciplined than most, to an unusual test of a new partner’s mettle: “I want a gang, a pack, a bunch of tough and experienced top women. I’ll leave the exact number up to you, but I don’t want just a threesome in warm leatherette. I would rather it not be women Roxanne already knows. And no novices, they would just get in the way. Once you get that group together I want to give them Roxanne, and if she makes me proud I want her to belong to me, wear my rings. If she still wants me. She might decide it’s too much, or maybe she’ll tumble for one of the other tops.” NN

Publisher: Alyson
Paperback: 298 pages

Menninger was an important American psychiatrist and founder of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. In this classic work, Menninger regards self-destructive behavior—from accident proneness to self-castration—as a way that the ego protects the body against a self-administered death penalty. To Menninger, acts of self-destruction are “bribes” to “buy off” the guilty conscience for the aggressive acts or even wishes of the past for which a tyrannical conscience demands a self-punishment which vastly outweighs the “crime” committed by the self. Thus self-mutilative acts represent a victory, although costly, of the life instinct over the death instinct. SS

Publisher: Harvest
Paperback: 429 pages

“For parents, teachers and anyone who works with children—here is advice, insight and answers to questions about child sexual abuse, tips on how to help a child foil or frustrate a would-be molester and straight talk unlike any other book on the subject.”

Publisher: McFarland
Hardback: 248 pages

A Vindication of the Rights of Women in fictitious form, written with great candor and an unbounded frankness by a female who had the audacity to challenge rigid English marriage laws, and to unabashedly proclaim that women harbored the “same capacity for rational thought and intellectual development as men.” Where in Vindication, Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein) gave the first ray of hope for a different, more egalitarian form of marriage, Maria paints a bleak picture of women who are pummeled down mentally, spiritually and physically by tyrannical husbands. Very much ahead of her time, Maria asks the painfully rhetorical question “Was not the World a vast prison and women born slaves?” GC

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 138 pages

“De Sade’s greatest crime, in the view of posterity, was the creation of a fictional world whose cruelty and sexual extravagance were a libel upon the society in which he lived. The truth was that the leaders of that society, in the name of moral example, devised the most ingenious forms of judicial cruelty and paid men well for inflicting them on other men and women, while crowds looked on as if at a circus of mortality. When de Sade was 17, Damiens was executed with satanic ingenuity for his attempt on the life of Louis XV. In the name of law and morality, the victim’s hair was seen to stand on end under such torment.”
Imprisoned for much of his adult life, less for his sexual transgressions than for embarrassing his in-laws, de Sade is remembered for the celebration of cruelty in his writings, and has an entire proclivity named after him. Yet as a citizen judge after the French Revolution he risked his own life in opposition to the death penalty. This biography looks at de Sade the man, in the context of his time, and evaluates without sensationalism his legacy. NN

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 326 pages
Illustrated

This gorgeously bound reprint of Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, Venus in Furs, which includes a thesis on masochism by Gilles Deleuze, is one of the most emotionally intense and beautifully written explorations of what Plato called “the desire and pursuit of the whole, which is called love.” One at times feels literally hypnotized while reading the book, as the protagonist erects layer upon layer of pathos for his plight: that of an obsessive, fetishistic dandy addicted to pain, servitude and the sight of fur around a woman’s bare shoulders, relentlessly imploring a reticent, disdainful Mistress to give him the treatment that he craves. Deleuze makes the point that masochism is not the opposite of sadism, locates its importance at the core of human psychology, and explains in depth Masoch’s “peculiar way of desexualizing love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity.” A complex and satisfying text that even vanilla-sexers will cherish. MG

Publisher: Zone
Paperback: 293 pages