American sex education is in such shambles that queer filmmakers have found the need to make D.I.Y. classroom tools to teach each other how to have safe, healthy sex, despite the fact that no legitimized classrooms would ever actually show them. From the PBS-special textures of Marlon Riggs’s AIDS epidemic screed Tongues Untied to the green screen psychedelia of Annie Sprinkle’s how-to guides like the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, there’s a 101 classroom lecture quality to a lot of queer video art, spreading the good news about good sex one VHS cassette at a time. Take, for instance, 1995’s BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism, a D.I.Y. camcorder documentary about the San Francisco lesbian kink scene. Ostensibly, that doc is meant to serve as a collection of oral histories from local kinksters about their personal relationships with BDSM, but the longer the interviewees pontificate about the subject the more instructive and abstract their testimonials get. It plays less like a direct-to-camera confessional from heavy-leather subculturistas than it does the orientation video you’re forced to watch before you can be issued a membership card to your local sex club.

We get a glimpse of why this kind of educational video might be necessary in an early sequence of HBO Real Sex-style street interviews, asking anonymous passersby how they feel about sado-masochistic sex. Most recoil in embarrassment, expressing a knee-jerk disgust with the subject and visible regret for having agreed to appear on camera. Then, heavy leather lesbians with stage names like Skeeter, Rainbeau, Peggy Sue, and Queen Cougar sit down for lengthy confessionals about their personal experiences on the kink scene, intentionally working to legitimize & destigmatize the practice of inflicting & receiving pain during sexual roleplay, all in the name of “cumsent.” While they explain BDSM’s political & therapeutic applications in casual, laidback chatter, graphic documents of the sexual acts being described (mostly of the spanking, whipping, and nipple torture variety) intercut & overlay their interview footage. As serious as BloodSisters is about conveying the legitimacy & ethicality of kinky sex, it also openly acknowledges that the scene profiled is mostly populated by nerds having fun playing dress-up. Everyone interviewed dons intentionally intimidating leather costumes, but they’re also reasonable, approachable people. If anything, they’re directly encouraging you to approach them at the leather bar as soon as the tape runs out and you pass the prerequisite vocabulary quiz for glossary terms like “soft butch,” “pushy bottom”, and “topping from the bottom.”

Kink education isn’t as niche of a field as it used to be. The kind of work BloodSisters was attempting to accomplish in the 90s has long had a brick-and-mortar institutional hub in The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago. Its 101 classroom lecturing has continued on in recent docs like A Body to Live In, which explains the spirituality of body modification, and Rebel Dykes, which offers a similar collection of oral histories detailing heavy-leather lesbianism in London. The film was massively important for arriving early and aggressively to that conversation, though, and thus its most vital details are in the datedness of its vintage stylistic touches: its animated punk zine credits, its cracked whip screen wipes, its rainbow colored tints, its Greek chorus of kink novelty songs from Bay Area punk band Frightwig, etc. The movie is unmistakably of the 1990s, which underlines just how important its political advocacy was both inside and outside the lesbian community. When subs & doms in an especially heavy scene start playing with bloodletting & needles, it means something different knowing what conversations about AIDS were happening offscreen in the background. Likewise, knowing what conversations about what kinds of lesbian sex do or do not reinforce the patriarchy in nearby feminist circles informs a lot of what’s said onscreen, even though that side of the “debate” is thankfully denied equal time. So, the concluding all-caps battle cry “FIST FUCK THE SYSTEM” wasn’t just included as a cheeky punchline; it was a timely, literal call to arms. Given how dated some of its defensiveness about kink feels today, it seems to have done some good.

-Brandon Ledet