Side by Side: BDSM, Kink, and the History of Queer Liberation

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The Debate That Returns Every Year

Every summer, right on cue with Pride season, the same debate flares up again: Do leather, latex, and visible kink belong at Pride? Critics demand "family-friendly" parades and accuse the leather community of harming the cause of queer equality. Supporters counter that kink was part of this movement from the very beginning – and that it was the leather people who stood up for the community in its darkest hours.

What makes this debate so charged is a widespread misconception: the assumption that the connection between kink and queer identity is new, a provocation of the younger generation. In fact, it is the opposite. Homoeroticism and kink have appeared together throughout history – side by side in the same spaces, jointly persecuted by the same laws, and even lumped together by science into the same category. Anyone who knows the history recognizes: today's debate is not the beginning, but the continuation of a conversation as old as Pride itself.

As Old as Pride Itself

Modern Pride begins with the Stonewall Uprising. On the night of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. Unlike earlier raids, the patrons fought back – the clashes lasted for days and fundamentally changed the character of queer activism (Library of Congress). At the front lines were people who today would be understood as trans, non-binary, or drag: Marsha P. Johnson, a self-proclaimed drag queen and activist, was one of the most prominent participants; together with Sylvia Rivera, she soon founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an organization for homeless queer and trans youth (Smithsonian Institution).

This pattern emerges early: the movement struggled over its boundaries from the very beginning. Already in 1973 – just four years after Stonewall – drag queens like Johnson were excluded from the New York City Pride March by its organizers; she and Rivera then defiantly marched ahead of the parade (Smithsonian Institution). That same year, Rivera delivered her famous “Y'all Better Quiet Down!” speech, in which she accused the predominantly white, bourgeois gay movement of abandoning sex workers, the incarcerated, and trans people – and was booed for it (Wikipedia: Sylvia Rivera).

A few years later, the same pattern repeated itself with kink. When the lesbian BDSM organization Samois made its first appearance at the San Francisco Pride Parade in 1978, stewards attempted to exclude the group, and parts of the crowd booed and heckled the marchers (The Exiles). The question “Who belongs at Pride?” was not invented in the 21st century. It has been present since the very first years – and it has always concerned the same people: the queer, the trans, the kinky.

A Historical Aside: Two Topics That Have Always Been Close

To understand why kink and homoeroticism are so closely intertwined, it is worth looking far back – to a time when both not only existed but were depicted openly and even appreciatively.

The Etruscans: Homoeroticism and Sensuality Without Shame

The Etruscans, the people who inhabited central Italy before the Romans, left some of the earliest and most candid erotic depictions in European history in their painted tombs near Tarquinia. In the “Tomba dei Tori” (Tomb of the Bulls), dated to around 540–520 BCE, a fresco shows two erotic scenes – including explicitly two men engaged in sexual intercourse (Wikipedia: Tomb of the Bulls). In the neighboring “Tomba delle Bighe” (Tomb of the Chariots), the painter placed several male couples among the spectators in the grandstands – casually, as a natural part of the exuberance of life (Uránia-Institut). In other tombs, a male couple appears in an “eternal, loving embrace,” which many researchers consider to be a couple (Visit Tuscany).

What is crucial is the context: these images were not secret pornography, but tomb decoration. According to Etruscan belief, depictions of sexual acts possessed a protective, life-affirming power – a “burst of life energy” meant to blind the forces of death (Uránia-Institut). Greek observers such as Theopompus reported – partly outraged, partly fascinated – on the sexual openness of the Etruscans and how they were “not ashamed” to openly live out same-sex preferences (Philip A. Harland, Quellensammlung zu Theopomp). The same necropolis at Tarquinia also contains the “Tomba della Fustigazione” (Tomb of the Flogging), which depicts an erotic flagellation scene (Tarquinia Turismo). In this single visual world, sensual power play and same-sex desire coexisted side by side – celebrated, not condemned.

England: Berkley, the Molly Houses, and Spatial Coexistence

A second, particularly well-documented example comes from 18th and 19th century England – this time not in an appreciative but in a persecuted form, which makes the parallel between kink and homoeroticism all the more striking.

On one side stood a well-developed, consensual flagellation culture, so widely known across Europe that it was simply called “le vice anglais” (the English vice) (Wikipedia – Flagellation (“le vice anglais”)). Its most famous figure was Theresa Berkley (d. 1836), a professional dominatrix in London’s West End. At her establishment “The White House,” she served paying clients and constructed in 1828 the legendary “Berkley Horse,” an adjustable frame on which clients were tied and beaten for their own pleasure (Wikipedia: Theresa Berkley). It was not about punishment, but about voluntarily sought, paid erotic practice – functionally already what we today call BDSM.

On the other side, in the very same city and era, a homosexual subculture flourished in the molly houses – taverns, coffeehouses, and private spaces where men sought sex and community with other men (Wikipedia: Molly house). Researchers describe them as “the most organized manifestation of London’s 18th-century homosexual subculture.” In houses such as the notorious Mother Clap’s (c. 1726), dozens of men would gather; there were their own rituals, “weddings,” nicknames, and a camp culture considered an early precursor to the drag tradition (Cravats, Crinoline, and Craft).

Both worlds existed side by side in space and time, in the same London – and both shared the same fate: persecution. “Buggery” (same-sex intercourse) was punishable by death in England until 1861 (Wikipedia: Molly house); raids on molly houses ended at the gallows, as after the storming of Mother Clap’s in 1726. The flagellation scene, meanwhile, operated on the margins of legality and in the shadows. As late as 1889, the Cleveland Street scandal exposed a London male brothel whose clientele reached into the aristocracy, triggering a wave of persecution (Wikipedia: Cleveland Street scandal). Shared persecution binds together: stigmatized sexualities sought the same niches, the same discreet spaces, the same protection – a pattern that would repeat itself in the 20th century.

Krafft-Ebing: Lumped Into the Same Category

Nothing illustrates more clearly how closely the two topics were viewed by contemporary society than early sexology. The Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in his work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) (Wikipedia: Psychopathia Sexualis). In the same work, he classified homosexuality into the exact same diagnostic category as sadism, masochism, and fetishism.

Krafft-Ebing divided sexual “anomalies” into four groups; the most important was “paraesthesia” – desire for the “wrong” object, which he termed “perversion” (Encyclopedia.com : Krafft-Ebing). Into this very category fell, side by side: homosexuality (which he called “contrary sexual feeling”), fetishism, sadism, and masochism (CHMC Dubai). Medical history research confirms: these four were considered the central “perversions” on a graded scale of the same pathological theory (Medical History, PMC).

From the perspective of the dominant science of the 19th century, same-sex desire was therefore just as “perverse” – just as “kinky” – as sadomasochism. Homosexuality and kink did not merely stand side by side; they were literally lumped into the same category. This shared stigmatization is historically consequential: what was forced together as a common “disease” in the 19th century found its way back to each other in the 20th century as a shared liberation movement.

The Modern Leather Culture: From Persecution to Visibility

The genuine modern connection begins after World War II in the United States. Gay leather culture emerged as a coherent subculture in the late 1940s and 1950s in major US cities (Wikipedia: Leather subculture). The impetus is well documented: thousands of gay soldiers received “blue discharges” (dishonorable discharges) after the war and settled in the port cities in emerging queer neighborhoods (Wikipedia: Folsom Street Fair). Many brought with them a familiarity with uniform, hierarchy, and masculinity that combined with erotic power staging.

In 1953, the film The Wild One, with Marlon Brando in leather jacket and biker cap, provided the iconic look; “butch”-presenting gay men began to adopt this style (Wikipedia: Folsom Street Fair). Institutions took shape: in 1954, the Satyrs Motorcycle Club was founded in Los Angeles, one of the first gay motorcycle clubs; in San Francisco, the first leather bars such as the Tool Box opened from the early 1960s onward (Wikipedia: Leather subculture). From persecuted individuals emerged a visible, self-confident community – one in which gay identity and kink were inseparably intertwined from the very beginning.

How Pride and Kink Grew Together

With the birth of Pride in 1970, the two strands – leather culture and queer liberation – visibly converged, and they remained connected.

The 1970s are considered the “Golden Age” of leather culture (Wikipedia: Leather subculture). In 1978, Pat Califia, Gayle Rubin, and other women in San Francisco founded Samois, the first lesbian BDSM organization in the United States, which – despite hostility – was present at Pride early on (The Exiles). In 1979, the lesbian motorcycle club Dykes on Bikes led the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade for the first time – a tradition that continues to this day (Wikipedia: Leather subculture).

The decisive test came with the AIDS crisis from the mid-1980s onward. The leather community was hit particularly hard – and at the same time became the backbone of self-help. Gay leather men and leather lesbians were among the first and most effective helpers: they provided care, education, and fundraising when medical staff sometimes refused even to touch those affected (The Pomonan). Lesbian leather women often cared for gay leather men with AIDS (Wikipedia: Leather subculture). In this context, the Folsom Street Fair was founded in 1984, today the world’s largest leather event (Folsom Street).

In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of Stonewall, activist Tony DeBlase created the Leather Pride Flag – inspired by Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag and thus a conscious statement: the leather movement saw itself as part of the same queer liberation (Schwules Museum Berlin). The flag marked the transition from secret signals like the hanky code to open, public visibility. Leather activists also pushed forward the de-pathologization: from 1987 onward, men like Race Bannon and Guy Baldwin campaigned for the removal of BDSM from the diagnostic manual DSM – with success, as the current DSM-5 excludes consensual BDSM from a diagnosis (Wikipedia: Leather subculture).

The Present: Side by Side, With Each Other and Alongside Each Other

And so the circle closes back to the debate described at the outset. Anyone who asks today whether kink “belongs” at Pride fails to recognize that the two have never been separate. Medical history research aptly describes the tension within the leather community as a “vulnerable project of fighting for acceptance through ‘respectability’ while preserving the individuality and ‘otherness’ of leather and fetish culture” (Klein, Visualizing BDSM and AIDS Activism, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Oxford University Press, 2023).

Today, kink and queer identity exist visibly side by side and with each other: most large Pride parades have a permanent leather block; the Leather Pride Flag flies alongside the rainbow and trans flags; events like Folsom or the Easter Berlin Leather Festival are fixtures of the queer calendar. Homosexuality, trans identity, and kink share a common history of persecution, mutual care during the AIDS crisis, and a joint struggle for visibility.

The lesson of history is clear: from the Etruscan tombs through the molly houses and Krafft-Ebing’s diagnoses to Stonewall, Samois, and Folsom Street, homoeroticism, trans identity, and kink have always been intertwined – stigmatized by the same powers, protected by the same communities. They do not coexist by coincidence, but because they belong together. Side by side, with each other and alongside each other – it has always been thus.