lesbian – The History of BDSM

High Maintenance S03E05 “Payday”: The Celluloid Dungeon

Feb 162026

High Maintenance is a comedy-drama series about a marijuana dealer, known only as “The Guy”, who encounters various people in the New York City area in the course of his business.

This episode, “Payday” (aired February 17, 2019), opens with a mock-kidnapping of a woman, Doc Lee (Margaret Cho), by a group of lesbians who drag her into a van and group-dominate her while a woman drives the van around town, all to celebrate her 50th birthday. Doc’s partner, Ayasha (Hye Yun Park), joins in. (I wonder if this was inspired by Patrick Califia’s short story “The Birthday Party”.) Later, Doc and her partner join the women at a bar for drinks. It’s all very fun and normalized for these people.

Mercy (2000): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 212022

Palmer and Vickie get to know each other

Mercy (2000) (IMDB) is a late entry in the erotic thriller genre that dominated in the 80s and 90s. This kind of movie was getting stale by the turn of the millennium, and many scenes seem strongly reminiscent of Body Double (previously discussed) and Se7en.

It starts, as usual for this kind of film, with a dead body. This time it’s a nude woman, one of a series with signs of being tied up, bite marks all over her torso, and her eyelids cut off. Detective Catherine Palmer (Ellen Barkin) forms a relationship with Vickie (Peta Wilson), a friend (and likely more) of the victim, Dorothy.

Palmer searches the victim’s home and finds a hidden briefcase full of BDSM toys, and pictures of the victim being dominated by a masked man. She calls up a pro dominatrix via Vice and visits her dungeon in an upscale building.

Palmer: “And what’s your area of expertise, Terry?”
Dominatrix: “Japanese silk ropes and the finer psychological aspects of the relationship between the players. I can tie you so you can’t twitch your ass cheeks. Of course it’s time consuming. It’ll cost you a couple of grand. Mostly the businessmen like that.”

Transparent S02E09 & S02E10: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jan 032022

Transparent Episode S02E09 “Man on the Land”, aired Dec 11, 2015.

In this episode, mainly set at a women’s festival in the woods, Maura, a transwoman, has a difficult experience when she finds that the festival is supposed to be for “women-born-women” only, and her adult daughter Sarah hooks up with a kinky woman named Pony (played by Jiz Lee).

Pony (Jiz Lee) meets with Sarah (Amy Landecker)

Bitter Moon (1992): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Sep 182021

Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) meets Nigel (Hugh Grant) in the company of her husband Oscar (Peter Coyote)

Bitter Moon (IMDB) is a 1992 erotic/romance film, directed by the notorious Roman Polanski, based on the novel Lunes de Fiel by Pascal Bruckner

Nigel goes on an ocean cruise with his wife, Fiona, where he becomes fascinated by a beautiful, mysterious woman named Mimi. Her husband, a paraplegic would-be writer named Oscar, demands that Nigel listen to his story of his obsessive love with Mimi before Nigel has an affair with her. Like another tale of twisted love, Nabokov’s Lolita, we shouldn’t take the narrator at face value. Mimi privately tells Nigel: “You musn’t believe all he says. He’s a sick man. He imagines things.”

In Oscar’s story, he is a self-consciously literary archetype, an independently wealthy young American living in Paris to become a writer. On a bus trip, he becomes smitten with Mimi, a young French woman.

Mimi is a cipher, with almost nothing more to her than being a beautiful French dancer, at least in Oscar’s telling. The early stages of their romance go from sweetly romantic to an adolescent’s idea of eroticism.

Oscar: (to Nigel) “I’m only going into such detail to show you how completely enslaved I was, body and soul, by this creature whose dangerous charms have made such an impression on you.”

Bloodsisters (1995) lesbian BDSM documentary

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Oct 172020

The documentary Bloodsisters, covering the San Francisco leatherdyke community in 1995, is currently streaming online as part of NewFest, New York’s LGBTQ+ film & media festival. The streaming will last until October 27, 2020.

You can view the trailer and some supplemental interviews and other materials on Vimeo. There was an online discussion with the director, Michelle Handelman, and others in August 2020, available on Youtube.

NOTE: I attempted to view this stream in Canada and was refused. It may only be available for viewers in the USA.

The L Word S02E11 “Loud and Proud”: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 072020

“Loud and Proud”, aired 1 May 2005 IMDB

The L Word was a night-time soap about a group of lesbian and bisexual women in West Hollywood, with multiple continuing storylines.

“Loud and Proud” is centered on Pride Weekend in LA. In the previous season, Jenny arrived in West Hollywood and began exploring her sexuality, which caused some complications with her boyfriend. Jenny broke up with him and joined the other characters.

The cold-open shows two women having a BDSM session, in the red-on-black color scheme we will see repeatedly in this episode. The bottom is cuffed to a St. Andrew’s cross. There’s no nudity, and only a couple of light impacts with a flogger.

The top says, “I’m going to give you a minute to think about how badly you want me to fuck you.”

Script from The L Word, 2004: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Apr 162020

Back in 2004, The L Word was a groundbreaking nighttime soap/drama series focusing on a group of lesbians living in Los Angeles. It was actually shot in Vancouver in early seasons.

The producers put out a call through the Vancouver BDSM community for extras and performers for a BDSM party scene in the season 2 finale, “Lacuna“. I signed up, not really expecting to get anywhere, and received the following as a script sample, or “side”.

L-Word-Lacuna-script-fragment-2004

As we can see from the second page, the story reproduces the common belief that being into BDSM is a response to trauma.

I did my best in the audition, but it was my first attempt at acting since high school drama class. I didn’t get the part.

Others have told me that the scene was filmed, but not used. In the aired episode, IIRC, there’s a very brief insert of the party scene and a scene in which two characters tentatively go to a BDSM demo and immediately leave.

One Shocking Moment (1965): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Oct 252019

One Shocking Moment (IMDB) is a 1965 exploitation drama film, written and directed by Ted V. Mikels. Unlike some other movies discussed in this project, it has a coherent narrative and recorded dialog.

Newlyweds Cliff and Mindy leave their home town so Cliff can get a big corporate job in LA. They settle into an apartment complex. This is the sleazy side of the sixties when everybody smoked like chimneys and drank like fish, and men cheerfully belittled and objectified women. Cliff even does so right in front of his new wife, with only her mild objections. Cliff starts an affair with his boss’ secretary, while lonely Mindy drifts into an implied lesbian affair with her neighbor Tanya, a lesbian nightclub owner.

Tanya (Verne Martine) gets down to business

The Duke of Burgundy (2014): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Aug 262019

The Duke of Burgundy (IMDB) is a 2014 drama film written and directed by Peter Strickland, and starring Chiara D’Anna as Evelyn and Sidse Babett Knudsen as Cynthia. Shot in the UK and Hungary.

One of the oldest cliches in BDSM is “the submissive has all the power”. This is not always true, nor is it necessarily a good thing, as the life of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch demonstrated. Submissives and masochists can be abusive, as shown by The Duke of Burgundy.

Evelyn (D’Anna) serves Cynthia (Knudsen)

Somewhere in Europe, sometime in the mid-20th century, two women play out elaborate sadomasochistic scenarios. Evelyn, playing the meek maid, comes to the house of Cynthia, playing the haughty mistress. Evelyn’s duties of cleaning and laundry are, inevitably, unsatisfactory, which results in punishment. Cynthia drags Evelyn to the bathroom, closes the door on the camera, and urinates on her.

Obviously, the MPAA would not give a film could give a film with an explicit golden showers scene an R-rating or even an NC-17 rating. (IMDB says it doesn’t have a rating in the USA.)

A few days later, they do it all over again. It’s a bit reminiscent of Secretary or the Munby-Cullwick relationship, a private world between two people in which mundane activities are elevated to erotic rituals.

The Roots of 1970s lesbian sadomasochism

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Sep 292016

There are a couple of principles I keep in mind when studying history. The first is, “You have to work with the evidence you have.” We have no way of knowing how many people secretly had relationships like Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, but left no historical evidence. Likewise, I and other scholars of this particular field have to contend with the lack of historical material about lesbian SM before the 1970s. Maybe somewhere there’s an old journal or manuscript or audiotape sitting in somebody’s basement, and someday somebody will find it and open up a new field of study.

The second principle is, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It’s highly unlikely there were no lesbian women doing SM before 1974, but we can only make cautious, educated inferences based on what evidence we do have.

Thankfully, somebody scanned and posted old issues of Lesbian Tide, which contain what may be the earliest mentions of BDSM in lesbian media. As I mentioned before, lesbian SM emerged into visibility at the same time and in dialectic with more restrictive theorizations of lesbian-feminist sexuality, and it cannot be discussed without also discussing this conflict.

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism