by slave david stein
under the Guardianship of Master Steve Sampson
taken from the Leather History Group
The following essay is the core of a larger work that is
still in progress. Copyright 2000 by david stein; all rights reserved.
History is what happens while you’re doing something else– and it
may not be until years later that you discover what you did
was “historic.” When i agreed in mid-1983 to be part of a committee
of GMSMA (Gay Male S/M Activists) charged with drafting a
new “statement of identity and purpose” for the two-year-old
organization, i had no idea that the lasting significance of our
work would be reduced to a single phrase: “safe, sane, and
consensual S/M.” Today GMSMA is the world’s largest S/M
organization for men and one of the oldest and most respected S/M
organizations of any sort. Yet there are thousands — perhaps tens
of thousands? — of kink-lovers all over North America and around
the world who have no idea what the letters “GMSMA” stand for.
But they do know “safe sane consensual.” Those words appear on T-
shirts, on Web sites, in personal ads, in the bylaws and foundation
statements of hundreds of organizations, on porn videos, in
virtually every kink magazine, in every book or pamphlet or
instructional video produced for kink-curious audiences. It’s
become a cliché, and some people are heartily sick of it — but no
one has yet proposed an alternative that rolls off the tongue as
easily, covers so many bases, or boasts nearly the same degree of
acceptance. Blame me for it, if you like. The August 1983 report of
that GMSMA committee represents the earliest use of the phrase
anyone has found, and it seems very likely that i was its author.
The statement of purpose we drafted began, “GMSMA is a not-for-
profit organization of gay males in the New York City area who are
seriously interested in safe, sane, and consensual S/M.” This
wording was adopted without change by the Board of Directors on
August 17, 1983, and since that fall the sentence has appeared in
every GMSMA brochure and membership application as well as in most
program schedules, newsletters, and other literature. The only
changes made over the years have been to drop the reference to New
York City and to replace “males” with “men.”
Both of the other members of the committee, Martin Berkenwald and
Bob Gillespie, are now dead, but a few months before his death last
year, Bob said he thought it was me who came up with the
formulation. It does seem likely: i produced most of GMSMA’s key
early documents, and i’m sure i was the only one of the three of us
to come to our meeting with a complete draft ready for comment.
Martin and Bob critiqued what i’d written, and we made revisions on
the spot until we came up with something we all liked. Frankly, i
don’t remember who contributed what, but “safe, sane, and consensual
S/M” certainly sounds like my style. Other pieces i wrote in the
years just before refer to “consensual vs. involuntary S/M,” and i
was always keenly interested in drawing a line between the kind of
sadomasochistic sexuality that ethical people can support (at least
if they are also broad-minded and unprejudiced) and the kind of
abusive, exploitative, coercive activity they rightly condemn.
THE PAST RECAPTURED
It seems obvious to me now that “safe” and “sane” derived from the
good old American practice of urging people to have a “safe and
sane” 4th of July celebration. i heard that exhortation every year
while growing up, and it stuck. It stuck with Tony DeBlase, too, and
appears in an unsigned essay he wrote for the Chicago Hellfire
Club’s Inferno 10 (1981) run book: “In 1980 the following was
adopted as the club’s statement of purpose: ‘. . . to provide
education and opportunities for participation in S&M sex among
consenting adult men and to foster communication among such
individuals.’ Responsible S&M has become more popular and less
feared in the gay community and Chicago Hellfire Club continues to
serve its community — striving always to educate and promote safe
and sane enjoyment of men by men.”
Since Inferno 10 was the first Inferno i attended, and it
made a big impression on me, Tony’s words may have reminded me
of “safe and sane,” and even suggested the association
with “consensual.” But the GMSMA statement was the first place the
three terms were actually conjoined. As a kid, what i took “Have a
safe and sane 4th” to mean was something like, “Have a good time,
but don’t be stupid and burn down the house or blow your hand off.”
A couple of decades later, that seemed to fit S/M just fine. What we
meant by “safe and sane S/M” in 1983, and what i believe GMSMA and
most other organizations still mean by it today, is something
like, “Have a good time, but keep your head and understand what
you’re doing so you don’t end up dead or in the hospital — or send
someone else there.” Possibly the echo of a familiar phrase explains
why so many other kinky Americans have also felt immediately
comfortable with “safe, sane, and consensual S/M,” which still isn’t
nearly as popular in Europe or elsewhere as it is in the U.S. even
aside from the issue of language.
SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE
Clearly, GMSMA’s use and dissemination of the phrase through the mid-
1980s laid the groundwork for its later explosive spread. And the
fuse was lit when the Community Involvement Committee (GMSMA’s
political arm), chaired by Barry Douglas, decided in late 1986 to
use a streamlined form of it as the slogan for the S/M-Leather
Contingent in the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay
Rights (it didn’t become the S/M-Leather-Fetish Contingent until the
1993 March on Washington). Barry is also no longer with us, but i
was a member of that committee, too, and when we commissioned a 20-
foot-wide banner for the march bearing the words “Safe Sane
Consensual,” the bomb was set. It didn’t hurt, either, that they
also appeared on the T-shirts produced for the event or
that for the entire day before the march the same banner hung across
the stately portico of the government building on Constitution
Avenue that hosted the contingent’s huge S/M-Leather Conference.
That weekend thousands of men and women from all over the U.S. and
many foreign countries read those words, identified with them, and
took the memory of them back to their local communities. The rest is
history — and commentary. Let me give a little of both. GMSMA’s
Community Involvement Committee chose “safe sane consensual” as the
slogan for the contingent and the conference because we felt these
words were the best sound bite to distinguish the kind of sexual
expression we were marching in support of from the typical
association of S/M with harmful, antisocial, predatory behavior.
While no one at our meetings felt that “safe sane consensual” was
the last word on the subject, or that it “defined” S/M, we felt it
did the job that needed done: to say to anyone coming to us with a
stereotypically negative view based on lurid headlines and
exploitative movies (we all remembered Cruising), “That’s not what
we’re about.”
We had no idea the slogan would have the success it did, or that so
many people would take it as more than a starting point. But if it
hadn’t been spontaneously embraced by so many people, because they
felt it fit what they were doing, or wanted to do, it wouldn’t have
had such “legs.” There was no way that GMSMA, or anyone else, could
have imposed the slogan on the community if most people hadn’t liked
it.
MISUSE OF A SLOGAN
The understandable popularity of the slogan has a downside, however.
Those with few or no roots in the struggle to bring S/M out of the
shadows — who take for granted today’s world of BDSM clubs in every
large town and kinky images all over the mass media — tend to apply
the slogan in a simplistic way, even using it as a stick to beat
anyone whose style of play offends them for whatever reason. The
implication is that whatever is safe, sane, and consensual is good,
and whatever isn’t is bad, which goes far beyond what we intended
back in 1987. In 1987, we were trying to draw a line between what is
clearly defensible, in terms of both social structures and personal
well-being, and what is either indefensible or at least very
questionable.
It was a conscious, deliberate attempt to shift the debate onto
grounds where we thought we could win, instead of having to keep
proving we weren’t serial killers, spouse beaters, and child
abusers. Of course, the morality of such a strategy depends on who
is left out. The organized gay-rights movement has been accused many
a time of marginalizing those who don’t fit a “respectable”
or “straight-acting” image, and in some cases that’s a fair
objection. But when it came to choosing a slogan for the S/M-Leather
Contingent in the 1987 march, that wasn’t our intention. People who
rejected “safe sane consensual” principles weren’t exactly clamoring
to join our organizations or march in our parades. Such people, we
thought, tended to be loners and to exclude themselves by crossing
any line that anyone else draws; they thrive in the shadows, not the
light. Of course, once an idea is reduced to a slogan that fits on
buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, no one can control its
meaning.
Each person who sees it interprets it with whatever prejudices and
preconceptions he or she brings to it. While it’s evident that
thousands of people have taken “safe sane consensual” as a welcome
validation for a type of sexuality still considered “sick”
or “crazy” by much of our society, others read it as devaluing their
own “edgeplay” in favor of cautious, conventional, and
completely scripted sex games. Sometime after the 1987 march, at
least one prominent member of the S/M community was seen wearing a T-
shirt emblazoned “Unsafe Insane Nonconsensual,” and i have seen that
phrase used elsewhere. i have also heard and read more thoughtful
criticisms of the slogan.
The more popular and widespread it has become, the more common it is
to see it angrily rejected as either trivially empty, too far
removed from what makes BDSM exciting and meaningful, or else
menacingly intrusive — representing yet another attempt to force
individual styles of living and loving into a boring conformity.
Which is it? Both? Neither?
CONTEXT IS THE KEY
Let’s return to the origin and look at the full statement of purpose
GMSMA adopted in 1983:
“GMSMA is a not-for-profit organization of gay males in the New York
City area who are seriously interested in safe, sane, and consensual
S/M. Our purpose is to help create a more supportive S/M community
for gay males, whether they desire a total lifestyle or an
occasional adventure, whether they are just coming out into S/M or
are long
“Our regular meetings and other activities attempt to build a sense
of community by exploring common feelings and concerns. We aim to
raise awareness about issues of safety and responsibility, to
recover elements of our tradition, and to disseminate the best
available medical and technical information about S/M practices. We
seek to establish a recognized political presence in the wider gay
community in order to combat the prevailing stereotypes and
misconceptions about S/M while working with others for the common
goals of gay liberation.”
Note that this first use of “safe, sane, and consensual” occurred in
a context that also included concepts like community,
responsibility, tradition, education, and gay liberation. Moreover,
the rubric “safe, sane, and consensual” itself was explicitly
presented as embracing all degrees of commitment, from “a total
lifestyle” to “an occasional adventure,” as well as S/M
practitioners ranging from novices to veterans. In other words, the
strategy was not to try to redefine “S/M” itself as
inherently “safe, sane, and consensual,” something that seems all
too common today. Neither those of us who drafted the statement nor
GMSMA’s board were that naive. We knew that the full range of real-
life S/M — briefly defined as sexual arousal or gratification
through the infliction or suffering of pain, bondage, or
humiliation — can embrace much that is unsafe, insane, and
nonconsensual by anyone’s standards. S/M involves powerful emotions
and intense vulnerability, and it can be scary stuff.
This must not be forgotten or swept under the rug in the quest for
social acceptance. The “dark side” of S/M — the injuries, the
abuse, the exploitation, the violence — was well known to us back
in the early 1980s because we were still close to it. We hadn’t
already had two decades of S/M education and activism, which
sometimes have the effect of making it seem like a flogging, tit
piercing, or mummification are routine activities for a first date.
We all knew about bottoms who’d been traumatized, or tops who’d gone
berserk and sent someone to the hospital. The emerging iconography
of S/M in Drummer magazine and elsewhere was very edgy,
very “noncon.”
In the early 1980s, as again today in certain circles, being known
as “dangerous” was more of a badge of honor than a liability.
Knowledge of S/M’s potential for harm was one of the chief things
that led us to form GMSMA in the first place. The organization was
intended to shine a light into some very dark corners. Therefore,
rather than saying, “This is what S/M is, and it’s okay, nothing to
be worried about,” the GMSMA statement of purpose said, in
effect, “This is the kind of S/M we stand for and support. S/M can
be damaging, crazy, or coercive, but it doesn’t have to be, and
together we’re going to learn how to tell the difference.” If
someone was deliberately careless or irresponsible, or broke
agreements about limits, we didn’t say, “He’s not doing S/M” but
rather, “He’s not doing the kind of S/M we can support.”
DEFINING ISSUES
As an organization, GMSMA never tried to officially
define “safe,” “sane,” or “consensual.” From the beginning, we knew
that beyond the obvious applications of these terms, there are vast
gray areas. Moreover, we knew that “safety,” especially, differed
from one individual to another. A maneuver that’s perfectly safe for
one gymnast or ice skater to perform could easily lead to a broken
neck for another. A flogging that one bottom finds pleasurably
exciting might leave another with serious damage. A session of rigid
bondage and sensory deprivation that leads to fulfillment and
ecstasy for one person might send another into a psychotic
breakdown. A year as a 24/7 slave might be the peak experience of a
lifetime for me, yet cause you to have an emotional collapse.
Go back to the full statement, where it says, “We aim to raise
awareness about issues of safety and responsibility . . . and to
disseminate the best available medical and technical information
about S/M practices.”
That’s the context in which the “safe” in “safe, sane, and
consensual” has to be understood: being responsible, being aware,
doing your homework, taking precautions — that’s what we meant
by “safe.” We did not mean, back in 1983 or 1987, to promote only G-
rated S/M, a lowest common denominator that restricts people’s play
to a risk-free sandbox where pain isn’t really painful, bondage
isn’t really constraining, and dominance is being ordered to do only
what you want to do anyway.
We left “sane” and “consensual” much vaguer, “sane” because it’s
pretty vague to begin with once you get past the obvious meaning —
able to distinguish fantasy from reality — and “consensual” because
we didn’t realize how tricky it is. We didn’t have the benefit of
today’s more nuanced perspective, which has developed from a couple
of decades of rising awareness of just how hard it can be to leave
an abusive spouse.
We did not discuss, back then, whether consent was something you
could give once and for all, or if it had to be renewed
continuously. The distinction we were trying to draw was much
simpler: between, on one hand, the kind of controlled bondage,
torture, and dominance that bottoms willingly seek out from
cooperative partners and, on the other hand, the kind that predators
and sociopaths impose on unwilling victims (it doesn’t help that
coercive S/M is far more common in our own erotica as well as in
sensationalistic journalism). It took another decade and a half for
people to start talking openly about the puzzles of “consensual
nonconsensuality” — but would these debates even occur if we didn’t
agree that S/M should be consensual in the first place?
FREEDOM FROM FEAR
Just as in the GMSMA statement, Tony DeBlase’s CHC article from 1981
surrounds the now-familiar terms “safe,” “sane,” and “consensual”
with other concepts — education, participation, communication,
responsibility, community — that provide a context for interpreting
them. i am especially struck by the clause, “Responsible S&M has
become more popular and less feared in the gay community . . . .”
That the “safe, sane, and consensual” slogan was coined at a time
when S/M was becoming “less feared” is one of the keys to this whole
history.
For most people in my generation and earlier, the practices and
images of S/M were very scary. And taking the first steps toward
realizing our fantasies of pain, bondage, dominance, or humiliation –
– from either side, top or bottom — was even scarier. But from the
late 1970s (when the original “old guard” began dying off, though
that’s another story) to now, S/M has grown progressively less
scary, to the point that many teenagers today are more familiar with
what goes on in our subculture than most adults were back in the
1950s. Why? Madonna and Trent Reznor can’t take all of the credit!
These and other “mainstream” artists would not have been able to
exploit such themes, i think, without the increasing visibility of
an S/M community that promotes responsible, ethical practices, thus
raising the comfort level for everyone, whether kinky or vanilla.
Coming out into S/M through our community today is infinitely less
scary than doing so in isolation, or with no resources except the
bars, baths, backrooms, sex clubs, and porn magazines to guide you.
In contrast, when i first realized back in the 1960s what made my
dick hard, i was terrified. i obsessed about the horrible things
that could happen to me if i ever gave in to my masochistic and
submissive urges and put myself in the hands of a dominant, sadistic
man.
i read William Carney’s novel The Real Thing and was sure i’d end up
on a slab in the morgue if i took the first step down that slippery
slope. By the time i moved to New York in 1977, still a virgin in
every sense of the term, i knew that leather bars existed and that
some of the scenes portrayed in Drummer weren’t totally fictional,
but i was still worried that i would be damaged irreparably if i
allowed a man to use me and hurt me in the ways i also knew i
needed. “Fear is the mind-killer,” they say in Frank Herbert’s novel
Dune, and mine took a long time to fade.
But it probably also kept me alive by making me think early and
often about risk-reduction strategies. And when i joined with others
at the end of 1980 to create GMSMA, i finally made contact with
enough men committed to doing S/M in a nondestructive way that i was
able to overcome my fears and begin participating actively. That’s
the historical and personal context in which “safe sane consensual”
emerged: overcoming fear, shame, and silence to learn what we need
to know to make our own choices. On the whole, i think the phrase
has served us well — and it can continue to do so if we don’t try
to make it do jobs it was never designed for.
Chanting “safe sane consensual” like a mantra can’t save you from a
bad scene or a bad relationship, and it can’t replace the years of
study and practice that guide an experienced top or bottom, dominant
or submissive through the maze of choices both must confront.
While “safe, sane, and consensual” may suggest the outlines of an
S/M ethics, actually articulating one will take a lot more work than
coining a useful slogan. But it’s a start.