Safe Words and Safe Sex

Who’d heard of safe sex in 1980? If you caught a bug, you went to the clinic and got fixed—unless it was herpes. Then you joined a support group.

When I started doing HIV education six years later, the ante was up, and lots of people knew about safe sex. Asking a group to list safe behaviors, as I often did in workshops, turned into an exercise in naming hitherto little-acknowledged erotic diversity. Among the shouts of “massage,” “fellatio with a condom” and “phone sex,” I frequently heard “bondage!” This didn’t only happen in the City—I started doing HIV education in Oregon. But where teaching safe sex was concerned, San Francisco’s influence had reached us up north and elsewhere.

Various kinds of S/M play appeared on safe-sex lists the early AIDS educators compiled. Other practices commonly associated with S/M were labeled unsafe. I spoke to audiences who knew all the terms, as well as folks who would scan the safe-sex brochure and sheepishly ask, “What’s fisting?” Safe-sex education usually meant letting people in on their neighbors’ sexual secrets: what was safe, “safer,” possibly safe or none of the above.

At first glance, it looks very much like the AIDS epidemic and its emphasis on “on me, not in me” sex brought S/M out of the depths of the closet and into the public eye. Look again, though, and the cause-and-effect relationship is not so clear. How on earth did we cover so much cultural terrain in the benighted nineteen-eighties that “flagellation, unbroken skin” became a practice we might not only talk about publicly, but even recommend to those who want to construct a safe and spicy sex life?

Around the world it was called the “San Francisco model” of AIDS education and service provision: Instead of waiting for others to intercede, members of at-risk communities mobilized to get the word out and the work done. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Shanti, Stop AIDS Project and California Prostitutes’ Education Project are only the best known of the SF model organizations; many others educate and serve women, people of color, and other specific populations. Though infrequently acknowledged, organizations like San Francisco Sex Information (SFSI)—a sex information hotline whose volunteers were one of the first groups to hand out condoms—and the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality also played a role in the development of our home-grown and much-imitated response to the HIV epidemic. Still, hardly anyone routinely teaches that the most influential aspect of all—what has come to be called “safe sex”—was pioneered by people who do S/M.

SFSI trainers David Lourea and Cynthia Slater sounded the alarm in that organization in 1981. Slater had founded the Society of Janus, one of the nation’s first S/M support organizations. Other members of the S/M community, like noted photographer Mark Chester, joined them in developing ways of teaching about sex that drew from S/M. SFSI members worked with the SF AIDS Foundation to help set up its hotline, and interplay between two sexually active and sophisticated communities—gay men and S/M players—coalesced into strategy for teaching about sexual health.

Slater and Lourea didn’t live to see the removal of consensual S/M from shrinks’ official list of mental illnesses, which happened in 1994. On the surface, that event has nothing to do with safe sex or AIDS, yet it’s part of a remarkable fabric of change wrought, to an extent, by the epidemic, which made talking openly about all kinds of sex critical. In turn, avenues of communication expanded, and we see the results in everything from the ’zine explosion to cable TV.

By now we’ve all heard we should “negotiate for safe sex,” whether or not we’ve figured out how to do that. In fact, the importance of sexual negotiation skills—for safety or for heightened sexual compatibility or fulfillment—may be another legacy of the epidemic. That we can develop skills of any sort around sex is still, to some, a controversial idea—like the insulted woman who complained to me that good sex should always be “natural” (whatever that is!), some people seem to think it ought to all fall into place like God’s law or Grandma’s cooking, sans recipe. The more complex or high-tech the sex, however, the more information and skill you need, whether the technology is a rudimentary prophylactic or a fancy rubber bondage suit from Amsterdam.

And who are the most highly skilled negotiators in the sex world? Not the Just Say No crowd, not the Condoms Just Get In The Way Of The Spontaneity folks, but the S/M practitioners. They learn from their community to decide what they’d like to do and then talk to their prospective partners about it. An important tool in safe-sex workshop leaders’ kits—the Make Three Lists exercise—comes directly from the initiation process a novice S/Mer is likely to encounter. If you’ve never done this before, give it a whirl. Your sex life will improve, I promise.

The exercise helps organize your desires and limits so you clearly know what they are. If you do S/M, you’ll care partly about whether you and your partner have similar interests at all. So, too, the safe-sex practitioner playing the field must do more than say “safe sex or no sex”; she or he must be ready to articulate what kind. The term safe sex is vague, covering everything from fucking with condoms to light S/M. Since different people have widely varying notions about what’s safe, not to mention widely varying sexual tastes, “I do safe sex” starts, not ends, the conversation.

Safety is important in the S/M community beyond the question of disease prevention—lots of S/M play involves some risk, and players typically educate themselves to avoid or minimize it. No matter what apparent extremes of abandon S/M players explore, they will usually have at their disposal a “safe word,” which allows either partner to stop what’s going on at once. As part of the negotiation ethic, and also because part of the eroticism of the S/M encounter is the planning of it, players are encouraged to talk very openly about sex. Unlike much “vanilla” play, S/M’s eroticism is often not particularly genitally focused. While most S/Mers like to fuck, their erotic repertoire includes many other ways of achieving physical and emotional sensation. They are very toy-positive, and condoms and gloves and sheets of plastic wrap, to them, are just more gear for the toy bag.

All of these values appear, sometimes completely divested of their black leather roots, in safe-sex education programs. The point, after all, is not to persuade non-S/M players to get kinky, but to extract useful elements of this particular sexual culture and teach those principles and skills to everyone.

So while Madonna and MTV bring mainstream S/M images to print, film and video (often badly—please, kids, don’t try any of those Body of Evidence tricks at home, at least not before you’ve joined Society of Janus or taken a safety class at QSM⁴) and while the Centers for Disease Control prints brochures that talk about fisting, America learns S/M sexuality, although not, ironically, that an S/M community exists to teach them sexual skills. To a significant degree, safe-sex education is an unsung gift from members of that community.

While safe sex seems to have brought S/M into the limelight as one of its more exotic manifestations, the reality is more circular. A once-secretive community contributed to its own new visibility by helping create today’s expanded discourse about sex.