Frank, informative and plenty filthy, the 1995 documentary Bloodsisters was part of a wave of autonomously queer non-fiction flicks that dominated the LGBTQIA+ film festival circuit in the mid-‘90s. Praised for overcoming “the hokiness associated with today’s pedestrian portrayal of S/M” by LA Weekly upon release, the scrappy work boldly dove into the Bay Area’s underground dyke leather scene. With unique access to key players, filmmaker Michelle Handelman was able to piece together a coherent history of a subculture that is still going strong today.
In recognition of this little-seen documentary’s 25th anniversary, NewFest offered Bloodsisters to the widest audience yet as part of its virtual festival last year. American audiences can now watch it via Amazon. In the following interview, two American film critics with diverging ties to queer leather communities ponder what it means to be a Blood Sister today.
————————————————
Sarah Fonseca: Should we take a minute to introduce ourselves and our relationships to kink and film communities before diving in? I reckon I can start.
I was twenty-one the first time a girlfriend asked me to tie her up. Without a Sportsheets set to my name, I tore my bed sheet with my teeth and knotted its strips to my bed’s frame and then around her wrists. It was a revelatory moment fusing trust, desire and scrappiness; I knew I would want to to continue experiencing that intricate state of being. Today, I am a dilettante leather dyke: more brown than black, with an appreciation for the antiquated and switch-hitting.
As for film, I’ve been writing about queer and experimental cinemas (and their overlap) for six years for publications like cléo: a journal of film and feminism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Museum of the Moving Image’s Reverse Shot. I’ve also done a bit of programming with NewFest, New York’s LGBTQ Film Festival. I’m more devoted to work than play—maybe I should change that?
Annie Rose Malamet: I am a leather dyke who is lightly enmeshed in the leather community. I would say I am a ‘heavy’ player who holds a healthy dose of irreverence and levity in regards to my lifestyle and practices. I do not participate in some of the more formal aspects of the leather community, such as the title circuit. I have been in 24/7 D/s (dom/sub) relationships, but I don’t require that dynamic to feel fulfilled. I am part of a similarly cheeky leather family composed mostly of sisters. In March 2020, I was honored for this work as part of a Kink Out event at MoMa Ps1.
I have a podcast called Girls, Guts, & Giallo in which I examine controversial and subversive film from a femme, leather dyke perspective. I have written for publications such as Cultured Magazine, The Gay Gaze, and have a forthcoming piece in the delectable indie horror magazine Blood Knife. I’ve lectured on the history of fatness in film at various colleges and at the New Orleans Film Festival. Next month, I will be giving a talk on kink as a trope in horror for the Final Girls Film Festival in Berlin.
SF: I want to ask you about the impressions this piece of lo-fi gay verité left on you. You come to this film as someone more beholden to its scene than me, and with a far greater understanding of the history. You are, after all, the proud proprietress of a Lesbian Sex Mafia paddle. Is Bloodsisters more of a record of how our community has lived, or a master class in queer kink?
ARM: Bloodsisters is extremely rooted in the feminist punk aesthetics of the ‘90s. Various riot grrrl songs are featured throughout and the heavily-trebled vocals of San Francisco punk bands Frightwig and Typhoon play over slow motion scenes of dykes taking to the streets, overlaid with images of chains. The contemporary viewer is never unaware of the form as artifacts produced by an aging VHS camera crackle across the screen. The ghost of young Sadie Benning is ever-present. It has certainly aged, which doesn’t mean it should be discounted in the queer leather pantheon.
SF: I’m also reminded of Dyke TV, Ana Simo’s and Mary Patierno’s cable public affairs magazine that ran from 1993 to 2005.
ARM: Contemporary queers have a tendency to gravitate towards a ‘90s aesthetic. It recalls the halcyon days of a decidedly dyke-centric punk subculture that is ripe for the kind of reverence that forgoes compelling criticism in favour of nostalgia. I feel like there is a special (and somewhat sacred) place this documentary occupies in community history. I believe it should inspire as much as it can jog us into thinking critically about the role of documentary in the larger archive of queer lust.
SF: I really love that phrase, “the larger archive of queer lust”. I appreciate that you acknowledge the liminal canonical place that Bloodsisters calls home.
“It’s tricky to watch Bloodsisters’ tactile images of power play during a pandemic… Representations of touch feel a bit like science fiction to me these days.” Sarah Fonseca
I was less accommodating. The split-screens of first-person interviews and kink scenes playing out in tandem sensorially overwhelmed me—perhaps in the futile attempt to draw me closer to the raw experience of a scene? It’s tricky to watch Bloodsisters’ tactile images of power play during a pandemic; I felt removed despite power play being a consistent part of my experiences up until this point. Representations of touch feel a bit like science fiction to me these days. I have been brainwashed by Mistress Rona.
I loved the diversity of bodies and framings here. In one of the first interviews, we meet a matronly, middle-aged domme who goes unnamed. She matter-of-factly annotates the misperceptions of consensual kink practices—that they’re indiscriminately violent, worthy of policing, so on and so forth. All the while, she sits near her submissive du jour, a rigged girl in a black lace bodysuit. I love this intermingling of action and thought so much more than the split-screens. The dominatrix wears a feather boa, as if to flaunt her largess within the leather community. That she’s a woman of size only seems to make this image more remarkable.
ARM: The Bay Area in general has always been a hotbed of fat activism. Judy Freespirit and Sara Aldebaran published their ‘Fat Liberation Manifesto’ in the April 1979 issue of off our backs, a periodical for dykes that disbanded in 2008 and featured many Bay Area-based dyke writers. Fat activist Marilyn Wann, a long time San Francisco resident, first published her zine Fat!So? in 1994, just a year before the premiere of Bloodsisters. Suffice to say, I’m assuming that at least a few of the fat dykes who appear in the documentary were aware of the contemporary fat activist dialogues of the time.
“The omnipotent presence of fat dykes is one of the strongest elements in Bloodsisters.” – Annie Rose Malamet
The omnipotent presence of fat dykes is one of the strongest elements in Bloodsisters. To other leather dykes, this might seem like a given; our community is known for embracing various bodies and gender presentations in a way that mainstream gay scenes simply have not. But when the layman thinks of kink imagery, I imagine they conjure those iconic Bettie Page photos, or Ellen Von Unwerth snapshots: images of skinny, white, cis women bound and struggling playfully. That is absolutely not what you get in this documentary. After all, this is the sub-cultural scene that birthed the work of Catherine Opie.
SF: When you mentioned Opie, I tried to get in touch with her about the nature of that 1987 photo where she’s so clearly geared up for kink mischief. No response …yet!
At the end of the day, we’re both gay girls who have, at some point or another, spent more on cuffs than we have on food. I want to talk about a community organising moment captured in the film that holds enormous promise for how we think about class and kink, but falls short for me.
ARM: Yes, there is one scene in particular I know affected you. In a backyard in the Bay Area, a gaggle of younger dykes congregate for a casual workshop on how to repurpose household objects in kink play. Can you say a bit about this scene and what about it struck a chord in you?
SF: The idea behind this demo was that anyone should be able to participate in the kink ecosystem without all of the costly hardware. A spatula can effortlessly be repurposed as a paddle. In this moment, a playful butch dyke named Skeeter demonstrates its use on a femme bottom, and invites others to play along. There is no high-concept scene contextualised here. There is only the spanker, the spankee and the gleeful audience.
It’s all well and good to associate kink with anti-capitalism. But, in the effort to be helpful to their fellow impoverished comrades, this act smacks (pun unintended) of class condescension at best, and misunderstanding at worst. Do these queers really think that poor people lack the connections and imaginations to partake in sadomasochism? In truth, one doesn’t even need toys, let alone hands; one just needs filthy thoughts and the means to convey them to another. I am uncertain whether the demo bothers me, or its insertion into the film as an act of leather charity.
I am returning to the torn bed sheet I mentioned in my introduction and sidling it alongside an anecdote from Dorothy Allison’s 1985 essay, ‘The Theory and Practice of the Strap-On Dildo’, where the author—a player herself—describes making a majestic harness from a leatherman’s chastity belt she picked up in the Castro. Even its title boasts a sort of playful ‘punch up’ at the leather elite.
There’s a moment in Bloodsisters where one of the subjects, Peggy Sue, notes that the first time she tied up a lover coincided with the loss of her heterosexual virginity—the fantasy organically spilled forth into the encounter, and the participants teased it out as it arose. She admits having no idea what she was doing, but wanting it. So much of kink, at least for me, is relegated to that immaterial space of longing. But objects, when used in concert, can certainly quicken the pulse.
“People were not asking to be positively seen in cinema; they were asking for cinema to not humiliate them.” – Sarah Fonseca
ARM: I couldn’t help but notice that the documentary is overwhelmingly white. One of the most prominent interviewees is Queen Cougar, a Black femme player. But aside from her, the screen is bereft of perspectives from dykes of colour. I was actually disquieted by the absence of critical engagement in regards to racism in kink community from any of the interviewees. To be fair, I am sure that many of our discussions and analyses that occur intra-communally will seem basic and lacking 20 years down the road (if we all survive that long). But in this conversation, we are taking Bloodsisters to task as it were, and I believe it is worth questioning the way the documentary explores such difficult topics. Were there moments in the film that stood out to you as lacking because of this exclusion?
SF: I hope to see the day. It’s interesting. It’s a bit challenging for me to look back on this film through representational lensing, as I feel like this conversation, at that time, was entirely different. People were not asking to be positively seen in cinema; they were asking for cinema to not humiliate them. Our community was on the defense.
Leather certainly has its racialised pitfalls, however—the use of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ nomenclature and the unwieldiness of the boot-clad aesthetics of militarism and genocide, just to name two. I wonder if these issues were being raised at that time. When did leather scholarship truly begin?
ARM: I flipped through my copies of Coming to Power, The Second Coming (the sequel to Coming to Power) (as well as a few other leather history books) and found only a small diversity section in The Second Coming’s table of contents. A piece of writing titled ‘A Latina Combat Femme, Her Shoes and Ensuing’ by Tatiana de la Tierra is the only chapter that explicitly deals with a racialised experience in kink. I did find a note about racial integration in the San Francisco leather scene in an issue of On Our Backs (not to be confused with off our backs).
Many subgroups within the leather scene were addressing issues of race in kink. There was a big eruption of discourse coming from the East Coast and the publication of Black Leather in Color, a short-lived periodical by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) leather folks. There is also the International Ms. Leather (a leather subculture convention for women that awards titles) which has crowned many women of colour since its conception in 1987. The first International Ms. Leather to hold the title was Judy Tallwing, an American indigenous artist and activist. I am sure there were discussions between these players with a racialised identity in kink community and play, which is why I find the omission in Bloodsisters to be a glaring one.
SF: Oh! And there was also Black Lace, the little-discussed kink and erotica magazine for Black lesbians in circulation at the same time as On Our Backs. But tellingly, I’ve never witnessed it be discussed outside of a queer studies textbook.
“…the experiences of leather people who are BIPOC are often eschewed in white dominated sub-scenes in favor of a white-washed concept of ‘unity’. “ – Annie Rose Malamet
ARM: While I shy away from generalisations, in my own research and experience, I have found that white leather people often position themselves as ‘the most maligned of the maligned’. They express an inflated sense and experience of oppression because of the censorship and legal ramifications that out perverts and pornographers have dealt with in American culture and law. Thus, the experiences of leather people who are BIPOC are often eschewed in white dominated sub-scenes in favor of a white-washed concept of ‘unity’. With this knowledge in mind, I view the lack of racial identity diversity in Bloodsisters to be a somewhat insidious omission. The film favours unity in lieu of critical examination.
SF: Damn, femme. So, in fewer words, the film is racially myopic.
ARM: Speaking of femmes. There are a few femmes interviewed in Bloodsisters but the documentary is arguably centered around butch leather dykes. When we see femmes engaged, one is a silent demo bottom, and the other is wielding a bullwhip at a political action. What are your feelings on the way femmes are represented here?
SF: Going back to what I touched upon about class, I naturally have mixed feelings from the jump. While I love that we are inundated with well-immersed butches and transmasculine types, there’s a broader issue of masculinity being the posterchild of the queer working class. I’m thinking of queer films across genres here: Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Frog Catcher (2020), Southern Comfort (2001) and The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love (1995). I’ve clung quite intensely to last year’s Ammonite (2020) because it actually shows roughened proletariat femininity in motion.
This has a lot to do with the materials of performance; femme is seen to require more accoutrements and affects. Butch, even in performance, calls to mind the proletariat: wallet chains, dungarees, leather belts, the cover of Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity. Femme is a bit of anomaly, as it seems to require resources that precarity cannot afford. But that just isn’t the case. I’m able to see this fallacy at play in Bloodsisters. I am curious whether this is a symptom of how the leather community was structured at that time, or an oversight on the filmmaker’s part.
Lately, I’ve been reading queer theory that suggests that sex work, a working class gig to end all others, is deeply indebted to transfeminine people (Blood Sisters, to its enormous credit, features a wizened transfemme domme, Tala Brandeis), specifically sex workers, who came into being in very close proximity to gay men but—ahead of Magnus Hirschfeld’s taxonomy of homosexuals—had discovered a more nuanced existence at society’s fringes.
But this lineage of sex work and queer femininity seems to have gone under-explored in these ‘archives of queer lust’. I wonder, more broadly, how this phenomenon of femme-forgetting plays out in kink. Though I will say I do appreciate the two subjects—Former Ms. Northern California Leather Donna Shrout and Peggy Sue—who acknowledge that their leather awakenings occurred through experiences with men, queer and not. I do think many femmes who grow frustrated with the respectability politics and prescriptiveness of the more mainstream lesbian-feminisms you’ve alluded to often find ourselves in such ‘faggy’ contexts.
ARM: You mention sex work briefly, and this is prescient because the lack of an ‘out’ sex worker perspective in the documentary was something I noticed as well. It’s not a criticism, just an observation. Sex workers—professional dommes and submissives in particular—have always been a huge part of so many leather dyke scenes. Perhaps Handelman purposefully shied away from a discussion of kink-for-pay so as to focus on the joyous, interpersonal, non-capitalist leather sex happening between dykes.
“While I love that we are inundated with well-immersed butches and transmasculine types, there’s a broader issue of masculinity being the posterchild of the queer working class.” – Sarah Fonseca
There is an experimental, pornographic film you and I both love called The Elegant Spanking directed by Maria Beatty from 1995, the same year as Bloodsisters. Maria Beatty is described on her website as “a precursor of the so-called new wave of ‘erotic noir’”, she is renowned for her profound explorations of female sexuality, body politics and lesbian desires.” She’s been making these dirty little movies for over 30 years and is beloved by sex worker artists and activists (this former working girl included). Her films are indebted to and highly referential of sex work history and tropes, particularly as it relates to kink. I think for me, this is why I feel much more attached to her work than I do Blood Sisters, my preference for experimental fiction over documentary notwithstanding.
SF: With The Elegant Spanking’s feminised pornographic symphony, it’s easy for me to empathetically slip in and out of the submissive and dominant roles. There is also the organic fetishisation of the conventional objects of femininity. A stiletto becomes a veritable weapon, a cock, a chastity belt. I can relate to this fluidity, of someone pulling out a word or toy in an unplanned moment and its capitulation to an entirely different headspace. This works for me because, by virtue of being surrounded by them, I deeply trust femmes—perhaps even when I shouldn’t! I know I can ease into Beatty’s unhinged opus and exit the other side blissfully intact.
With Handelman’s documentary, the experience is naturally very different given the genre. But I certainly departed the virtual cinema with more thoughts about power and possibility than I had upon entry. At the end of the day, that’s all I can ever ask of a queer non-fiction film.
All stills from 'Bloodsisters' (Michelle Handelman, 1995)
Frank, informative and plenty filthy, the 1995 documentary Bloodsisters was part of a wave of autonomously queer non-fiction flicks that dominated the LGBTQIA+ film festival circuit in the mid-‘90s. Praised for overcoming “the hokiness associated with today’s pedestrian portrayal of S/M” by LA Weekly upon release, the scrappy work boldly dove into the Bay Area’s underground dyke leather scene. With unique access to key players, filmmaker Michelle Handelman was able to piece together a coherent history of a subculture that is still going strong today.
In recognition of this little-seen documentary’s 25th anniversary, NewFest offered Bloodsisters to the widest audience yet as part of its virtual festival last year. American audiences can now watch it via Amazon. In the following interview, two American film critics with diverging ties to queer leather communities ponder what it means to be a Blood Sister today.
————————————————
Sarah Fonseca: Should we take a minute to introduce ourselves and our relationships to kink and film communities before diving in? I reckon I can start.
I was twenty-one the first time a girlfriend asked me to tie her up. Without a Sportsheets set to my name, I tore my bed sheet with my teeth and knotted its strips to my bed’s frame and then around her wrists. It was a revelatory moment fusing trust, desire and scrappiness; I knew I would want to to continue experiencing that intricate state of being. Today, I am a dilettante leather dyke: more brown than black, with an appreciation for the antiquated and switch-hitting.
As for film, I’ve been writing about queer and experimental cinemas (and their overlap) for six years for publications like cléo: a journal of film and feminism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Museum of the Moving Image’s Reverse Shot. I’ve also done a bit of programming with NewFest, New York’s LGBTQ Film Festival. I’m more devoted to work than play—maybe I should change that?
Annie Rose Malamet: I am a leather dyke who is lightly enmeshed in the leather community. I would say I am a ‘heavy’ player who holds a healthy dose of irreverence and levity in regards to my lifestyle and practices. I do not participate in some of the more formal aspects of the leather community, such as the title circuit. I have been in 24/7 D/s (dom/sub) relationships, but I don’t require that dynamic to feel fulfilled. I am part of a similarly cheeky leather family composed mostly of sisters. In March 2020, I was honored for this work as part of a Kink Out event at MoMa Ps1.
I have a podcast called Girls, Guts, & Giallo in which I examine controversial and subversive film from a femme, leather dyke perspective. I have written for publications such as Cultured Magazine, The Gay Gaze, and have a forthcoming piece in the delectable indie horror magazine Blood Knife. I’ve lectured on the history of fatness in film at various colleges and at the New Orleans Film Festival. Next month, I will be giving a talk on kink as a trope in horror for the Final Girls Film Festival in Berlin.
SF: I want to ask you about the impressions this piece of lo-fi gay verité left on you. You come to this film as someone more beholden to its scene than me, and with a far greater understanding of the history. You are, after all, the proud proprietress of a Lesbian Sex Mafia paddle. Is Bloodsisters more of a record of how our community has lived, or a master class in queer kink?
ARM: Bloodsisters is extremely rooted in the feminist punk aesthetics of the ‘90s. Various riot grrrl songs are featured throughout and the heavily-trebled vocals of San Francisco punk bands Frightwig and Typhoon play over slow motion scenes of dykes taking to the streets, overlaid with images of chains. The contemporary viewer is never unaware of the form as artifacts produced by an aging VHS camera crackle across the screen. The ghost of young Sadie Benning is ever-present. It has certainly aged, which doesn’t mean it should be discounted in the queer leather pantheon.
SF: I’m also reminded of Dyke TV, Ana Simo’s and Mary Patierno’s cable public affairs magazine that ran from 1993 to 2005.
ARM: Contemporary queers have a tendency to gravitate towards a ‘90s aesthetic. It recalls the halcyon days of a decidedly dyke-centric punk subculture that is ripe for the kind of reverence that forgoes compelling criticism in favour of nostalgia. I feel like there is a special (and somewhat sacred) place this documentary occupies in community history. I believe it should inspire as much as it can jog us into thinking critically about the role of documentary in the larger archive of queer lust.
SF: I really love that phrase, “the larger archive of queer lust”. I appreciate that you acknowledge the liminal canonical place that Bloodsisters calls home.
“It’s tricky to watch Bloodsisters’ tactile images of power play during a pandemic… Representations of touch feel a bit like science fiction to me these days.” Sarah Fonseca
I was less accommodating. The split-screens of first-person interviews and kink scenes playing out in tandem sensorially overwhelmed me—perhaps in the futile attempt to draw me closer to the raw experience of a scene? It’s tricky to watch Bloodsisters’ tactile images of power play during a pandemic; I felt removed despite power play being a consistent part of my experiences up until this point. Representations of touch feel a bit like science fiction to me these days. I have been brainwashed by Mistress Rona.
I loved the diversity of bodies and framings here. In one of the first interviews, we meet a matronly, middle-aged domme who goes unnamed. She matter-of-factly annotates the misperceptions of consensual kink practices—that they’re indiscriminately violent, worthy of policing, so on and so forth. All the while, she sits near her submissive du jour, a rigged girl in a black lace bodysuit. I love this intermingling of action and thought so much more than the split-screens. The dominatrix wears a feather boa, as if to flaunt her largess within the leather community. That she’s a woman of size only seems to make this image more remarkable.
ARM: The Bay Area in general has always been a hotbed of fat activism. Judy Freespirit and Sara Aldebaran published their ‘Fat Liberation Manifesto’ in the April 1979 issue of off our backs, a periodical for dykes that disbanded in 2008 and featured many Bay Area-based dyke writers. Fat activist Marilyn Wann, a long time San Francisco resident, first published her zine Fat!So? in 1994, just a year before the premiere of Bloodsisters. Suffice to say, I’m assuming that at least a few of the fat dykes who appear in the documentary were aware of the contemporary fat activist dialogues of the time.
“The omnipotent presence of fat dykes is one of the strongest elements in Bloodsisters.” – Annie Rose Malamet
The omnipotent presence of fat dykes is one of the strongest elements in Bloodsisters. To other leather dykes, this might seem like a given; our community is known for embracing various bodies and gender presentations in a way that mainstream gay scenes simply have not. But when the layman thinks of kink imagery, I imagine they conjure those iconic Bettie Page photos, or Ellen Von Unwerth snapshots: images of skinny, white, cis women bound and struggling playfully. That is absolutely not what you get in this documentary. After all, this is the sub-cultural scene that birthed the work of Catherine Opie.
SF: When you mentioned Opie, I tried to get in touch with her about the nature of that 1987 photo where she’s so clearly geared up for kink mischief. No response …yet!
At the end of the day, we’re both gay girls who have, at some point or another, spent more on cuffs than we have on food. I want to talk about a community organising moment captured in the film that holds enormous promise for how we think about class and kink, but falls short for me.
ARM: Yes, there is one scene in particular I know affected you. In a backyard in the Bay Area, a gaggle of younger dykes congregate for a casual workshop on how to repurpose household objects in kink play. Can you say a bit about this scene and what about it struck a chord in you?
SF: The idea behind this demo was that anyone should be able to participate in the kink ecosystem without all of the costly hardware. A spatula can effortlessly be repurposed as a paddle. In this moment, a playful butch dyke named Skeeter demonstrates its use on a femme bottom, and invites others to play along. There is no high-concept scene contextualised here. There is only the spanker, the spankee and the gleeful audience.
It’s all well and good to associate kink with anti-capitalism. But, in the effort to be helpful to their fellow impoverished comrades, this act smacks (pun unintended) of class condescension at best, and misunderstanding at worst. Do these queers really think that poor people lack the connections and imaginations to partake in sadomasochism? In truth, one doesn’t even need toys, let alone hands; one just needs filthy thoughts and the means to convey them to another. I am uncertain whether the demo bothers me, or its insertion into the film as an act of leather charity.
I am returning to the torn bed sheet I mentioned in my introduction and sidling it alongside an anecdote from Dorothy Allison’s 1985 essay, ‘The Theory and Practice of the Strap-On Dildo’, where the author—a player herself—describes making a majestic harness from a leatherman’s chastity belt she picked up in the Castro. Even its title boasts a sort of playful ‘punch up’ at the leather elite.
There’s a moment in Bloodsisters where one of the subjects, Peggy Sue, notes that the first time she tied up a lover coincided with the loss of her heterosexual virginity—the fantasy organically spilled forth into the encounter, and the participants teased it out as it arose. She admits having no idea what she was doing, but wanting it. So much of kink, at least for me, is relegated to that immaterial space of longing. But objects, when used in concert, can certainly quicken the pulse.
“People were not asking to be positively seen in cinema; they were asking for cinema to not humiliate them.” – Sarah Fonseca
ARM: I couldn’t help but notice that the documentary is overwhelmingly white. One of the most prominent interviewees is Queen Cougar, a Black femme player. But aside from her, the screen is bereft of perspectives from dykes of colour. I was actually disquieted by the absence of critical engagement in regards to racism in kink community from any of the interviewees. To be fair, I am sure that many of our discussions and analyses that occur intra-communally will seem basic and lacking 20 years down the road (if we all survive that long). But in this conversation, we are taking Bloodsisters to task as it were, and I believe it is worth questioning the way the documentary explores such difficult topics. Were there moments in the film that stood out to you as lacking because of this exclusion?
SF: I hope to see the day. It’s interesting. It’s a bit challenging for me to look back on this film through representational lensing, as I feel like this conversation, at that time, was entirely different. People were not asking to be positively seen in cinema; they were asking for cinema to not humiliate them. Our community was on the defense.
Leather certainly has its racialised pitfalls, however—the use of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ nomenclature and the unwieldiness of the boot-clad aesthetics of militarism and genocide, just to name two. I wonder if these issues were being raised at that time. When did leather scholarship truly begin?
ARM: I flipped through my copies of Coming to Power, The Second Coming (the sequel to Coming to Power) (as well as a few other leather history books) and found only a small diversity section in The Second Coming’s table of contents. A piece of writing titled ‘A Latina Combat Femme, Her Shoes and Ensuing’ by Tatiana de la Tierra is the only chapter that explicitly deals with a racialised experience in kink. I did find a note about racial integration in the San Francisco leather scene in an issue of On Our Backs (not to be confused with off our backs).
Many subgroups within the leather scene were addressing issues of race in kink. There was a big eruption of discourse coming from the East Coast and the publication of Black Leather in Color, a short-lived periodical by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) leather folks. There is also the International Ms. Leather (a leather subculture convention for women that awards titles) which has crowned many women of colour since its conception in 1987. The first International Ms. Leather to hold the title was Judy Tallwing, an American indigenous artist and activist. I am sure there were discussions between these players with a racialised identity in kink community and play, which is why I find the omission in Bloodsisters to be a glaring one.
SF: Oh! And there was also Black Lace, the little-discussed kink and erotica magazine for Black lesbians in circulation at the same time as On Our Backs. But tellingly, I’ve never witnessed it be discussed outside of a queer studies textbook.
“…the experiences of leather people who are BIPOC are often eschewed in white dominated sub-scenes in favor of a white-washed concept of ‘unity’. “ – Annie Rose Malamet
ARM: While I shy away from generalisations, in my own research and experience, I have found that white leather people often position themselves as ‘the most maligned of the maligned’. They express an inflated sense and experience of oppression because of the censorship and legal ramifications that out perverts and pornographers have dealt with in American culture and law. Thus, the experiences of leather people who are BIPOC are often eschewed in white dominated sub-scenes in favor of a white-washed concept of ‘unity’. With this knowledge in mind, I view the lack of racial identity diversity in Bloodsisters to be a somewhat insidious omission. The film favours unity in lieu of critical examination.
SF: Damn, femme. So, in fewer words, the film is racially myopic.
ARM: Speaking of femmes. There are a few femmes interviewed in Bloodsisters but the documentary is arguably centered around butch leather dykes. When we see femmes engaged, one is a silent demo bottom, and the other is wielding a bullwhip at a political action. What are your feelings on the way femmes are represented here?
SF: Going back to what I touched upon about class, I naturally have mixed feelings from the jump. While I love that we are inundated with well-immersed butches and transmasculine types, there’s a broader issue of masculinity being the posterchild of the queer working class. I’m thinking of queer films across genres here: Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Frog Catcher (2020), Southern Comfort (2001) and The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love (1995). I’ve clung quite intensely to last year’s Ammonite (2020) because it actually shows roughened proletariat femininity in motion.
This has a lot to do with the materials of performance; femme is seen to require more accoutrements and affects. Butch, even in performance, calls to mind the proletariat: wallet chains, dungarees, leather belts, the cover of Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity. Femme is a bit of anomaly, as it seems to require resources that precarity cannot afford. But that just isn’t the case. I’m able to see this fallacy at play in Bloodsisters. I am curious whether this is a symptom of how the leather community was structured at that time, or an oversight on the filmmaker’s part.
Lately, I’ve been reading queer theory that suggests that sex work, a working class gig to end all others, is deeply indebted to transfeminine people (Blood Sisters, to its enormous credit, features a wizened transfemme domme, Tala Brandeis), specifically sex workers, who came into being in very close proximity to gay men but—ahead of Magnus Hirschfeld’s taxonomy of homosexuals—had discovered a more nuanced existence at society’s fringes.
But this lineage of sex work and queer femininity seems to have gone under-explored in these ‘archives of queer lust’. I wonder, more broadly, how this phenomenon of femme-forgetting plays out in kink. Though I will say I do appreciate the two subjects—Former Ms. Northern California Leather Donna Shrout and Peggy Sue—who acknowledge that their leather awakenings occurred through experiences with men, queer and not. I do think many femmes who grow frustrated with the respectability politics and prescriptiveness of the more mainstream lesbian-feminisms you’ve alluded to often find ourselves in such ‘faggy’ contexts.
ARM: You mention sex work briefly, and this is prescient because the lack of an ‘out’ sex worker perspective in the documentary was something I noticed as well. It’s not a criticism, just an observation. Sex workers—professional dommes and submissives in particular—have always been a huge part of so many leather dyke scenes. Perhaps Handelman purposefully shied away from a discussion of kink-for-pay so as to focus on the joyous, interpersonal, non-capitalist leather sex happening between dykes.
“While I love that we are inundated with well-immersed butches and transmasculine types, there’s a broader issue of masculinity being the posterchild of the queer working class.” – Sarah Fonseca
There is an experimental, pornographic film you and I both love called The Elegant Spanking directed by Maria Beatty from 1995, the same year as Bloodsisters. Maria Beatty is described on her website as “a precursor of the so-called new wave of ‘erotic noir’”, she is renowned for her profound explorations of female sexuality, body politics and lesbian desires.” She’s been making these dirty little movies for over 30 years and is beloved by sex worker artists and activists (this former working girl included). Her films are indebted to and highly referential of sex work history and tropes, particularly as it relates to kink. I think for me, this is why I feel much more attached to her work than I do Blood Sisters, my preference for experimental fiction over documentary notwithstanding.
SF: With The Elegant Spanking’s feminised pornographic symphony, it’s easy for me to empathetically slip in and out of the submissive and dominant roles. There is also the organic fetishisation of the conventional objects of femininity. A stiletto becomes a veritable weapon, a cock, a chastity belt. I can relate to this fluidity, of someone pulling out a word or toy in an unplanned moment and its capitulation to an entirely different headspace. This works for me because, by virtue of being surrounded by them, I deeply trust femmes—perhaps even when I shouldn’t! I know I can ease into Beatty’s unhinged opus and exit the other side blissfully intact.
With Handelman’s documentary, the experience is naturally very different given the genre. But I certainly departed the virtual cinema with more thoughts about power and possibility than I had upon entry. At the end of the day, that’s all I can ever ask of a queer non-fiction film.