How New York’s Lesbian Sex Mafia Put Queer Desire on the Agenda

New York City’s Lesbian Sex Mafia emerged in 1981 as a support and education group for people whose sexual interests and identities were often pushed to the margins—even within broader movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

Founded by Jo Arnone and Dorothy Allison, the group is open to queer women as well as nonbinary, genderqueer and transmasculine people interested in BDSM, leather, fetish, costume and related forms of sexual expression. Its work places education and community alongside a political argument: queer people should be able to organize not only against sexual violence and discrimination, but also around their own desires.

The group’s deliberately provocative name reflects that approach. It was selected with a comic nod to organizations such as the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorism Society, using humor to challenge assumptions about what a women’s group could be and what subjects it could address.

LSM became visible in the early 1980s at a moment when debates over sexuality were intensifying. In 1982, it organized a “Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex” rally at the Barnard Conference on Sexuality. The event’s title signaled the group’s interest in conversations that could be treated as uncomfortable, controversial or outside the boundaries of acceptable feminist discussion.

The organization also reached audiences beyond New York’s activist and leather communities. German filmmaker Monika Treut featured LSM in *Bondage*, the first film in her *Female Misbehaviour* documentary series. That appearance helped document the group’s place in a wider international conversation about women, sexual autonomy and practices often stigmatized by mainstream culture.

LSM’s history is also tied to New York’s leather and fetish institutions. In 1993, Pride Night—a collaboration involving LSM, The Eulenspiegel Society, Excelsior MC, GMS/MA and NLA: Metro New York—received the Large Event of the Year honor from the Pantheon of Leather Awards. The recognition reflected the scale of cooperation among groups serving the city’s leather and BDSM communities.

Arnone’s contributions received further recognition. In 1996, the National Leather Association International gave her its Jan Lyon Award for Regional or Local Work. She later received the Pantheon of Leather Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

Based in New York City, the Lesbian Sex Mafia remains part of the city’s LGBTQ+ history as an example of community organizing centered on sexual self-determination. Its legacy sits at the intersection of feminist activism, queer education and leather culture—areas that have often been discussed separately, but that LSM brought together under one outspoken banner.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “Lesbian Sex Mafia” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_Sex_Mafia The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://web.archive.org/web/20080306135008/http://www.geocities.com/wikispace/oob.1982b.html - https://books.google.com/books?id=6mzOaVZn6acC&pg=PA311 - https://web.archive.org/web/20150328142017/http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-16076215.html - https://books.google.com/books?id=Gw7uAAAAMAAJ - https://www.nla-international.com/list-of-winners-3.html - https://www.theleatherjournal.com/pantheon-awards/recipients Image rights Photograph description: New York City day trip, Dec 6, 2008 Creator: Jazz Guy from New Jersey, United States. License: CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANew_York_City_day_trip%2C_Dec_6%2C_2008_(3089365457).jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.