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This book is a collection of forty-one superb essays by women is sure to please. Among the contributors are some of the best-known women in the scene including Gerrie Blum, Pat Califia, Laura Goodwin, Viola Johnson, Nancy Miller, and Cecilia Tan. They include women brand new to bdsm and those with decades of experience including several professional dominatrices, toymakers, titleholders, and activists. Topics range from how to do a scene to relationships and how to start your own support group. Some of the best essays are those that explore why women are into bdsm and respond to feminist critics such as Andrea Dworkin. As several of the authors point out, bdsm is not abuse, but abuse does exist within the bdsm community. If you're trying to explain your lifestyle to non-scene friends, this would be a good book to give them. At the very least make them read Phoenix Flora's "Jesus Taught Me to Bottom" and Cecilia Tan's "An Open Letter From a Masochist to a Feminist." 

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Now published every year, this is one of the best guides to the bdsm community and the sexual fringe in general. It includes everything from leather bars and play clubs to stores, kinky bed and breakfasts, dungeons, and toy-makers, as well as resources for the gay and lesbian community and transgendered individuals. Brent, the publisher of Black Sheets magazine, does a fairly good job of keeping up despite the constant changes in address, name, and existence of sexually-oriented businesses and organizations. The book is not complete (what book could be), but it is a very good place to start your search for a particular type of business or organization. It is very well indexed by topic as well as by state. 

Another, slightly more expensive guide, is Alternate Sources which is also available on CD-ROM. Like the Black Book, it is a reasonably good listing of what's out there, but is hardly complete and has some out of date references. 

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If you're considering starting your own bdsm support group or getting involved in bdsm politics, this is the book for you. Dominguez, a longtime gay activist, explores the organized bdsm scene explaining how these groups function and why we need them. He covers both the old gay, motorcycle (backpatch) groups, and the newer, support and discussion groups. His list of suggested discussion topics should definitely keep your group busy for its first several meetings. It is no secret to anyone who's been in the scene for a while that the organized bdsm community is rife with conflict. At any given time half a dozen organizations are feuding with one another. Most of the rest are regularly wracked with internal power struggles and legal disputes. In the best part of his book, Dominguez delicately explores the reasons for some of these conflicts and suggests ways to improve the political organization of our community. 

This collection of interviews with people into bdsm made a big splash when first published several years ago. The topics addressed include fetishism, corseting, bondage, whipping, lifestyle play, and many others. Some of the roughly one hundred interviews are quite good, but the editors have added little to what each interviewee gave them to work with. They've drawn primarily from people they've met on computer bulletin boards and their friends in the New York community, but have managed to get a good mix of views. Some of those interviewed are bdsm celebrities, but most are average participants in the scene. A few topics receive rather scant attention and the biases of the authors against certain activities, such as corset-training, sometimes show through. Right now, it is the best book that attempts to capture the full diversity of the heterosexual scene. Brame's web page is superb and remains the best guide to the online world of bdsm. She has recently published the erotic bdsm novel Domina, and Come Hither : A Commonsense Guide to Kinky Sex.

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Pat Califia and Drew Campbell (eds.), Bitch Goddess: The Spiritual Path of the Dominant Woman
(Greenery, 1997), paperback, $15.95

This collection of essays, poetry and short fiction, edited by Pat Califia and Drew Campbell (a.k.a. Miss Abernathy), focuses on spirituality in female-dominant BDSM play. Contributors include women, men and transgendered individuals of all sexual orientations and bdsm inclinations. Review forthcoming.

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This book offers more than a decade of Pat Califia's writings about sex and the sexual fringe. Like all her writings it is insightful, penetrating, and cuts right to the chase. She attacks both right and left, and all who threaten our right to perversity in all its diverse forms. No one is as appreciative of sexual diversity and no speaks out as forthrightly about our rights as Califia does. It is a call to arms. Her essays address everything from the Meese Commission and the myth of a vast child pornography industrial complex to feminism, transgenderism, and the polyamory. While the focus is political, there are a number of essays on sexual topics including genderbending, latex, and making a long-term bdsm relationship work. If you've only read Califia's fiction, you're missing out on some of her best work. 
 

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This collection of essays, poetry and short stories describes the experiences of the members of Samois, a San Francisco based lesbian-feminist bdsm support group in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The short fiction remains some of the best ever published, and includes a number of excellent writers such as Dorothy Allison and Pat Califia. The essays are an excellent glimpse into the early history of organized bdsm and the difficulty women who identified themselves with the feminist movement had being into bdsm. This book launched an explosion in bdsm organizing and led to the creation of women-centered support groups in cities throughout the United States. It is a fun read and celebratory of the leather lifestyle unlike the recent A Second Coming (edited by Pat Califia and Robin Sweeney, 1996) which is more subdued in tone and includes several essays on problems in the bdsm community including domestic violence. Both are excellent books. 
 
 

This classic work is one of the earliest efforts to describe the scene to outsiders. An anthropologist by training, Mains has many unique insights into the gay leather scene of the 1970s before its significant transformation in the last decade and a half. He is also one of few academics to write about bdsm who was also an active participant in the scene. He died from complications due to AIDS some years ago. If you are interested in what the Old Guard scene was like at its peak, this book is a must read. 
 
 
 

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Anita Phillips, A Defense of Masochism
(NY: St. MartinÕs, 1998), hardcover, 165 pages, $22.95

Phillips, a self-described masochist and the editor of the British journal Interstice, argues that masochism has been misunderstood for over a century now, classed by psychiatrists as a pathology. This book is her effort to rescue it and place it back within the context of normal, healthy human experience. In a thoughtful essay she links masochism to romantic love and creativity. Full review forthcoming.

This is a superb compilation of interviews with and writings by many of the most prominent members of the leather community including Carol Truscott, Dorothy Allison, Gayle Rubin, Guy Baldwin, John Preston, Pat Califia, Fakir Musafar, and others. All discuss their involvement in the scene, what it was like in the past, and where they think its going in the future. Discussions range from fisting and blood play to Kinsey, history, religion, politics, and spirituality. The essays discussing the links between the bdsm and pagan communities and the integration of ancient spiritual beliefs into bdsm ritual are particularly interesting. Pat Califia's "The Limits of the S/M Relationship, or Mr. Benson Doesn't Live Here Anymore" is a superb critique of the intrusion of fantasy into reality. No other book so clearly shows the exciting diversity of the leather community. It is a bit weighted toward the west coast, though. 

There's also a hardcover edition that costs just $13.97 from Amazon.com.

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This is a collection of interviews with and photographs of some of the most important people involved in piercing, tattooing, scarification, and the popularization of tribal rituals in the 1980s and 1990s. Roughly half of the book's subjects are active participants in bdsm. These include Fakir Musafar, Raelyn Gallina, Jim Ward. More than any other book, this is the one that brought modern primitivism (a term coined by Musafar) to the attention of mainstream culture. The interview with Musafar is particularly good with a discussion and pictures of many of his more elaborate ordeals. This book remains the only source of information on many of these people, though rumors persist that Vale and Juno pressured and threatened people with exposure to get some of these interviews. 

Among Vale and Juno's other books is Angry Women which features interviews with Susie Bright, Lydia Lunch, Annie Sprinkle, and a dozen others.