S/M-themed lesbian short fiction can also be found in Dorothy Allison's Trash (1988) and Cappy Kotz's, The First Stroke (1988). The Dog-Collar Murders by the successful "vanilla" novelist Barbara Wilson defends S/M against the charge that it is internalized male hatred that inevitably leads to violence.

Lesbian S/M literature has been at the forefront of recognizing the legitimacy of consensual S/M practice while criticizing the real social structures that S/M practice in part reflects and contests.

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Serious Criticism of Sadomasochistic Fiction

Although critics of S/M fiction continue to claim that it reinforces gay self-hatred, they also level the more serious charge that it advances conservative social and sexual ideologies. Since the majority of S/M literature is produced by and for white males, critics have tried to show the ways in which S/M culture replicates race, class, and gender hierarchies.

It is true that S/M literature too often eroticizes racial and ethnic difference. And in its less rigorous forms, it also depicts positions of power and dominance based on class position and misogynistic notions of masculinity.

Perhaps these tendencies are rooted in the origins of S/M culture in America. Scholars have argued that it arose out of the biker culture of the 1950s, which is often seen as a reaction against the domestic stability and white-collar positions offered to white males in post-World War II America.

The association of male homosexuality with S/M imagery such as leather, piercing, and tattoos is sometimes seen as a reaction against the widespread belief that homosexuality was a form of gender deviance and effeminacy.

If S/M has become a dominant mode of gay life and gay style, some critics have argued that it is only imitating the rise of a new form of masculinity associated with the rising conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s.

But to call S/M, especially in its most radical and dissenting forms, politically conservative is clearly too simplistic. There is reason to believe, for example, that the politics of confrontation and outrage that have come to be associated with the ascendancy of politics owes a significant debt to S/M.

Not surprisingly, some S/M writers lament the increased visibility and cultural mainstreaming of S/M practice as a watering down of its empowering potential.

Conclusion

The heated wars over lesbian S/M, like the attempts in America and abroad to ban consensual S/M sex and to censor its representation, attest to the fact that S/M continues to be a site of extraordinary controversy and fascination.

S/M writing, as the spirited nonfiction anthology Leatherfolk (1991) demonstrates, has constructed itself as a form of emancipation for all lesbians and gays. As a crucial site of S/M performance, sadomasochistic literature continues to stake a claim for S/M's radical potential.

The Bear Movement has inspired a number of organizations, events, publications, and resources dedicated to affirming and eroticizing large-bodied, hirsute gay men, known as Bears.

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

"Leather" is a blanket term for a large array of sexual preferences, identities, relationship structures, and social organizations loosely tied together by the thread of what is conventionally understood as sadomasochistic sex.

South Carolina native Dorothy Allison refuses to write didactic or romantic illustrations of the lesbian experience, focusing instead on the sheer survival of her lesbian characters in the hostile environment of Southern working-class families.

Terry Andrews is the pseudonym under which was published The Story of Harold, one of the most remarkable queer books of the twentieth century.

Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.

Italian novelist Aldo Busi, while eschewing the label "gay writer," nevertheless presents homosexual acts as normative behavior and foregrounds gay sex as an epiphany for his protagonists.

Controversial for defending sadomasochism and pornography, gender outlaw and sexual anarchist Patrick Califia, who recently underwent gender reassignment, is widely admired as a defender of individual freedom.

Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.

Writer of science fiction, memoirs, erotica, cultural studies, and postmodern criticism, and winner of multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Lambda Literary Awards, Samuel R. Delany is widely regarded as one of the finest science fiction writers of his generation.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

The iconoclastic Juan Goytisolo, one of the most prominent literary figures in Spain, exalts homosexuality for rejecting repressive Hispanic social norms.

In his quest for masculinity, Yukio Mishima mythologized himself both in his life and his writings, culminating in his ritual suicide.

Petronius' Satyricon is both the best evidence for homosexual behavior at the height of the Roman Empire and one of the most bumptious homoerotic picaresque narratives ever written.

One of the most prolific gay writers of recent decades, John Preston helped elevate pornographic fiction into a genre viewed as having literary merit.

In his novels about hustling, preeminently City of Night and Numbers, John Rechy moves from the world of homosexual behavior into the world of gay identity.

The influential novelist Gerard Reve was a pioneer in European gay writing and in the liberalization of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Netherlands.

Italian rhetorician and philosopher Antonio Rocco is author of an early classic of pederastic literature, L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the schoolboy), which was written in 1630 and published anonymously in 1652.

Whether or not the Marquis de Sade was himself bisexual, homosexual activity is an important item in his program of revolutionary sexual libertinism.

Now best known for his highly successful mystery novels set in ancient Rome, Steven Saylor began his writing career by publishing erotica under the pen-name Aaron Travis.

Although he has had various embodiments throughout history, Sebastian has long been known as the homosexual's saint.